Mar­ket­ingRx roundup: Pfiz­er plans mar­ket­ing spend bump for 2023; Am­gen, Mer­ck join ‘Project Black’ eq­ui­ty fund­ing

Pfiz­er de­buted its first brand cam­paign for its Covid-19 treat­ment Paxlovid and men­tioned in an End­points News Gram­my Awards sto­ry yes­ter­day, but it’s worth not­ing again. Un­til now, Pfiz­er has been en­cour­ag­ing peo­ple to go to a health­care provider quick­ly — to the tune of more than $108 mil­lion in NFL TV ad place­ments alone, ac­cord­ing to re­al-time TV ad track­er iS­pot.tv.

There’s al­so no rea­son to ex­pect the ad­ver­tis­ing will stop. Not on­ly are Paxlovid treat­ments un­der­used, but al­so Pfiz­er has ear­marked funds for spend­ing. It re­port­ed last week that it plans to spend an ex­tra $1.3 bil­lion in 2023 “to sup­port an­tic­i­pat­ed new launch­es, ac­quired as­sets and com­mer­cial launch of COVID-19 prod­ucts” for a to­tal ex­pect­ed sell­ing, in­for­ma­tion­al and ad­min­is­tra­tive (SI&A) tab of $13.8 bil­lion to $14.8 bil­lion for 2023. The spend­ing bump fol­lows a 17% SI&A in­crease in the fourth quar­ter of 2022.

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