Editors’ Note: This feature appears as it was published in the summer 2021 edition of UT Dallas Magazine. Titles or faculty members listed may have changed since that time.
Many marketing studies have examined the impact of direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals on sales and market shares. But in a recent study, a researcher from UT Dallas wanted to know whether drug advertising might have some unintended, population-level health consequences.
“A colleague and I wondered, ‘Can Viagra ads result in more babies?’” said Dr. Tongil “TI” Kim, assistant professor of marketing in the Naveen Jindal School of Management and one of the study’s co-authors.
In the study, published in the August 2020 issue of the Journal of Marketing Research, Kim and Dr. Diwas KC of Emory University explored the impact of direct-to-consumer advertising of erectile dysfunction (ED) drugs on birth rate at the population level.
The researchers examined local television commercials for three drug brands: Viagra (sildenafil), Levitra (vardenafil) and Cialis (tadalafil). They compared advertising data with hospital data from Massachusetts between 2001 and 2010, and with 15 million birth certificate records from the U.S. between 2000 and 2004.
They used a type of quasi field experiment — a way to show causality in economics and marketing — to address many potential confounding factors. They examined two sets of adjacent rural ZIP codes with similar characteristics, where one side received more ED drug ads than the other side.
Additionally, the researchers considered other variables that might have affected increased birth rates during these time periods, such as inclement or cold weather, and determined those factors were not major concerns in the study’s setting. They also replaced ED drug advertising with advertising for an unrelated drug category and found no impact on birth rates.
The researchers found that in ZIP codes where more ED drug ads ran than in neighboring ZIP codes, the birth rates were higher 10 months after the advertising aired. Their results showed that a 1% increase in ED drug advertising contributed to an increase of 0.04% to 0.08% of total births. They also found the ads particularly increased births among families with children.
The researchers believe that some viewers watched the ads and purchased ED drugs to improve their chances of achieving pregnancy (consumption effect), while others may have been affected by the suggestive nature of the ads without purchasing ED drugs (media effect).
The researchers said their study could provide companies a framework to monitor unintended health consequences in relation to the launch and marketing of pharmaceutical goods.
The Food and Drug Administration relaxed restrictions on direct-to-consumer advertising in 1997. Since then, TV advertising for pharmaceuticals increased substantially, with more than 80 drug ads aired every hour on U.S. television.
— Brittany Magelssen
