A Marketing Touchdown for Novartis

Drug maker Novartis paid current and former sports figures, like New York Giants quarterback Eli Manning and Baseball Hall-of-Famer Johnny Bench, from $8,000 and $35,000 per appearance to show up at company-sponsored doctor-dinners, give short speeches, answer questions about their careers and pose with doctors for individual photos. Afterwards, Novartis sales reps would bring the photos with them when they called on the doctors to sell their products. Sometimes the sports figures would sign memorabilia that the doctors brought with them to the dinner. Novartis spent a total of $3.6 million on the sports figure drug marketing program between 2006 and 2009. "I hope someone at the company got a fat bonus, because this is one of the most clever schemes I've seen to provide gifts to doctors," said Paul Thacker an investigator for the Project on Government Oversight, who studies the financial relationships between doctors and drug companies. "If you shove a bag of cash in a doctor's pocket, he might feel like a common streetwalker, but if you give him a picture of his childhood idol, then he might feel like everyone is just being pals," he said.