DTC "needs to address ethnic audiences, or lose 77 million US consumers"

Pharmaceutical companies in the USA are starting to realize that theywill not reach some ethnic groups with direct-to-consumer ads unless they use non-traditional venues and languages other than English. If they do not change this advertising, they will lose an estimated 77 million consumers and $1,200 billion in spending power, notes Advertising Age.

Marketers will begin to plan ad campaigns in exactly the opposite manner to how they do it now, said Larry Moskowitz, director of strategic planning at New York-based Kang & Lee, an Asian specialist agency owned by WPP Group's Young & Rubicam. No longer will "leftover money" be used for multicultural ads and, within three years, companies will realize that they need to sell to every person in America, not every white person in America, he told the magazine.

Companies are wasting their money by still advertising drugs like AstraZeneca's Prilosec (omeprazole) to the non-ethnic market, which has already been bombarded with ads for "the purple pill," but are missing affluent Asian consumers, he said. Using native languages, or at least ethnic faces, in ads, makes all the difference. Last year, Mr Moskowitz' firm received nine invitations to educate pharmaceutical advertisers about the Asian-American market and, to date, he has already held one seminar and has another planned. None were presented in 1999.