The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and General Pharmaceutical Council (GPhC) have today (April 11) issued a joint enforcement notice flagging their concerns “about the advertising of prescription-only medicines (POMs) used for weight management, including on social media”.
“POMs cannot be advertised to the public” – “therefore, you must not promote products such as Ozempic, Wegovy or Mounjaro” the notice stressed.
The regulators warned against illicit advertising on “all media” within their remit, including both paid-for ads on social media like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok and non-paid-for “organic” content on a pharmacy’s own social media channels.
Read more: New weight loss regs: Almost 50 concerns already raised with GPhC
They added that pharmacies also cannot sponsor searches on search engines such as Google, use influencer marketing or affiliate ads.
“Keep in mind that you can break the rules by indirectly advertising POMs,” the notice said.
Pharmacies can still come under fire by “for example…advertising a POM without identifying it by name,” it added.
“Enforcement action”
“Remove all named POMs from your ads [and] ensure that your ads do not indirectly promote a POM,” the regulators said.
The stern warning threatened wayward companies with GPhC “enforcement action”.
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“This could be against the pharmacy, the pharmacy owner, the superintendent pharmacist, or all three – they could also investigate the fitness to practise of all…involved,” it said.
“No-one operating in this industry can say they have not been warned,” it added.
Investigations “underway”
The ASA has launched 12 investigations into whether online ads are promoting weight-loss POMs “which are underway”, the regulator said.
It added that the investigations, which cover “common approaches” seen in ads, “will provide further clarity for advertisers and businesses over what is acceptable”.
Read more: Wegovy: Regulators removing ‘around 100’ social media POM ads every day
“Formal rulings will be published once those investigations are complete [and] following that, the enforcement notice will be updated,” it said.
“We do not rule out launching further investigations,” it added.
Advertising crackdown?
The ASA revealed that during “a wide sweep of online ads” earlier this year, it “found around 1,800 unique paid-for weight-loss ads from December and January” all of which it found to be “potentially advertising a POM”.
In addition to the around-450 ads that named POMS “in clear breach of [its] rules”, “there were also many examples of content which is under current ASA investigation”, it added.
It said that in December and January, the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) contacted 20 of the advertisers it found, three quarters of whom had removed reference to a specific POM by March.
Read more: Revealed: Online pharmacies use ‘TikTok stars’ to shift discount weight loss jabs
“Whilst we welcome this positive sign of improvement, which relates to ad featuring named POMs only, no ads for weight-loss POMs should be appearing online or elsewhere,” the regulator said.
It comes after the ASA revealed that it was removing “around 100 posts” advertising POMs on social media “a day” in September.
At the time it revealed that it was “proactively finding and removing ads for POMs, including for weight loss products, using [its] artificial intelligence (AI) based active ad monitoring system”.
Read more: Repeat offender online pharmacy warned over weight loss POM ads
And in February, the MHRA chided online pharmacy Habitual Healthcare Ltd for using “content creators” to promote the weight loss drugs.
It came after a C+D investigation revealed that TikTok influencers were offering “25% off” discount codes for followers to “order Mounjaro” from Habitual.
Read more: GPhC: Photo verification for weight loss drugs ‘not appropriate’
Meanwhile in February, the GPhC announced new rules stating that online pharmacies “cannot” prescribe based on online questionnaires alone and must “independently verify” patients’ weight and height before prescribing weight loss drugs.
A month on, C+D revealed that the regulator had already received almost 50 concerns relating to weight management.
