TV Advertising in Clinical Trial Recruitment: Overcoming Fear of Desensitization

No one wants to waste money on advertising. When talking with study sponsors about recruiting patients for clinical trials, we are routinely asked whether advertising campaigns – specifically TV campaigns – would become exorbitantly expensive as the market becomes saturated with ads.

In the time that I have been analyzing effectiveness of patient recruitment campaigns, I have never seen TV advertising campaigns become less effective over time.

Just the other day, a fellow clinical trials strategist asked me: How do we measure desensitization to a TV ad?

We test for diminishing returns by breaking out the average costs per referral by market and by TV buy. In order to adjust for differences in the size of the TV buy and the cost of buying TV ads in various markets, we calculate the cost per referral in each media buy as a percentage of the average cost per referral in that DMA. We then run single factor ANOVAs to test for significant differences between groups (media buys).

Costs per referral remained consistent with multiple weeks of TV advertising

I have yet to see the cost per referral increase significantly with recurring media buys. It is important to consider the context: TV remains the largest advertising medium in the US, with annual spending of roughly $60 billion dollars. Our targeted ad campaigns are a drop in the bucket compared to national branding campaigns aired by a huge retailer such as Target. While a strategically targeted media buy can certainly make up a sizeable portion of a patient recruitment budget, these types of ad campaigns just don’t run long enough to desensitize TV viewers.

In our experience, TV advertising can represent a hefty investment for clinical trial enrollment, which means it isn’t right for every trial. Nevertheless, its reach and reliability in generating qualified leads can’t be beat!