Pharmaceutical Advertising

So the house is currently considering a proposal to disallow the "ordinary and necessary business expense" of advertising for the pharmaceutical industry (it will still be allowed for every other industry). The stated intention is to help pay for health care reform through the elimination of this tax deduction. But unless I'm wrong, I think the upshot will be that since advertising for Rx drugs will be much more expensive, pharma companies with decrease the amount of advertising they do. Although there would be some additional corporate tax revenue for the Federal government that would result, another result would be that there would be a lot less information published on available Rx therapies (after all, almost all patient support and patient education campaigns are considered advertising).

I might also suspect that the likely reduction in requests for branded Rx products, espeically by patients on Medicare/Medicaid, would also result in fewer branded scripts and more (cheaper) generic scripts - which certainly would also be in the best interest of lowering government expenses for health care. But it might do so at the expense of providing the best available treatments to some of these patients.

It will be very interesting to watch how this evolves.

Launch Day!

So, after many months of planning, today is launch day for imc2 health and wellness. We actually started talking about creating a separate "agency," or an agency within the agency, that would focus on health over 9 months ago - I specifically felt like there were so many changes happening in the world of health marketing that we needed a team that was specifically focused on the industry. At that time I didn't know that I would wind up leading that team!

We're launching our official website, www.imc2healthandwellness.com later today, and then sending out press releases to our clients and other agency partners later in the day.

The press about imc2 lately has actually helped to create some nice "buzz" in the market about us already - Amber Benson's POV on Social Media got picked up by Forrester and they think highly of the framework she's developed, and of course our overall ranking in the Forrester Wave published two weeks ago was great news - and they specifically mention our expertise in and focus on health as once of the reasons they ranked us so highly in strategy.

Anyway, my plan is to use this blog to pubish points of view and random thoughts on trends and interesting topics in the world of health marketing, and some of the public policy debates that will have a big impact on all of us involved in the industry. I'm hoping to post several times weekly and keep it relatively up to date. Please feel free to comment or respond if you want!