In “fun” news, the FDA wants to know if the use of animation in pharmaceutical advertising affects consumers’ general perception of drugs, as well as the side effects they can cause.
According to a Notice posted on the Federal Register website, the FDA is looking to answer the following questions:
- How does consumer processing of a DTC prescription drug ad differ depending on whether the ad is live-action, rotoscoped, or animated?
- Does consumer processing differ depending on whether the sufferer, the disease, or the benefit is the focus of the animation?
The FDA will hire an advertising firm to create TV commercials for fictitious psoriasis and chronic dry eye drugs and share them with 1,500 patients diagnosed with these medical conditions. The study will leverage a series of separate commercials that depict human, non-human, and rotoscoped human suffers.
Although direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising is banned in every developed nation except for the United States and New Zealand, it is often a critical part of many pharmaceutical companies’ marketing plans, especially for those that have products that could appeal to large portions of the population.
