FDA Owes Health Care Marketers Better Guidelines for Online Media
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- May 20th, 2009
It’s not easy for a health care marketer making the leap from broadcast to broadband. As reported by Jacob Goldstein in the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog, Johnson & Johnson received an FDA warning letter which prompted the removal of an online video for Ultram ER from the PainAwareness.org site.
What strikes me as interesting is that PainAwareness is a site intended for health care practitioners and goes so far as to offer CME. Would this have been different had the site required registration? Hard to say as the guidelines are so antiquated (who uses diskettes for distribution anymore?)
Until FDA issues usable, contemporary guidelines for online media, marketers would be well advised to leverage technology like YouTube’s Video Annotations in their online media. This technology enables pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device marketers to embed hyperlinks to relevant information at key points in the video. For example:
- Add background information about the video
- Link to related YouTube videos or channels
- Link (and track) search results from within a video
The cautious among us – which includes me – would use it to keep the full PI literally “just one click away.” Better safe than sorry. Or on the receiving end of a DDMAC letter.