"Ask your doctor if somthingodin is right for you."

Just bizarre to me.

Then there's the pure branding ads, where you can say the name of the drug, show pictures of people dancing in forests and playing with puppies, and say "ask your doctor if somethingodin is right for you", without having to spell out the side effects.

So first you learn what the drug does, and all the horrific things it will do to you. Then, when you vaguely remember that the drug helps treat a thing you have, you see the branding ads, and then you talk to your doctor, who, while ethically bound to go over the side effects, is not being monitored by the FDA, and thus will hopefully present a rosier picture than the first ad.

Over the last 10 years, Gilead has spent somewhat more on research than marketing. They still spent a big chunk of change on marketing, though: $9.4 billion.

That being said, presumably they set their marketing budget at a point that maximizes their revenue (i.e. the point at which one more marketing dollar fails to bring in more than one more revenue dollar). Given the fact that the research budget is a fixed cost, obviously it makes sense to spend money on marketing to ensure that there are enough sales to recoup that expenditure and make a profit.

So I guess I don't understand what your point is?

Oh, and a considerable percentage of "research" is really marketing, since its goal is to find minor variations of existing, perfectly effective drugs whose patent protection is about to run out.

If people could instantly know about which drugs are relevant to them, or doctors meticulously searched the literature for all available treatments for all patients, then alerting the world about the existence of your new drug would be a complete waste. But we don't live in that world.

If pharmas really are offering identical products, that's a problem of creating unnecessary drugs, not marketing per se, and would be exposed when the relevant people make the cost benefit calculation.

Not true at all: Could you sit in an empty, white-walled room and tell us exactly which new drugs will be needed over the next decade and how they will appeal to doctors and different patient groups? Whether they'll be worth developing at all? How existing patients on inferior (or no) treatments will find out about them without you spending a nickel?

Marketing is not just ads.

As a society, marketing more than useless. It manipulates and confuses actual knowledge.

Even if you think DTC is worthless or actively harmful, surely there's some value in marketing to (nominally) informed, expert doctors and insurers, unless you think marketing anything is an essentially fraudulent or worthless activity. Would Ford or their potential customers be better off without marketing? What makes drugs any different?

[1] http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/ftpdocs/105x...

I don't think marketing is either fraudulent nor worthless, but it is a tragedy of the commons these days. People have more than enough tools at their disposal to discover the products they want and need to buy on their own. Marketing by an individual entity is useful and necessary, but the whole field is just pointlessly rearranging the chairs. We'd all be better off if we could somehow all agree to quit it, at least the fluffy parts that convey only emotion and not information.

That's a lot easier to do when they can get the government and other insurers to pay $1000 a pill for their wares that they have marketed to the public.

the marketing of many drugs is done to convince consumers to pick a named brand over a generic. frankly the small print warnings they have to carry are more frightening than what is on a pack of smokes.