Why TV Commercials are Now All Pharma Ads

They're everywhere

Media companies won’t write about it, but on Twitter you’ll see the chatter. Watch NFL, the Emmys, or the Golden Globes, the change is undeniable. Commercials used to shill beer, insurance, trucks, burgers. Now it’s almost entirely drugs.

In 1996, Claritin advertisers found a loophole in FDA regulations that allowed them to advertise directly to consumers on TV by omitting mentions of the medication. In a year, pharma spending on TV time exploded to over a $1 billion.

Since then, we’ve all become familiar with the inescapable cringe of the pharma commercial. One of my all time favorites ads is E-Trade’s parody: “The condition known as hot dog fingers.”

But now, pharma ads completely dominate TV. They range from ads for fairly innocuous conditions like psoriasis and alopecia, to those for serious genetic disorders, to those featuring Travis Kelce pressuring us to re-up yet again on “the vaccine.” Yet they all make us feel the same amount of uncomfortable.

I had ad sales expert Chris Gadek on my podcast to help answer why this is happening.

The answer is deceptively simple. During the pandemic, the world population was not only enticed, but mandated to spend both their taxpayer and personal dollars on Covid care (virtually all of which turned out to be completely useless). This led, of course, to a gold rush for drugmakers and medical suppliers. A massive revenue surge.

But when public companies reach a certain high water mark, they hate to recede backwards. Executives obsess over nothing more than stock price, and a great way to implode your stock price is to spike your revenue then have it plummet back down. And sure enough, revenue for Pfizer and Moderna is plummeting. Look at this absurdity:

What does a company do when it has a bunch of cash and plummeting revenue? It spends on advertising in a hail mary attempt to re-establish demand. The problem is, in the situation, demand will never recover, at least until there’s another pandemic and they can make treatments that actually work.

But why so much on TV ads specifically? Because that’s where the Boomers are.

Much of CPG (chips, soda etc) and QSR (fast food) advertising is targeted towards young people and has shifted to digital/social. TV ads still come with over-inflated price tags that remaining advertisers, like insurance and automotive companies, find increasingly difficult to justify. So TV media sellers were panicking, until Covid-born pharma monsters desperate to reach less skeptical, more health-conscious old Boomers came to the rescue. A match made in heaven. And this is why pharma ads suddenly make up 80% of the ads you see on TV.

If pharma ads make you feel like you’re living in a hellish global dystopia keeping you sick and afraid, you’re not alone. Propaganda reveals a lot about who controls society, what they want us to believe, and the actions they want us to take. Pharma ads grow demand by sowing fear (AKA “spreading awareness”), then offering the remedy (AKA “selling drugs). They’re not just cringey, they’re manipulative af—even the staunchest capitalist should be appalled by markets made around health fears, let alone ones involving mandated treatments.

Capitalism works when it can rationally shape markets around elastic prices that shift with supply and demand. Pharma overrides rationality—tell someone they’re sick (or worse, mandate purchase of a treatment), and capitalism stops working. You’re talking about not just tyranny, but tyranny for profit.

Perhaps we can find escape in the only other kind of TV ad that seems to be proliferating under our oh-so-moral regime: gambling commercials!