Pharmaceutical sales not responsive to consurmer advertising.

After the change to allow advertising to consumers in the USA, advertising spend shot up over the following 10 years by 330% to over 5 Billion Dollars.  New research by the Havard research team has shown that although pharmaceutical sales are increased for a brief period after an advertising campaign, this effect is relatively short lived and sales usually shrink back to where they were before.  Given a 5 Billion Dollar spend, perhaps not what you would have hoped for!

The conclusion was that there is no better way to increase pharmaceutical sales than an active medical representative promoting medicines directly to the physicians who write the prescriptions.  This will be comforting news to the UK pharmaceutical industry which relies on medical representative promotion as it's primary means of generting pharmaceutical sales growth.