Marketing Scholars’ Roles in the Policy Arena: An Opportunity for Discourse on Direct-to-Consumer Advertising

Paul W. Farris is Landmark Communications Professor of Business, Darden Graduate School of Business Administration, University of Virginia (e-mail: farrisp@darden.virginia.edu). William L. Wilkie is Nathe Professor of Marketing, University of Notre Dame (e-mail: wwilkie@nd.edu). A Brief Background Direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising of prescription drugs is clearly among the most significant marketing phenomena of the past decade in the United States. It is important partly because of the large amounts of money involved and its prominence in the popular media and surely because it potentially affects the length and quality of the lives of millions of people. Moreover, DTC advertising is a phenomenon that owes its existence to public policy choices in the United States and in New Zealand, and not anywhere else in the world (and in this sense, it represents an important natural experiment). In the United States, a series of regulatory actions during the 1980s and 1990s increasingly loosened restraints on the provision of information to consumers regarding ethical drugs, and advertising in this area occurred at lower levels of spending (for an informative regulatory history, see Pines 1999). In 1997, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a draft guide for firms that, in effect, allowed television advertising, and after addressing many enforcement actions to clarify the nature of such commercials, it issued final guides in 1999. At this point, the rate of spending on DTC advertising began to soar, to the extent that it is now the third largest advertising spending category, behind only automobiles and fast foods. Furthermore, as of early 2005, the attention on this topic has heightened, as unforeseen and previously undisclosed health risks have begun to surface with popular drugs such as Vioxx, Bextra, and, possibly, the entire class of Cox-2 inhibitors.