Pharmaceutical companies are legally required to list the potential side effects of the drugs they advertise on TV. The need to convey that a given drug could harm or even kill customers while also urging them to ask their physician about it poses a communication challenge for drugmakers, to say the least.
However, in the nearly two decades since the Food and Drug Administration began allowing direct-to-consumer TV advertising for prescription drugs, pharmaceutical companies have learned how to effectively deliver the information they are required to include without dissuading consumers from inquiring about the drug, according to Stat News. Voiceover actors play a key role in the $5 billion-a-year prescription drug advertising industry.
There are a few strategies the ad designers use when it comes to delivering the list of potential health risks and side effects associated with a drug.
"There's a shift in how the voice is used to make it easier to understand the benefits and less easy to understand the risks," said Ruth Day, PhD, a cognitive scientist at Durham, N.C.-based Duke University who has studied drug ads for more than a decade, according to Stat.
Some ads have one narrator explain the benefits of the drug and a different actor to recite the risks in a less engaging voice. Some ads incorporate more complex sentence structures in the warning section, which makes it harder for viewers to absorb.
Another tactic is keeping the voice actor who discusses the drug's benefits on screen and the actor who discusses its risks off screen. Research shows consumers absorb more information when they can see the speaker compared to when they can only hear the speaker's voice, according to the report.
However, drug companies have to ensure the warning section of the ad is clearly communicated. In 2008, the FDA sent a warning letter to Bayer, stating two ads for the birth control pill Yaz seemed to aim to distract viewers from the potential side effects with a reel of "fast-paced visuals" being shown while the voice actor spoke.
"These complex presentations distract from and make it difficult for viewers to process and comprehend the important risks being conveyed," the FDA wrote, according to the report. "This is particularly troubling as some of the risks being conveyed are serious, even life-threatening."
Bayer was required to run corrective ads that placed greater emphasis on the potential health risks, according to the report. Since then, most drug companies have been careful not to divert viewers' attention from side effects, explained Adrienne Faerber, PhD, a health policy researcher at the Dartmouth Institute.
Now, many drug companies have employed the opposite approach — having the voiceover actor narrate the side effects in a deliberately dull, understated tone. This approach can have an equally distractive effect on viewers, but the FDA can't ban pharmaceutical companies from producing ads that bore consumers out of paying attention to the drug's side effects. "There's no requirement for [drug manufacturers] to present things in a way that's cognitively engaging," said Dr. Faerber, according to the report.