They dance in kitchens and in meadows frothy with flowers. They dance at weddings. They dance while fireworks bloom in dark summer skies; they dance in the bleachers at slow-pitch softball games. They dance at carnivals, and there’s always a carnival going on. They dance at luaus. They dance for the sheer joy of having tamed their ulcerative colitis, their skin conditions and their seasonal allergies, and because $5.09 billion buys a lot of fancy footwork.
They are the people who dance in pharmaceutical ads, and if you watch televised sports, they’ve become about as inescapable as the CGI insurance lizard or Matthew McConaughey. According to iSpot.tv data, prescription drug brands in 2024 accounted for 11.6% of all linear-TV ad spend (a catch-all that includes the regional sports networks), thanks in large part to the tireless efforts and deep pockets of the people who brought you Skyrizi and Rinvoq and Wegovy and Ozempic.
But like the town elders in Footloose, the new Secretary of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., has had it up to here with the pharma industry’s twirling and spinning, and he’d like to put a stop to it. For the networks that cover the most popular sports, Kennedy’s stated aim to put the kibosh on prescription drug advertising could put a big dent in their gameday revenues, although banning Big Pharma from the airwaves is easier said than done.
The amount of money at stake is not inconsiderable. Per iSpot, prescription drug manufacturers last year invested $895.8 million on in-game ad units, which accounted for 17.6% of the industry’s overall TV spend. The NFL is pharma’s favorite hunting ground, with 8.7% of the category’s spend, or $442.8 million, finding its way into the coffers of the league’s TV partners. By way of comparison, the next-biggest beneficiary of all those drug dollars is TV’s top-rated evening news program; ABC’s World News Tonight with David Muir mopped up 3.2% of pharma’s national spend, for a haul of some $162.9 million.
Other sports properties that traffic in high volumes of pharma bucks include the NBA, which accounts for 1.1% of the segment’s total outlay, or just shy of $56 million, MLB ($48.4 million), college football ($46.3 million) and men’s college basketball ($41.2 million). All told, NBC, ABC, CBS, Fox and ESPN combined for 52.8% of all prescription drug TV ad spend in 2024, which works out to $2.69 billion worth of airtime. Many of those dollars are spent on the evening and morning news shows, which draw tens of millions of demographically apposite viewers each weekday.
Network prime is also a favorite landing spot, as the median age of the nighttime broadcast audience is now creeping up on 65 years. Little wonder; on an episode-by-episode basis, adults 18-49 make up just 12.9% of the overall deliveries for entertainment programming on the Big Four nets. To put it less charitably, if pneumonia is the old man’s friend, TV is his BFF.
While Kennedy is an outspoken critic of pharma advertising—during his presidential campaign, the new HHS head promised to issue an executive order banning the practice on his first day in office if elected—precedent suggests that ridding the airwaves of drug spots may be more trouble than it’s worth. Since the 1970s, the courts have held the view that advertising is a form of “commercial speech” guaranteed by the First Amendment.
As much as legal types are justly ill-disposed toward monkeying with the Constitution’s protections of free speech, there’s precedent for overriding such concerns in the advertising arena. As FCC chairman Brendan Carr noted during a recent podcast appearance, the Nixon administration was able to do away with cigarette ads in early 1971 after Congress passed a law banning tobacco products from appearing on TV and radio. That proved to be a windfall for print, but erased an estimated $150 million, or $1.23 billion in today’s dollars, from broadcasters’ budgets.
“I think it probably requires a two-step, where Congress passes a law or maybe HHS [Health and Human Services] can do it,” Carr said. “But there is precedent where that happens, and the FCC enforces it.”
The cigarette ban didn’t just chase the Marlboro Man off into the chaparral of magazines and newspapers—it also led to the widespread adoption of the 30-second spot. Before the tobacco dollars went up in smoke, the standard length of a TV ad was 60 seconds; when that revenue stream was eliminated, network ad sales bosses were quick to embrace a slimmed-down messaging format. Rather than wait for the cavalry to arrive in the unlikely form of a bunch of hitherto untapped categories, the sales guys instead chopped the commercial running times in half, thereby making their inventory a great deal more affordable. As the smoke cleared, TV became a volume play, with lower CPMs and an expanded client roster going a long way toward making up for all that lost escarole.
Back here in the present, the networks are monitoring the pharma situation, but there’s a palpable sense of skepticism in the air. One representative take was served up on Dec. 9 by Fox Corp. chief financial officer Steven Tomsic, who told the crowd at the USB Global Media and Communications Conference that he thought a full-on pharma ban was a longshot. “When we look at it, it’s unlikely,” Tomsic said. “[I’m] prepared to be proven otherwise, but it is going to be unlikely to be a blanket ban on all pharma advertising, right?”
Tomsic went on to add that Fox’s exposure to pharma advertising was relatively limited, likening the category to the “sports betting money [that’s] largely been sucked out of the market.” Per iSpot estimates, the Fox flagship accounted for 5.8% of all pharma TV spend in 2024, well shy of its broadcast competition. NBC remains the top destination at 16.1%, while ABC (14.5%) and CBS (14.1%) aren’t too far off the mark.
If Fox’s balance sheet allows it to be relatively unbothered by the threat of a pharma ban, the more vested networks aren’t exactly gearing up for cold turkey withdrawal pains. There’s a sense in some circles that Big Pharma’s lobbying might will win the day; after all, the sector last year shelled out $384.5 million in the service of various Beltway palm-greasing efforts, making it the most well-funded influencer network in the Capital. The thinking is, as long as so many representatives on the Hill are lining their pockets with drug dough, there’s little chance that anyone’s going to get near enough to ruffle the feathers of this particular golden goose.
Government intervention is what got us into this pharma glut in the first place. In 1999, the FDA relaxed its regulations on consumer-facing pharmaceutical advertising (“ask your doctor if Moloko Plus is right for you”), which led a tripling of the category’s commercial spend in just six years. As such, it’s arguably far more likely that a compromise may be struck, with some of the more blatant pitches to the home viewer being phased out while leaving the nuts and bolts of TV’s prescription drug messaging largely intact.
Or as Tomsic suggested, “It would take an enormously draconian ban on it for it to really have an impact.” Given the sheer tonnage of cash that Big Pharma pumps into D.C. every year, the outright elimination of TV ads for FDA-approved prescription drugs seems about as unlikely as the development of a pill that makes commercials less annoying.
But if nothing else, the dancing’s got to go. Next time you spot one of these ads in the wild, pay close attention: They always start in with the hips and the elbows while the voiceover warns about the side effects. It’s almost as if all that shimmying and swaying is there to make you forget about the nausea, vomiting, dizziness, upset stomach, bloating, loss of appetite, projectile diarrhea and capital-d Death that may occur if you take those … gastric reflux pills.
