this isn't a "credibility revolution" paper, it doesn't show causality, it doesn't use randomization anywhere, and it is very much a post hoc ergo proctor hoc sort of thing

some evidence of the contrary: DTC pharmaceutical ads about Zoloft, a depression medication, cause better health outcomes

https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/695475

not merely correlation but causation. the approach used here was part of a family of approaches that won the Nobel in 2012

another good one: advertising caused increases in treatment and adherence to medicine

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37275770/

there is also a great paper that scary lawyer ads about statins CAUSE lower adherence to statins, so negative advertising causes negative outcomes. unsurprising.

i'm not saying that these two papers generalize to the whole of digital advertising. it is as difficult to generalize about global digital advertising at it is to generalize about the US defense budget - they are comparable in size (about $800b/y both) and complexity of missions. it does feel good though. i'm glad this comment will get downvoted by people who are not interested in actually discussing the merits of the paper versus their vibes.

instead you could look at it as a victory for the FDA, it has done a great job at regulating drugs (at least since 1965 when the SSA created medicare and the regulations started to matter) such that advertising them is mostly a good thing. You can extrapolate from there to say, well we should regulate what you can advertise instead of delegating it out to upvotes and downvotes on Facebook, which is really how bad and good ads are controlled.

Pharma reps (advertising) consume physician time --> doctors have less time per patient --> patients don't get properly evaluated --> DTC ads "help" by telling patients what their doctor didn't have time to ---> study shows DTC ads improve outcomes --> this is cited as evidence advertising is good