TV Prescription Drug Ads Lack in Important Risk Details
A new study out of the University of Georgia finds that most prescription drug ads seen on television do not present all the information necessary to make an informed decision, especially when is comes to the risk of side effects. The team analyzed a week’s worth of consumer ads on broadcast and cable television. They found that the average 60-second ad contained less than 8 seconds of side effect disclaimers and 30-second ads had less than 4.4 seconds of disclaimers. “These ads clearly don’t devote enough time to information about risk,” said Wendy Macias, associate professor in the UGA Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication. Her results appear in the November/December issue of the journal Health Communication. “Adding to the problem is that the information is often presented in a way that people aren’t likely to comprehend or even pay attention to,” she continues. The 1997 FDA guidelines that allowed drug companies to expand their direct-to-consumer advertising required the companies to “present a fair balance between information about effectiveness and information about risk.” Fair balance is not defined by the FDA. “Very few advertisers are really doing well enough when it comes to actually trying to educate the consumer,” she said. “The ads are presented in such a way that the consumer would have to be paying very close attention and be adept at processing the information to really understand the risks as well as the benefits.”
