AbbVie and Johnson & Johnson are the current big spenders when it comes to TV drug ads in the U.S., but Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk are appearing the most in AI citations organically.
That’s according to new figures published by PR and digital comms firm 5W AI Communications. To reach the conclusion, the company tallied up AI-generated responses from five major chatbots—ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews—during the second quarter of the year.
The firm said it tracked AI citation share as represented by the estimated proportion of company-specific citations across more than 60 tracked patient and consumer prompts.
The resulting report found that Eli Lilly came out on top when it came to estimated AI citation share, hitting 12.5%, while its rival Novo Nordisk was second, with 11.5%.
The companies market major obesity and diabetes drugs in Wegovy, Ozempic, Zepbound and Mounjaro, all of which that have captured the media and popular imagination, so it’s no surprise to see them at the top of the list.
Pfizer came in third, with 8.5% share, likely because of its longstanding citations from the days of COVID, when it was one of the most-discussed pharma companies.
J&J, also a major pharma brand, and Merck, which sells oncology megablockbuster Keytruda, round out the top 5 with AI citation shares of 7% and 6%, respectively.
Pharma does not pay directly for these citations, but drug companies do pay billions of dollars every year in DTC drug advertising, predominately on linear TV.
This year, the biggest TV spenders are AbbVie for its immunology duo Skyrizi and Rinvoq, as well as Johnson & Johnson and its rival immunology med Tremfya. AbbVie was sixth on the AI citation list, with a 5% share.
AbbVie and J&J regularly spend between $30 million and $50 million per month per drug on TV drug ads, according to data Fierce Pharma Marketing publishes from iSpot.TV
Merck rarely makes the top 10 list, as selling cancer drugs on TV is the not the best use of its marketing budget. The same goes for Pfizer, which has dropped off the iSpot.TV listings since its reduced marketing on its COVID products.
Lilly has been consistently spending its TV budget on ads for its obesity drug Zepbound, though it’s usually at around the $20 million a month mark, rarely troubling the top 3 spenders.
The 5W report’s authors say that while pharma is the top-spending industry for DTC ads in the U.S., “that scale of spend does not translate into proportional AI citation share.”
“Pharma is the largest direct-to-consumer ad category in America. The AI engines are not impressed,” Ronn Torossian, Founder and Chairman at 5W, said in a release accompanying the report.
“They name the companies whose drugs patients actually research—Eli Lilly and Novo Nordisk—not the companies running the most prime-time spots,” Torossian added.
Pharmas still buying ad spots and “hoping it carries through to the engines are funding the wrong channel,” he concluded.