If you work with US-based pharmaceutical advertisers you’ve probably heard of Important safety information (ISI). Important safety information will typically contain the name of the drug, FDA-approved uses for the drug, and the risks and side effects of the drug. Display ads must include important safety information (ISI) and warnings about the benefits and potential risks of the drugs. So, how do marketers do this with just a few hundred pixels of space on an ad. How do they collaborate on the creative to ensure they’re compliant?
How can marketers put important safety information in a display ad
If you try to present a balance of benefits and risks in your important safety information (ISI), 30-50% of the ad space will be taken up by the notices. Most Pharma marketers and agencies will add a scrollable ISI so that they can maximize space for the creative.
You can still spice up the ISI section a bit by adding color to the scroll arrows and paragraph headings. Most ads consist of multiple frames, so it may be beneficial to include a repeat button to run back through the ad animation.
How do you collaborate on Pharma ad creative and ensure the ISI is compliant?
Capture each frame of the ad and the important safety information as images, then include them all in a PDF. With animated ads, this can be time-consuming. Especially when you have to recapture frames after you’ve made changes to the ad. You can use our Ad Preview tool/API to capture an image of each frame and a screenshot of the ISI separately. Just upload an ad tag, HTML5 zip file, or your staging link that hosts the ad.
Share this internally for creative collaboration. Once you’re ready send it to your client to allow them to give you legal feedback on the important safety information for final review. Your client may have a tool of choice for feedback and review (ie. Veeva), but if not, you could always use something like Punchlist.
Pharma marketers and agencies have a unique creative and compliance challenge when it comes to display ads. Hopefully, this advice and some of these tools help make things a lot easier!