It’s been a year of big stories about Big Pharmas in the healthcare marketing world. All our top 10 pieces, as read by you in 2024, relate to the biggest players in the industry and the biggest issues of the year, namely: AI, celebrity endorsements, marketing snafus and anti-obesity meds.
The number one piece—and by a major margin as it has nearly double the views of the second most-read story—is about French Big Pharma Sanofi guaranteeing its employees diagnosed with cancer one year of salary and support. The program is designed to provide social, emotional and financial support to all employees and came amid the 2024 Olympics in Paris this summer, which Sanofi was heavily involved in and looked to use as a promotion vehicle for the company.
In the second spot is a story about Lady Gaga and Pfizer, both of which enjoyed multiple appearances within the top 10 this year (if you had that on your bingo card, well done because I didn’t).
This first story is about Pfizer’s migraine drug campaign for Nurtec ODT and its work with the actress and singer, who drew on personal experience to help promote the drug Pfizer picked up in its buyout of Biohaven a few years back.
Number three is a “naughty pharma” story. This time, it was two naughty pharmas in AstraZeneca and GSK who were both separately chided by the U.K.’s drug marketing watchdog, the PMCPA, for their employees’ breaching industry rules by “liking” posts on LinkedIn related to prescription meds.
In fourth place was our annual FierceMadness Tournament that this year focused on drug names (come back in March 2025 for the DTC Tournament) as you flocked to see the eventual winner in the form of AstraZeneca and Ionis’s Wainua.
Mid-table and we arrive at a major talking point in 2024 for marketers: ChatGPT and the expansion of AI. Here, we delved into a ZoomRx survey undertaken in the spring of more than 200 life sciences professionals, finding that more than half said their companies have banned employees from using OpenAI’s popular generative AI tool ChatGPT, including 65% of the top 20 Big Pharmas.
Our sixth most-read story centers on anti-obesity meds, another major talking point of 2024. This story, however, was from an annoyed Eli Lilly, who called out those who are using its obesity and diabetes franchise for what it deemed were purely “cosmetic” reasons and not as its drugs are labeled.
Lucky number seven for Pfizer, who returns with another ad campaign, this time enlisting Queen, Einstein and more for its Super Bowl ad back in February. This commercial focused on Pfizer’s role in the history of science while trying desperately to up the marketing of its COVID-19 franchise which had seen a dramatic fall in revenue in 2023.
At number eight is the story of the struggle that is Eisai and Biogen’s new Alzheimer’s disease drug Leqembi and its weak launch trajectory, with neurologists painting a bleak picture for the med’s prospects.
Lady Gaga is back in the charts at number nine but this time it’s a bad romance as Gaga’s two posts about the Pfizer Nurtec ad were alleged to have violated the EU’s DTC drug marketing rules, landing the pair in the crosshairs of European regulators.
And finally, at number 10 is, once again, Pfizer, though this time free of celebrity as you all flocked to read about how the New York pharma shifted its global creative business to Publicis on its own. This came less than a year after Pfizer had divvied up its marketing work between the Publicis Groupe and Interpublic Group.
Thank you for reading us this year. We look forward to bringing you the biggest pharma marketing stories again in 2025.