And the winner of the Marketing Overdose Award for rampant promotion goes to...Eli Lilly!

Consumers International (CI) has bestowed this dubious honour on the company as part of the Bad Company Awards 2008. As previously reported on this blog and elsewhere, Eli Lilly has run foul of marketing regulations in the promotion of it's erectile dysfunction (ED) drug Cialis on a number of occasions around the world.

With sales of over $1.1 billion, Cialis is one of Lilly's biggest sellers, and no expense has been spared promoting the drug globally. And in doing so the company has been officially censured by British and Australian authorities no less than three times in the past few years.

Analysis by Consumers Union, a CI member organisation in the USA, found TV adverts for the drug to be misleading. They also conducted a study whose results questioned the efficacy of ED drugs compared with other treatments. In 2007 Lilly spent $152million on public promotion of Cialis in the US alone.

Read the Bad Company Awards factsheet to find out more about the hard work Eli Lilly has been putting in to win this prestigious prize!