Marketing Planning

7 Discoveries about DTC Advertising Campaigns

While double- and triple-digit spending on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising for prescription drugs is continues, the success of most DTC advertising campaigns remains marginal at best. Through our work with our Copernican Discovery™ DTC Simulated Test Marketing Model, we have made the following discoveries about the characteristics of DTC campaigns:

  1. The inability of DTC marketing communications vehicles, particularly advertising, to imprint the brand name and its raison d'etre in the minds of consumers contributes to the high rate of direct-to-consumer failures.
  2. Sufferers—even if they become "aware" of a product—will contact their physicians and ask for an Rx by name much less frequently than conventional wisdom holds. While many DTC marketers believe that the conversion rate from awareness to behavior hovers around 30 percent, in fact, the rate falls closer to 10 percent.
  3. Movement from awareness to physician-requested conversion varies considerably depending on sufferer "involvement" in the product category. The more a DTC marketer targets "highly involved" sufferers, the more likely the success of marketing efforts.
  4. DTC campaigns may have a greater impact in physicians than their patients—which explains why in many cases, direct-to-consumer marketers observe sales increases for the advertised Rx, without seeing significant shifts in patient awareness and behavior.
  5. The performance of most DTC programs can be predicted well before any money is spent on a real world, national introduction. This is what makes "traditional" test marketing such a theoretically useful tool.
  6. However, real world test markets may not be the wisest way to "test" a DTC campaign. They're expensive, time consuming, give away ideas, are susceptible to sabotage and often not projectable. In many cases, market response modeling is an appropriate alternative
  7. As emergency room physicians sometimes say, "a body that comes in cold is not necessarily dead." Likewaise, diagnostic analyses of DTC campaigns can sometimes transform an apparent failure into a success. A DTC marketer can develop and launch a new marketing program, which yileds a more positive outcome.


For an example of a Copernican Discovery™ DTC campaign forecast, click here. Or to read about applications of the Copernican Discovery™ to defensive response modeling, click here.

Learn more about the Copernicus Smart Solution designed specifically for DTC marketers.

The Copernican discoveries about DTC advertising campaigns is one of the many Copernican intellectual properties that differentiate our work.

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