How a Health Department led by RFK Jr. could throw the advertising industry into turmoil

We’ve seen it before: a smiling older man frolics through an open field while birds sing around him. He plays fetch with a charming golden retriever. His significant other smiles at him softly. Then the upbeat voice of a narrator kicks in: if you take this medication, it could lead to catastrophic bowel movements, loss of hearing, or even death. 

Pharmaceutical ads like these are a huge funnel of spending for drug companies — which also means they’re a lucrative source of revenue for TV broadcasters. President Trump’s pick to run the Department of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., could throw a wrench into that machine.

If Kennedy gets past the Senate — he’s currently in the middle of confirmation hearings — he could make radical changes to the Department of Health. Even Trump has said Kennedy plansto “go wild,” though the US is starkly divided over whether the vaccine skeptic’s initiatives will actually improve public health. 

One enormous change that Kennedy has proposed would change the pharmaceutical business landscape to the tune of billions of advertising dollars. 

“One of the things I’m going to advise Donald Trump to do in order to correct the chronic disease epidemic is to ban pharmaceutical advertising on TV,” he said during a rally. 

That would be a huge shift given that pharma ads on TV gain an average of 223 million impressions daily, analysts at iSpot.tv say. It could be the last we see of marketing messages for Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, AbbVie’s Humira, Sanofi, Regeneron’s Dupixent, and their peers. 

If Kennedy’s proposal were implemented, it could dramatically reshape the TV advertising landscape. 

“Pharmaceuticals spend a ton of money on TV,” Greg Schwartz, founder of advertising consultancy Household, told Sherwood News. iSpot.tv tracked an estimated $3.4 billion of spending on TV spots from pharma companies between January and August 2024. Spending was up more than 8% year on year. That amount of cash disappearing from the sector could open doors for smaller advertisers and reduce ad costs, Schwartz said.

“This could have significant implications for advertising companies and the broader ad industry,” said Lori Goldberg, CEO at Silverlight Digital. 

Skyrizi, an injectable arthritis treatment that has the most widespread advertising campaign on TV, iSpot.tv found, spends about $32 million a month on TV spots alone. Even Tums, the most frugal brand tracked by the analysts, fills networks’ coffers with $2.7 million a month.

If that disappeared, a hole would appear that networks would have to fill — likely by decreasing their asking price. A drop in price would come because more ad slots would slip into the “remnant market,” where any inventory that remains unsold by network or cable channels gets listed below the rate-card price. The resulting gap in revenue streams might force major networks to rethink their advertising strategies or look to other industries to fill the void. 

Pharma companies, with their massive budgets and desire to get mentions of their drug in front of consumers, have historically been willing to pay top dollar for airtime. Healthcare companies devote more than a quarter of their total media spend on traditional outlets like TV, 10 percentage points more than the retail sector and double the tech and electronics industry, eMarketer reported.

The reason pharma firms are so willing to splash the cash? They know TV marketing works. Since 1997, when the Food and Drug Administration loosened requirements for companies to list all their drugs’ side effects and instead required only the major ones, TV ad spending by drug companies has ballooned. At the time, there were 79,000 commercials for medicines broadcast on US TV. By 2016, 663,000 TV spots were being broadcast. 

“Direct-to-consumer advertising has increased dramatically, in the number and types of health conditions,” said Ruth Day, director of the Medical Cognition Lab at Duke University, who has studied the spread of big pharma advertising for decades.

That’s not happening just on TV, but also online. Pharma is moving increasingly toward digital promotion, echoing the trend of cord-cutting across the wider population. Indeed, three-quarters of marketing budgets from pharma companies is devoted to digital advertising, eMarketer data shows. But the demographics of those who are more likely to watch TV and those who are more likely to need medical help overlap significantly — meaning that traditional broadcast still has its place in helping promote products.

The importance of TV advertising to the pharma industry is hard to overstate, Silverlight Digital’s Goldberg said. 

“Pharmaceutical advertising is a key channel for educating patients about new treatments,” she said. “If this ban were implemented, it could impact the launch of drugs that rely on ads to build brand awareness and inform the market. They could face barriers to entry, potentially stifling innovation and preventing customers from learning about new treatments.”

There’s also a flip side to any potential ban, Duke University’s Day said. Beyond boosting brand awareness, the ads have requirements on declaring side effects that help inform patients of what to look out for if they do take such medications. 

“If the ads went away, people would be less informed about the risks of drugs — as well as the benefits that are heavily advertised,” she said.

Day worries about a narrowing of horizons for patients looking for support, and an overreliance on choices made by their physician — who can equally be influenced by commercial interests. “Ads educate people about health conditions,” she said. 

For Goldberg, TV advertising has helped bring more information to the public about the potential treatment options available to them. 

“Patients today are more educated and want to feel empowered to have knowledgeable conversations with their healthcare provider,” she said.

But beyond that, she’s concerned by the example it sets — not just in the medical sphere, but elsewhere. 

“Banning pharmaceutical ads on TV could set regulatory precedent for other media types as well as other industries facing scrutiny, such as food, beverages, or technology,” Goldberg said. 

With all three areas regularly battling allegations that they’re addictive or harmful to health, it’s possible that they, too, could be in the crosshairs under Kennedy’s health department. 

The advertising industry itself is also likely to rail against any potential ban, given that some companies depend on the healthcare sector for a significant chunk of their revenues. Interpublic, one such agency, makes 29% of its revenue from health ads, Barclays found, while others like WPP, Publicis, and Omnicom get between 11% and 16% of their turnover from such ads.

Whether Kennedy will succeed in his goal of getting medical ads off television is the first question. Lobbying — by both Big Pharma and the TV industry that relies on it — has stepped up. K Street went into action as soon as Kennedy was nominated to lead the health department in November, Politico reported. 

Deciding where to draw the line in the event of a ban could be tricky, too. “Is a weight-loss drug OK, but a cancer drug isn’t?” Schwartz asked. “That’s going to be the holdup here, and probably how things get muddled and the initiative gets dropped.”

Besides that, there’s simply too much money involved. Too many vested interests could be spoiled if a ban were enacted, Schwartz reckons — which is why he thinks it won’t happen. “There’s a lot of people that want to keep the train rolling.”

Chris Stokel-Walker is a UK-based journalist. His latest book is “How AI Ate the World.”