Pfizer Finds a New Way to Sell to Doctors

By now, everyone seems to agree: On demand advertising is the wave of the future. Companies have figured out that the way to get the message across to their costumers is to give them content that they actually want. With consumers that tends to mean humor; for drug companies selling to doctors, it could mean something else.

Pfizer said today that it has linked up with the doctors-only social networking web site Sermo pioneering a new way for drug companies to communicate with medical professionals.

You might not have heard of it, but Sermo is the largest U.S. networking site for doctors. It launched in September 2006, counts 30,000 physicians as members, and is adding 2,000 a week.

Why do doctors need their own Facebook? Sermo provides a forum for docs to pick each others' brains on clinical issues, to keep up to date on research—and (cue Pfizer) to find out about new medicines and treatments.

Before Sermo, they had to rely for knowledge-sharing on medical journals, personal networks of colleagues, or conferences that were often sponsored by, ahem, pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer.

Sermo realized that any semblance of bias on the site, such as advertising, would cost it some credibility with its core audience. Doctors are well acquainted with feeling like targets for the multibillion-dollar prescription drug and medical equipment industries.

Instead of selling ads, Sermo makes its money by letting service companies, financial services firms, and the government become flies on the wall of the biggest physicians' roundtable out there. It packages and sells the data it holds on the medical community, allowing those parties to get insight into how to better serve them, and to anticipate what's on the horizon.

So opening the door to major drug companies seems like a big leap away from Sermo's original strategy of keeping them entirely at bay. The exact nature of the collaboration with Pfizer is still unclear, but one could easily imagine pervasive Pfizer branding efforts making physicians instinctively leery about the advice they trust (even if the input of biased parties was strictly monitored).

For drug companies, the value is clear—digital interfaces are a cheaper way to get face time with doctors. The cost of selling drugs the old fashioned way is high, and the industry has less and less leeway to extend traditional perks and gifts to the medical professionals they're attempting to woo.

For doctors, Sermo's co-operation with drug companies could also mean one-stop shopping for drug information, as well as the latest information on research and development. According to Sermo, doctors have actively asked to team up with drug makers, government agencies, industry groups, and other outside organizations, and will be instrumental in building guidelines for how they will collaborate.

For now, Pfizer says it will provide Sermo with "clinical content," including information on Pfizer products. So until other drug companies weigh in, the offering seems little different from what it could provide on its own web site.

by Liz Gunnison