Executives from Google, Yahoo, and dozens of pharmaceutical companies are in Washington DC today appealing to the Food and Drug Administration to expand online drug advertising. Although drug companies spend huge sums of money on marketing and advertising in media outlets such as television and print, they hardly spend money online.
According to a Yahoo Finance article where this news was reported, pharmaceutical companies “spent more than $4.3 billion on patient-targeted advertisements last year, though online marketing represented about 3 percent of that amount.”
If their budgets for online marketing grew to the same percentage as most other advertisers, this would be a boon to web publishers who would be able to display drug-related advertisements with their Adsense accounts, and parked domain names could have more competitive PPC bids.
Don’t get your hopes up yet though. According to experts, the FDA isn’t expected to make policy changes until 2011.
I think this has more to do with the pending health care bill passing. Consider a slow 2009 Christmas Season with low consumer buying and advertising; the hope of Federal money being pumped into the health, medical and pharmaceutical industries will most certainly spill over into advertising dollars that will be reaped by search giants like Google and Yahoo.