Yet again, a post about one of Meryl Dorey's regularly scheduled SocialOomph tweets. And guess what? Meryl is lying again. Oh, sure, she's probably just repeating something she's heard somewhere else. Sad thing is, though, she's been told she's wrong repeatedly and she's still carrying on, so it's crossed from merely repeating a rumour without checking into the territory of outright lie. She's repeating this on the "official" twitter channel of the Australian Vaccination Network, which claims to be an independent watchdog. It's not a watchdog. It's a half-blind junkyard mutt with three legs.
So, are pharma companies the biggest buyers of advertising?
Well, no.
Dave The Happy Singer sent me this link from Advertising Age, summarising the top 100 ad spends from companies worldwide in 2009.
In at number one? Procter & Gamble. Do they have any pharma products? Well no, unless you count tampons and razors as pharma, which I don't. Yes, I know you can buy them at the pharmacy. They're not pharma.
Number two in the list? Unilever. A direct competitor to the #1 company, Unilever are also conspicuously short of pharma brands, but they're nevertheless pervasive. I'm drinking Lipton's tea right now, a Unilever brand.
Third in the top 100 is L'oreal, the world's largest cosmetics firm. Wait a minute! doesn't Meryl Dorey run a company called "Fountain Of Beauty"? Why yes! Cosmetics firms are the third largest buyers of advertising. Think about that next time you see Meryl Dorey abusing the AVN's non-profit status to promote her own private company.
Fourth - and don't worry, I'm not going to do all 100 of them - is General Motors, owners of the Holden, Opel and Vauxhall brands. Oh, those evil Holdens and Vauxhalls! But do they manufacture any drugs? Not unless you count pure adrenaline!
Coming in at number five, The Toyota Motor Corporation. I think we all know who Toyota are. They make cars that just don't stop. No drugs here. NEXT!
Sixth in the list: Coca-Cola. Now, despite schoolyard rumours, Coca-Cola no longer contains cocaine. Therefore, I don't think it's fair to call Coca Cola a pharma or chemical company, even if they do market Monster Energy.
Now, at seven with a global spend of $2.6bn, Johnson & Johnson. Finally, a pharmaceutical company. Possibly best known for their sanitation products like gauzes, cotton tips and dressings (they got started in surgical dressings), J&J do actually have a stake in the vaccine business. That's right. They got into vaccines in 2009 when they bought a european research biotech company.
OK, so we find a pharma brand at number 7, though admittedly it's a brand more well known for cotton tips and tylenol than "proper" clinical products. Where are the others?
8. Ford. Not pharma, though their cars are known to put me to sleep
9. Reckit Benckiser (chemicals and 'health' products including Gaviscon, Nurofen and Clearasil). Only vaguely pharma. We'll give it half a point, if only for products like Suboxone.
10. Nestlé. A food company. Not very ethical, but also not "pharma". Also, a verb meaning "to move or arrange oneself in a comfortable and cozy position", if you leave off the accent.
11. Volkswagen. Nobody mention Hitler.
12. Honda. Any drugs here? Just the ones being taken by the designers of this thing.
13. Mars. Formerly Masterfoods. Vegetarians don't like them much any more, but not because they manufacture evil drugs. It's because they started using veal byproducts in their chocolate bars. Mmmmm. Veal.
14. McDonalds - I've often joked that their food is addictive, but it ain't no drug, Meryl.
15. Sony - don't get me started on Sony. They put rootkits on their music CDs, but they don't manufacture pharma.
Damn, this is a struggle. Up to fifteen and only one and a half pharma companies
16. GlaxoSmithKline. Yay! Another pharma company with an ad spend of $1.83bn. Fourth largest pharma company in the world, seemingly the second (maybe third) largest ad spend of the pharma segment. And they definitely make vaccines. But at number 16, they're clearly not pulling their weight for Meryl. Pick up your game, GSK.
17. Deutsche Telecom. I think we can discount these guys. I'm pretty sure that DTAG's product line fails to constitute a pharmacopeia. I just wanted to use the word pharmacopeia. Move along.
18. Kraft Foods. Vegemite is not a drug! I'm not addicted. I can quit any time I want.
19. Nissan. Boring cars are not pharmaceutical products.
20. Walt Disney Company. Pure unmitigated evil, but again they don't count as pharma. Not even for fantasia.
So there we have it. Only two and a half pharma companies in the top 20 Ad spenders worldwide, and none above seventh-placed J&J, which is there by virtue of a massively diverse product base. That's 12.5% of the list. Even if we expand the domain to include "chemical companies" we only really add half a point for Reckit Benckiser, notwithstanding that all matter is composed of chemicals and therefore any company with a physical product is therefore a chemical company.
Here's the lowdown: Meryl is lying. Again.
Hang on, I'll put that in big, so the message is clear
Meryl is lying. Again.
Got that?
UPDATE: Meryl is still spouting this tweet as of today 25th June 2010