Site About Cialis Pills.

Eli Lilly & Co. has changed its TV strategy in a move that will likely make life more difficult—again—for its competitors in the erectile dysfunction category.

At the beginning of this month, Lilly began airing spots touting its “Promise program” in a single new TV spot. The program urges men to download a voucher for three Cialis tabs from the cialis.com web site. Men who take it to their doctors and get a prescription will get the drug for free. At that point, patients are offered a voucher for three more free tabs or—if they didn’t like it—Lilly is offering to buy them three free tabs of the competing ED drug of their choice. Cialis is marketed by Lilly ICOS, a joint venture.

The “promise” offer was already running on the Web site prior to the new TV commercials.

“We’re so confident of the benefits of Cialis that what we’ve seen over the last 12 months or so is that 92% will refill for Cialis,” said Matt Beebe, U.S. brand team leader at Lilly in Indianapolis. “If you want to go through with Viagra or Levitra, we’ll pay for it,” Beebe said.

Although bold offers to buy disappointed consumers equal amounts of a rival’s product are old news in other categories, it is a relatively unused tactic in Big Pharma—drug companies just don’t buy their competing brands’ products.

“This has never been done in the history of the pharmaceutical industry, as far as we can tell,” Beebe said.

Hyperbole aside, the new spot—which features a male on-screen speaker describing the offer in the foreground as a re-purposed version of an older spot rolls in the background—will function as a stumbling block for category leader Pfizer. It is no secret that, after the FDA slapped Pfizer’s wrists a few months ago for making overly frivolous Viagra ads, the New York giant is currently trying to develop new work for Viagra.

Levitra was also asked by the FDA to change its ads (Levitra is a joint venture between Schering-Plough, GlaxoSmithKline and Bayer).

At the same time, Pfizer signed onto the drug industry’s new DTC code of conduct last week, which restricts the times during which ED drugs will air on TV so that fewer children will see the ads. The code also means the likely extinction of ED spots on the Super Bowl.

On top of that, Pfizer has seen the dominance of Viagra erode slowly but significantly as Cialis gains ground. A Pfizer rep declined to comment on Wednesday.

Among newly written prescriptions, Cialis has a 25% share, Beebe claimed Tuesday. Among total share, Cialis gets a 23-24% range, he said. Third-running Levitra has about 14% of new scrips and 12% total, Beebe said. Viagra has everything else. “We’ve had steady growth in 2005 but not quite as steep [as 2004],” Beebe said.

At first glance, those numbers don’t appear overly threatening to Viagra. But the blue diamonds were first to market, had a five-year head start on the two later entries, and the brand enjoys the advantage (like Kleenex and Xerox) of being the popular generic name for male sexual dysfunction pills. So any erosion of that dominance is regarded as a huge victory at Lilly, which entered the category third.

Currently, the ED market functions like this: Viagra tends to be the first choice for doctors writing new prescriptions, as it is the oldest, most-familiar brand to physicians. Men who don’t like Viagra, or who become interested in Cialis’s 36-hour efficacy period, are then likely to be referred next to Cialis. Levitra mops up the rest.

Cialis’s point of differentiation (summed up best by the French who call it “le weekender”) has formed a pretty good market on its own. But Beebe said that Lilly actually wants to replace Viagra as No. 1. Beebe declined to outline Lilly’s timetable for that, but he said, “We’re right on track.”

Lilly’s strategy is also a challenge to Pfizer’s renewed interest in customer relationship management. The Lilly “promise” offer allows it to track the efficacy of its Web offering.

Coincidentally, earlier this year, Pfizer retained Epsilon, a 700-employee database-marketing agency with offices in Wakefield, Mass., Dallas, St. Louis and Washington. Epsilon was hired to do consumer-relations analysis for Pfizer across a range of Pfizer brands, according to Taleen Ghazarian, Epsilon’s vp-customer relationship management/strategy and planning.

