Over 100 million Americans just watched a misleading ad at the Super Bowl.
By Shabbir Imber Safdar, Executive Director
Tonight, as over 100 million Americans watched the Super Bowl, they saw an ad that looked like a drug ad. It induced Americans to buy a medication that would help them lose weight, heard about its benefits over another medication, and then were told how to get it.
Perhaps they noticed that the commercial didn't mention any side effects. Many who saw might have thought it must be magical if, unlike every other drug, it doesn't have any side effects worth mentioning.
And if they were paying attention they might have caught, in small print obscured by the background, a notice that it was a compounded medicine not approved by the FDA.
We noticed, and we have concerns strong enough that we sent a letter to Fox Broadcasting that it violated their own rules on drug ads. If you somehow squint and think it's not a drug ad, it still violates Fox's other rules about ads that make weight loss claims. We let the FDA know too.
If this disclosure had been in 72 point font in white letters on a black background, most Americans still wouldn't know what it meant.
That's because compounded medicine, which occupies an important niche role in our drug supply, has not been mass marketed like this, and it really isn't supposed to be. You could tell an American that they're getting a compounded medicine and they would have no idea what that meant. That may be a legal disclosure, but that's not good enough to protect patients who don't know what the words mean.
However in this case, it was lacking in more ways than one.