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legulere

Pharmaceutical companies spend even more on advertising than on R&D and still highly profitable though.

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According to one google search result total pharma ad spend was $6.58 billion in 2020.

According to the CBO pharma R&D was $83 billion in 2019.

References:

https://www.fiercepharma.com/special-report/top-10-ad-spende...

https://www.cbo.gov/publication/57126

You are off by a factor 10. The 1 billion is in total over all the time needed to produce the drug (about 10 years), while ads are per year.

ok, so 65 drugs in development, with 6.5 drugs released per year? does that seem plausible for the entire pharma industry?

The FDA approved 53 novel drugs in 2020. That was relatively high; most years have lower totals.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/817534/annual-novel-drug...

You notice you are off by a factor 10 and don't pause for a moment but instead immediately go "ok, so"?

If it costs a billion dollars to develop a drug and pharma spends 6.5 billion on ads, that would mean an implausibly small number of drugs being developed, no?

I don't see any reason to believe that pharma spends more on ads than R&D. Do you?

> that would mean

No.

> Do you?

The fact that you just reposted your above comment without any change despite knowing it was wrong and despite being called out on that. That seems like a strong point in favor of the opposite of whatever your position is.

Just to chime in; the poster you're replying to is correct regarding your incorrectness related to the relative weighting of R&D vs. Marketing spend.

Pull a public filing for these companies and take a look at their balance sheets; it's pretty straight forward.

It could easily be the case that without the advertising spend they would not be profitable. Do you think these publicly traded companies are wasting tons of money on advertising? Where is the shareholder outrage?

It could also be tragic of the commons effect though. High ad spend is necessitated by the high ad spend of competitors.

I worked in pharma advertising for a little bit: There are two sides, consumer and clinical which I believe are about equal spends (might be wrong, but it's significant anyway). Clinical advertising is mostly used to recruit doctors to recruit patients to take part in clinicial trials, and is a necessary component of R&D. Think lots of tradeshows with fancy signage, interactive touchscreens, apps, etc.

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