Trivia note: In the new Cialis ad, the footage in the background features the famous shot of a couple in matching bathtubs on a mountaintop looking down over the sea.

Where did this nonsensical scene come from?

“I didn’t sit here in Indianapolis and say ‘Put two bathtubs up there!’” Beebe said. The imagery emerged on its own in development and testing as Lilly looked for images that represented the concept of “relaxing.” “I’d love to tell you a story about how it was strategic,” Beebe said, but it wasn’t a deliberate decision. The imagery simply “took on a life of its own,” he said.

Recent DTC ad spend numbers in E.D.:

* Viagra: $110 million
* Cialis: $176 million
* Levitra: $90 million.

More and more people are buying Cialis online.  In 2003 worldwide Cialis
sales were $203.3 million.  According to Eli Lilly, in 2007 worldwide Cialis
sales jumped to $1.216 billion, a 560% increase since it was launched in
the United States!

Cialis’ popularity is catching up to Viagra (which sold $1.764 billion in 2007).
According to published reports, Cialis outsells Viagra in France.

Since so many people are buying Cialis, it is a tempting pill for
unscrupulous online merchants to bootleg or make counterfeit copies
with the eye on making a quick dollar.

Doctors welcome results with woman who had three years to live

Dave Mark
A YORKSHIRE mother with a serious heart condition is being kept alive by large amounts of a Viagra-like drug in a pioneering medical trial.
Catherine Lee, of Cottingham, near Hull, is making medical history after being chosen as one of only four women in the world to take Cialis, which is commonly used to treat erection problems in men.
Doctors are so encouraged by the results, they have effectively torn up their previous prognosis, which warned she could be dead inside three years from the rare condition primary pulmonary hypertension, or PPH.
Now Mrs Lee, 32, is looking forward to many happy years with her two-year-old daughter Poppy.
She takes enough of the impotence drug to fuel 10 men on a daily basis.
She said: “Before I started taking the Cialis I was mainly sedentary.
“Even simple tasks such as loading the washing machine were impossible, and contemplating going for any sort of walk – even across the room – was out of the question.
“Rather than being scared when I was diagnosed, I was actually relieved.
“I was pleased to know what was wrong with me, and I just thought ‘It’s the 21st century, there must be something that can be done’, but I didn’t think Viagra would be the drug to help me.”
Mrs Lee, who used to be a switchboard operator before the one-in-a-million disease struck her down, was first diagnosed with the progressive heart and lung condition about a year ago.
Symptoms began five years ago when she started getting heart palpitations and would often feel dizzy.
Doctors initially diagnosed anxiety and she was put on Prozac for three years.
It was not until she gave birth to her daughter prematurely, at 27 weeks, that her condition worsened.
Simple day-to-day tasks began causing her to lose breath and everything become a struggle. Looking after her daughter was exhausting and she would often black out from the intensity of the palpitations.
Mrs Lee, who is married to 33-year-old joiner Matthew, was eventually sent to a neurologist. He referred her to a cardiologist and her condition, which results in the progressive narrowing of the blood vessels of the lungs, was finally diagnosed.
She was then referred to Professor Alyn Morice, from Castle Hill Hospital in Cottingham who is a world expert and is conducting research to see if the drug can prolong the lives of people with PPH.
Cialis works for Mrs Lee because it is a vasodilator drug, which means that it helps to dilate the blood vessels in the lungs.
Prof Morice, who is a professor of respiratory medicine, said: “I am the only person in the world prescribing this drug for PPH and so far, over the last 18 months or so, we have had tremendous results. PPH was a condition that was almost 100 per cent fatal 20 years ago and now I have lost only one patient in the last five years.
“The drug works in the same way as Viagra. The only difference is that Cialis has a much longer-lasting effect. It works by relaxing the blood vessels, which enables blood to flow through the penis and create an erection. But in Catherine’s case, it helps relax arteries in her lungs, allowing blood to be pumped through.”
The only set-back is that Mrs Lee is developing a tolerance to the medication and she has to keep increasing her doses.