Cialis Dares to Be Different

Cialis is the drug with the ear-catching TV commercial. A man and a woman repose on their outdoor sun deck -- sitting in his-and-her bathtubs -- contemplating the countryside as an announcer intones about the drug's 36-hour window of opportunity and warns about the (rare) side effects of four-hour erections.

When you're the newest entrant in a pharmaceutical market, you need to capture the public's attention quickly.

The people promoting Cialis -- the biotechnology company Icos and the multinational drug giant Eli Lilly (LLY) -- tried something that their competitors hadn't tried before. They ran a TV ad that described what an impotence drug does.

But in order to present such an ad, they also had to list Cialis' possible side-effects. That's a requirement by the Food and Drug Administration, which says, in effect, that ads describing what a drug does for you must also say what the drug can do to you.

This type of ad is common in newspapers and magazines, where readers can check the fine print about side effects, but the descriptive format is becoming more common on television for anything from cholesterol fighters to antidepressants to antihistamines.

But Cialis, which reached the U.S. market in late November, was the first impotence drug to use such a TV commercial. The ad made its debut during the Super Bowl.

A Strategic Decision

"The first launch advantage is a very powerful advantage in pharmaceutical marketing," said Leonard Blum, vice president of sales and marketing for Icos of Bothell, Wash., referring to the five-year-plus head start for Viagra and the three-month lead for Levitra.

Because drug marketing depends on what the FDA allows on a drug's label, Eli Lilly and Icos decided to promote the drug's major distinction: It stays in the body longer than the competitors' drugs. Even the FDA remarks that Cialis is "different" than other medications because it can improve erectile function for up to 36 hours.