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ER Editor: We believe there are only two countries in the world that permit Big Pharma to advertise their products directly to customers through the medium of TV – US and New Zealand.
See also this from February of this year —
Proposed Pharma Ad Ban May Be a Bitter Pill to Swallow for Sports TV
Of note:
… ridding the airwaves of drug spots may be more trouble than it’s worth. Since the 1970s, the courts have held the view that advertising is a form of “commercial speech” guaranteed by the First Amendment.
As much as legal types are justly ill-disposed toward monkeying with the Constitution’s protections of free speech, there’s precedent for overriding such concerns in the advertising arena. As FCC chairman Brendan Carr noted during a recent podcast appearance, the Nixon administration was able to do away with cigarette ads in early 1971 after Congress passed a law banning tobacco products from appearing on TV and radio. That proved to be a windfall for print, but erased an estimated $150 million, or $1.23 billion in today’s dollars, from broadcasters’ budgets.
“I think it probably requires a two-step, where Congress passes a law or maybe HHS [Health and Human Services] can do it,” Carr said. “But there is precedent where that happens, and the FCC enforces it.”
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TV Networks Face Advertising Apocalypse After Trump Admin Mulls Pharma Restrictions
Last week independent Senators Bernie Sanders (VT) and Angus King (ME) introduced legislation that would ban pharmaceutical companies from promoting prescription drugs directly to consumers – including through television, radio, print, digital platforms, and social media.
Today, Bloomberg reports that the Trump administration is now ‘discussing policies that would make it harder and more expensive for pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients.’
Although the US is the only place, besides New Zealand, where pharma companies can directly advertise, banning pharma ads outright could make the administration vulnerable to lawsuits, so it’s instead focusing on cutting down on the practice by adding legal and financial hurdles, according to people familiar with the plans who weren’t authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
The two policies the administration has focused in on would be to require greater disclosures of side effects of a drug within each ad — likely making broadcast ads much longer and prohibitively expensive — or removing the industry’s ability to deduct direct-to-consumer advertising as a business expense for tax purposes, these people said.
If this happens, it would mark a major victory for Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., who says he believes Americans consume more drugs than people in other countries due to the ability of US drug companies to directly advertise to consumers.
While running for president, Mr. Kennedy said he would issue an executive order removing pharmaceutical ads from television, citing overmedication and industry influence on news coverage.
Advertising Apocalypse
As we noted last week, the move would mark a sweeping shift in the U.S. advertising landscape, where pharmaceutical companies are among the largest spenders. Prescription drug brands accounted for roughly 13 percent of all ad spending on linear television in 2025, totaling approximately $2.18 billion so far this year, according to iSpot data. In 2024, the industry spent $3.4 billion on traditional TV ads between January and August alone, according to ad-tracking data.
Since 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration relaxed disclosure requirements for DTC ads, pharmaceutical companies have increasingly leaned on consumer advertising to drive demand. Under current rules, companies need only disclose a drug’s “most important” risks during commercials.
The result has been a media environment saturated with pharmaceutical messaging.
Drug ads made up 24.4 percent of all advertising minutes on evening news broadcasts across major networks — including ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, and NBC — through May of this year, according to iSpot. On CBS Evening News, pharmaceutical companies appeared in more than 70 percent of commercial breaks, per Kantar Media.
Source
Featured image source: https://www.sportico.com/business/media/2025/proposed-pharmaceutical-ad-ban-sports-tv-1234832190/
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