Should Marketing Agencies Be Held Accountable for the Opioid Crisis?

The opioid crisis was fueled by doctors overprescribing the medication, but a recent court case has taken aim at the communicators who specifically worked to encourage that behavior. This case is against Publicis Health and spans from 2010 to 2019, during which time the team at Publicis built marketing campaigns for their client Purdue Pharmaceutical to encourage docs to write more prescriptions. The suit includes some damning emails, such as one where a Publicis PR exec writes: “Even if we can’t find the data, we can craft the message and tell the brand team what we WANT to say and see if their Medical Services group can come up with anything to support it?”

The dirty little secret of many marketing teams is that such conversations happen with regularity. But it’s not because the people working on these campaigns are evil or just want to cash a client’s check. When good people are fed cherry-picked data, they can justify the work they do to themselves. It doesn’t feel like they are doing anything wrong, until much later when the truth comes to light.

I suspect this case will be closely watched by the entire marketing industry, and may even inspire more discipline from agency people themselves.