Over the past few weeks, the FDA announced plans to launch public surveys and conduct studies relating to the promotion of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements for prescription drugs. As part of this “spring cleaning,” on March 9, 2016 the Agency proposed an additional study, which will examine how the size and presentation of superimposed text (supers) impacts consumer comprehension of DTC television ads for prescription drugs.
FDA would like to conduct this study in order “to extend previous research on the effects of supers in general print and television advertising to today’s modern DTC pharmaceutical promotion.” The Agency states that, although previous research suggests that altering text size can impact consumer comprehension, it is necessary to determine if these findings, which are more than 20 years old, are still applicable when viewing DTC ads for prescription drugs using today’s modern technologies. In addition, FDA also wants to look into whether or not text/background contrast may “influence both the understanding of the superimposed information and the effects of text size.”
This study is being proposed as a part of FDA’s public health mission, which seeks to ensure the safe use of prescription drugs. In doing so, FDA states that it is important that the information being presented in DTC advertisements is:
FDA’s study will address a number of unanswered questions regarding the use of superimposed text in the promotion of prescription drugs. The specific research questions that the Agency will be working to answer are:
To test these questions, FDA will conduct one randomized controlled study. In this study, FDA has stated that it “will examine reactions to supers in a fictitious DTC prescription drug promotional video on two types of viewing devices with a general population sample. The study design will be a 3 × 2 × 2 factorial design, where participants are randomly assigned to one of twelve experimental study arms differentiated by:
FDA is seeking feedback and is asking interested parties to submit comments by Monday, May 9th.
For more details on FDA’s proposed study, view the recent Federal Register notice.
November 24, 2014
Recently I was asked by a client whether they should continue to do Re-Qualifications or change to Continued Process Verification on their qualified cleaning circuits. To answer this, the factors to...
June 1, 2022
As many blockbuster biologicals face the expiration of their patents, so-called "patent cliff", many biotech businesses direct their attention to the field of biosimilars. The development of...
March 20, 2019
Operating a business under a Consent Decree is extremely difficult; there is no area of the business that goes unaffected. In addition to fines that could reach $500 million, a three to five-year...