Sanofi-Aventis - Top 13 Advertising Budgets

Company: Sanofi-Aventis
2007 Ad Spending: $493.1 million
2006 Ad Spending: $490.8 million

Breakdown

• Magazines: $113.3 million
• Newspaper: $1.8 million
• Outdoor: $100,000
• TV: $122.4 million
• Radio: $200,000
• Internet: $8.7 million

Where Sanofi is spending money: Sanofi-Aventis kept its overall ad spending fairly steady, but it did shuffle its brand focus a bit. Ambien continued to get lots of media support--$196.5 million versus $207.7 million the previous year--as the company continued to capitalize on a successful campaign. Sanofi also pumped up the budget for diabetes drug Lantus by 60 percent, to $20.9 million, and it boosted corporate spending to $14 million from just $277,000.

It turns out that Lantus was one focus of Sanofi's U.S. financial report, too. The company grew sales in the U.S. by $3.9 percent, partly because of big growth in that brand. Lantus sales rocketed upward by almost 40 percent to $1 billion.

Ambien was a more complicated story: The original formulation went generic in April, and uptake of the copycat versions was immediate. That formula lost 52 percent of its sales to end the year at $920,000. But by heavily promoting the new extended-release formula, Ambien CR, Sanofi offset that loss. The CR formula saw sales increase by almost 60 percent, to $876,000. The total of more than $1.8 billion amounted to a growth of 38 percent.

Where Sanofi isn't spending money: Sanofi didn't promote two of its biggest drugs via mass media: Lovenox, with 16 percent increase and $1.5 billion in sales; and Taxotere, with $708,000 in sales. That's because Lovenox, a heparin product, is used in hospitals, and Taxotere, a cancer treatment, is marketed directly to doctors.