Not that they'll stop running them

US News & World Report has an article about the ineffective use of direct-to-consumer advertising on television:

Drug companies that advertise directly to consumers may not be getting their money's worth, a new study contends.
The research, published Tuesday in the online British Medical Journal, found that despite the billions that are being spent on direct-to-consumer drug marketing campaigns, the advertising is having a modest effect at best on sales.
The only two countries that allow pharmaceutical companies to advertise directly to patients are the United States and New Zealand.
As of 2005, the pharmaceutical industry was spending about $5 billion each year on direct-to-consumer campaigns. The industry based this big spending on evidence that consumer campaigns increase prescriptions.
"People tend to think that if direct-to-consumer advertising wasn't effective, pharma wouldn't be doing it," principal investigator Stephen Soumerai, a professor at Harvard Medical School, said in a university news release. "But, as it turns out, decisions to market directly to consumers is based on scant data."

Rico says he worked in big pharma companies for more than a decade, but he's still tired of seeing their incessant flapdoodle on television...