Super Bowl Ads Dramatically Boost Sales of Prescription Drugs

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(Inside Science) -- On Sunday when people gather to watch the Super Bowl, they will cheer and chat, but many will only pay casual attention to the actual game. When the ads come on, however, many spectators will look up from their phones or pause their conversations to focus on the commercials, which routinely include over-the-top production and celebrity cameos.
Because of the number of viewers, the rate for a 30-second spot during Sunday’s Super Bowl is about $5.6 million
Gray and a team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh found Medicare prescription data for two drugs that were both approved by the FDA in 2014 to treat toenail fungus. They’re called efinaconazole (brand name Jublia) and tavaborole (brand name Kerydin). The team took the data regarding prescriptions for the two drugs and investigated what happened after Jublia was advertised during both the 2015 and 2016 Super Bowls.
They found that the ads worked even better than they expected. In February 2015, following the first ad
For Kerydin, which was used by many fewer people but works in a similar way to Jublia, according to the researchers, the model suggested that the rate of increase without ads would have been 90%. But after the ad, prescriptions increased by 275%.
In 2016, when a Jublia ad starring retired football stars
The study was published in
The researchers had Medicare data up to 2016, but not for more recent years. They also were not able to look beyond the proportion of people covered under Medicaid’s prescription drug program. But the results do hint that direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription drugs is a powerful driver of sales.
“The benefits and risks of direct-to-consumer drug advertising are really on the forefront of health policy debates,” said Gray. “We think that our results add an interesting perspective.”