Photo: A promotion produced by ad agency Affinity for Mundipharma alludes to their oxycodone product. (Supplied) A manufacturer of highly addictive painkillers has been using data-matching techniques to track people’s Google health searches and target them with ads that increase in intensity until they respond. Pharmaceutical company Mundipharma uses health searches on Google to target ads The ads appear in web browsers and indirectly reference a brand of addictive oxycodone The banner ads get more intense until people click on them Pharmaceutical giant Mundipharma and marketing agency Affinity produced a marketing campaign for the drug oxycodone, which used Google’s ad searches tool to identify patients who were unhappy with their current pain medication. As part of a pilot project in the Coffs Harbour area of New South Wales, they monitored Google searches to specifically identify patients who were looking up terms like "blocked up due to pain meds". After […]