Just days before the 2024 presidential election, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took the stage in Glendale, Arizona, at an event hosted by conservative pundit Tucker Carlson. Kennedy had endorsed Donald Trump in his quest to return to the White House and was delivering a stump speech with a particular focus on health care issues.
“One of the things I’m going to advise Donald Trump to do in order to correct the chronic disease epidemic is to ban pharmaceutical advertising on TV,” Kennedy told the crowd, which responded with a standing ovation. “There’s only two countries in the world that allow pharmaceutical advertising on the airwaves. One of them is New Zealand, and the other is us, and we have the highest disease rate, and we buy more drugs, and they’re more expensive than anywhere in the world.”
Trump, of course, won the election, and he subsequently announced his intent to nominate Kennedy to lead Health and Human Services in the new administration, with pharma advertising seemingly top of mind. It is a development not lost on media executives. One top TV ad sales executive says that their company is following the developments closely and that their team has been casually gaming out ways to respond should any sort of ban or limit go into effect. Trump has made targeting the media a recurring theme in his campaign, filing lawsuits against ABC News and CBS News and with incoming FCC chairman Brendan Carr seemingly interested in holding broadcast owners to account.
To target pharmaceutical ads on TV would be a major financial escalation in that fight. And while lawsuits or FCC inquiries are targeted, a blanket ban on pharma ads would wound both friend and foe. Steve Tomsic, CFO of Fox Corp., which owns Fox News and the Fox broadcast network, was asked about the possibility of a ban Dec. 9 during a UBS conference. “Is it a concern? We shouldn’t be flippant about it,” Tomsic said, adding that pharma advertising represented low single digits of the company’s overall revenue and that Fox was “prepared to be proven otherwise, but it is going to be unlikely to be a blanket ban of all pharma.”
Still, a low-single-digit impact to Fox would amount to hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And the impact to the larger TV business would be considerable. Media measurement firm iSpot.tv says that the pharmaceutical industry will spend $5 billion-plus on national linear TV advertising this year. Billions more will be spent on digital and streaming ads.
In fact, the 10 biggest drugs alone count for more than $1 billion in annual spend, according to FiercePharma, with such brands as Ozempic and Jardiance spending north of $10 million a month on national TV ads alone and Skyrizi topping the charts with more than $30 million a month in TV ad spend.
A ban would wreak havoc, with some verticals like TV news programs hit particularly hard. At the very least, the possibility of a ban is a real wild card when it comes to the TV business, which has been struggling to regain ad sales growth as tech giants Meta and Amazon and streaming companies YouTube and TikTok steal market share. “Pharmaceutical advertising skews toward national television, and the loss of this key vertical could hurt television,” S&P Global analyst Naveen Sarma wrote in a Dec. 12 report.
Media buying firm GroupM predicted in its 2025 preview that global advertising revenue should grow 7.7 percent in 2025, though linear TV ad revenue will decline next year by 3.4 percent, offset by a 19.3 percent growth in streaming TV revenue.
“It remains unknown what impact the proposed appointment of Robert F. Kennedy to the U.S. head of Health and Human Services will have on U.S. pharmaceutical spending, but he has voiced an opposition to direct-to-consumer advertising in the industry,” GroupM said in its report, adding that “such a ban could impact linear TV media owners if it is enacted.”
On a conference call about the report, Kate Scott-Dawkins, global president of business intelligence at GroupM, said that the possibility of a ban was factored into the firm’s report. “We have a base case, that is what we are projecting, and that is why we talk about the downside risks,” she said.
But despite the very real risk to the TV business, it is far from certain that the administration would be able to actually push any sort of ban over the finish line. The U.S., after all, has a long history of free speech protections, including for commercial speech. “I don’t believe that the courts would entertain this. I think they would find that a blanket ban is probably too much,” says Dan Novack, an attorney who specializes in First Amendment and media law cases. “I think these are the types of what I call First Amendment trial balloons that get floated, and it’s easy, it’s costless to put something out there, and then you see how much it rankles.”
That’s not to say there is no precedent. Speaking with conservative radio host Dana Loesch, Carr recalled the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act that Richard Nixon signed into law in 1970, banning cigarette advertising on TV. “On that big pharma advertising idea, my initial gut is we need a two-step like that, which is whether it’s either HHS maybe makes a decision, or Congress makes a decision, but then the FCC could come behind it and take some action,” Carr said.
Of course, cigarettes are a public health nuisance, whereas pharmaceutical drugs approved by the FDA provide a net benefit. “I don’t know how you get around the fact that every single drug that they’re putting out there on an advertisement is FDA-approved,” Novack says. “So how do you have one branch of the government saying that this has been clinically proved to have efficacy and safety if used correctly and then another branch of the government saying that this is inherently dangerous and has ill effects for society?”
S&P Global’s Sarma noted in his analysis that those ad dollars could flow elsewhere, even if the administration is able to implement some sort of ban. Indeed, GroupM wrote in its report that “it must be noted that DTC messages are just one part of pharma advertising plans” and that a great deal of pharma ad dollars go to B-to-B marketing geared toward prescribers, dollars that do not typically flow through TV networks.
While an ad for Ozempic or Mounjaro on TV may have a strong free speech defense, marketing or sales efforts directed toward doctors may be an easier target. “I don’t think the First Amendment aspects are quite as salient there,” Novack notes. But the issue is also a politically complex one. Kennedy received a standing ovation at a conservative political event, but efforts to limit or curb pharmaceutical advertising have in the past been associated with more left-of-center politicians like Hillary Clinton.
Even the media might not necessarily be uniform in opposition to a ban. On CNBC’s Squawk Box on Dec. 23, co-anchors Andrew Ross Sorkin and Joe Kernen agreed that a ban on pharma ads might be a good idea, despite acknowledging that NBCUniversal is a beneficiary of that spend. “Don’t you think doctors, should, if you need something, prescribe it? I don’t need to be sold something for something that I don’t even have,” Kernen said, sparking agreement from Sorkin.
This story first appeared in the Jan. 9 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.