BOSTON – Terri Bagley spent nearly two decades searching for a way to get a good night’s sleep.
She toyed with keeping her bedroom pitch black and sniffing in the soothing smell of lavender. But neither those tricks nor over-the-counter and prescription medications made much of a difference.
Bagley, a 44-year-old operator of a small cleaning service in Pelham, N.C., is typical of the millions of Americans believed to suffer from chronic insomnia who until recently had mostly short-term solutions available. She found help in a clinical trial for Lunesta, one of a new generation of prescription sleep medications, and continued taking the drug after it hit the market in April.
“If you’re tired for 20 years, you don’t realize how much better you can feel until you start getting a full night’s sleep again,” she said.
An emerging class of sleep aids is spurring an advertising effort that industry watchers say could rival the saturation campaign for erectile dysfunction drugs.
“I would expect this to become a very active category of drugs in consumer advertising,” said Judy Franks, of Starcom Worldwide, a Chicago-based ad buying agency.
U.S. advertising for prescription and over-the-counter insomnia drugs totaled nearly $68 million last year, according to TNS Media Intelligence, a media research firm. But spending in the first four months of this year alone was already $48.7 million; at that rate, it could top $146 million this year.
The total is still far less than the $382 million spent last year to advertise erectile dysfunction drugs. But advertising industry officials expect spots encouraging insomniacs to talk to their doctor will become more frequent in coming months as more sleep aids hit the market.
“When a new competitor comes into the marketplace, it usually heightens spending on the part of all the competitors, because they need to defend their positions in the marketplace,” said Michael Guarini, managing director of the New York City-based Ogilvy Healthcare.
Lunesta is so far the only prescription sleep aid approved by the Food and Drug Administration for long-term use, in contrast with more established short-term medications such as Ambien and Sonata. While most of the eight FDA-approved sleep aids tend to lose their effectiveness after a week or so of use, Lunesta has been shown in Sepracor-funded clinical studies to remain effective for up to six months.
Like the heavily marketed erectile dysfunction drugs, the new insomnia medications are aimed at people who have gone largely untreated and may be unaware of new treatment options.
“A lot of doctors have been historically somewhat reticent to prescribe these drugs, so a patient-driven marketing approach makes sense,” said analyst David Steinberg of Deutsche Bank North America.
Sepracor Inc., the Marlborough, Mass.-based manufacturer of Lunesta, has nearly tripled the size of its sales staff to 1,250 and is spending $60 million this year on ads for the drug.
The predicted marketing wars are raising alarms among critics who say ads touting medications for common problems – from heartburn to shyness – too often unnecessarily steer patients to prescription drugs.
“We’ve already started to see an enormous marketing push for these drugs, with insomnia now labeled the latest epidemic’ threatening the health of America,” said Dr. Jerry Avorn, a Harvard Medical School professor and author of the book “Powerful Medicines.”
Avorn says many insomnia patients could find restful sleep by simply avoiding stimulants like caffeine and nicotine or getting enough exercise.
“There’s no money to be made advertising those simple lifestyle solutions, but there are billions to be made getting patients onto lifelong use of expensive medications,” Avorn said.
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