Nine out of 10 major pharmaceutical companies spent more on sales marketing than researching new drugs.
This chart, by León Markovitz at Dadaviz with data from the BBC, captures the spending differences:
John Oliver's segment on his Sunday show, Last Week Tonight, resurfaced these numbers. As Oliver pointed out, a lot of the marketing these companies do is specifically targeted toward physicians. In 2012, pharmaceutical companies spent more than $24 billion marketing to doctors.
"Drug companies are a bit like high-school boyfriends," Oliver said. "They're much more concerned with getting inside you than being effective once they're in there."
These spending numbers are at odds with a common claim by pharmaceutical companies that they need to patent drugs for extraordinary amounts of time to justify the massive amounts of money spent on research. Not only do many top drugmakers appear to spend more on advertising, but their profit margins, the BBC noted, are often larger than their research spending.