283 - We are considering a partnership that will allow us to place unbranded, disease awareness information into a variety of large public health portals. The portals contain disease awareness information but also have separate areas that disseminate drug specific information. (We are not providing any drug specific information.) As part of this partnership, we are being offered the ability to have banner ads run throughout the site. The ads are not just for our unbranded content. There is the potential for us to have branded ads that point to our gated product-specific website. The banner ads are "run of site" and there is no influence on where they appear within the portal. There are two possible situations that we are concerned about. Our branded ad appears on a page where our unbranded disease information resides through random placement. Our unbranded disease awareness ad lands on a page which contains related drug information through random placement...
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continued ... These situations are out of control but may occur. Does this make us out of compliance with the spirit of the DTC advertising code?
Response: Generally, in a run of site context, those linkages should occur very rarely in a large/diverse portal (or sets of portals). The same random incidents occasionally occur in print publications. The core principle is that the manufacturer (or its agent) should not take steps to influence the ad environment in such a way that promotes the general public's ability to associate the product with its therapeutic use. Unlikely random incidents which are not under the manufacturer's or agent's control are unlikely to cause the manufacturer to be non-compliant with the consumer advertising regulations. For example, from a statistical perspective, the Arbace ad will appear much more frequently with unrelated condition content (e.g. mood disorders, erectile dysfunction, menopause, pain...etc.) than with disease content relating to its indication (i.e. hypertension).Having said this, these electronic portals provide the opportunity to set exceptions to the run of site command. For example, in my Arbace example, it is simple to allow for run of site except for pages containing the keyword hypertension. Many clients are doing this as a best-practice to make sure their advertising does not contravene (or appear to contravene) the regulations.
