The company, whose ad agencies include BBDO Worldwide and DDB Worldwide, has taken significant minority stakes in five health-care-related Internet companies to pave the way for its pharmaceutical clients, all of whom are eager to reach doctors and consumers on the Web without alienating them. Two of the sites are aimed at consumers: Healthology Inc. and Caresoft Inc., which runs the consumer site theDailyApple.com. Two others, eMedicine.com Inc. and continuing-education site WorldMedicalLeaders.com Inc., are aimed at physicians. A fifth Web company, eResearchTechnology Inc., is a clinical-trials site where drug companies can better track tests of new medications. While providing up-to-date medical information to physicians and consumers, Omnicom is also planning to develop a database of the visitors to help the drug companies better target those two groups. "We will be able to give, down to patient and doctor, the kind of audience they want.

We're going to be able to cut this so many different ways. They must go through us," says Tom Harrison, chief executive of Omnicom's diversified-services division, which includes health-care marketing.

Taking stakes in a medium, such as Web sites, is something Omnicom doesn't do in the offline world. But Harrison says that while Omnicom is part-owner of the sites, that fact won't be the driver for pharmaceutical companies to place advertisements or sponsor those sites. "They can and will do multiple channels," he says.

What Harrison is counting on is that the pharmaceutical companies will come to Omnicom for its proprietary database derived from visitors to the sites, which he says will help companies "fine-tune their promotions" aimed at doctors and patients. Having scored huge successes with TV commercials and print ads for drugs like Claritin and Viagra, pharmaceutical makers are delighted to find a new way to reach patients and physicians. In a new study on online health care, the New York research firm Jupiter Communications reports that 90 per cent of drug companies plan to increase their spending on the Internet, with 20 per cent of them saying they would double their spending.

But pharmaceutical companies face myriad issues as they expand their Internet marketing. For one thing, doctors have been slow to embrace the Internet in their practice or use the Web for research. Privacy is another hot-button issue, with many activists concerned about how Internet healthsites will use data collected from consumers.

But while expressing misgivings about drug-company marketing, some physicians are supporting the sites. Robert McNamara, an emergency-medicine professor at Philadelphia's Temple University Hospital, won't even let drug company representatives give pens to his residents. But he is happy to see a textbook he helped edit appear on eMedicine.com, even though the online version of the book is sponsored by drug maker Genentech Inc.

"It would be nice if someone else would pay for it," McNamara says. But he says he believes the important thing is getting the book on the Web. "It's easy to click online and find what you're looking for rather than digging through a stack of textbooks that you may or may not find."

To date, pharmaceutical makers have primarily focused on creating brand-related sites, like Pfizer Inc.'s Viagra.com, and soft-sell sites such as "thinhair.com" which markets Merck & Co.'s Propecia baldness medication.

Of the record $1.9 billion that drug companies spent on advertising in 1999, less than 1 per cent was put toward Web sites, be it sponsorships or banner ads.

France's Aventis Co., maker of allergy medication Allegra, is exploring ways to make a major move on the Internet but has been confused by the mad scramble among start-ups eager to get a piece of the health-care market, says John Leone, senior vice president and chief operating officer for Aventis in the US. ``There are so many vendors, so many avenues of Internet access, be it to the consumer or the doctor. They're all disjointed," Leone says.

Charlene Singer, a health-care analyst at Jupiter, says drug companies would be wise to spend on general health or medical sites rather than on their own drug-specific sites. She says both physicians and patients are more accepting of third-party sites. While consumers don't mind getting basic information from a drug-specific site, she says, they don't "want to give data to a pharmaceutical site" but might voluntarily provide data to a third-party site such as eMedicine.com. Omnicom agrees. "The biggest risk is attempting to communicate with the patient or physician when he or she doesn't want to be communicated with," says Harrison. "You have to get to them when their interest is peaked."

He believes the two consumer sites will break away from the pack by providing original articles written by physicians instead of repackaged material. Additionally, DailyApple.com allows consumers to check their laboratory results on the site through a partnership with Quest Diagnostics.

The Asian Wall Street Journal