Sunday, December 23, 2012

The Best Choice of Portable Accommodation

We have all types of portable accommodation, Portable Cabins, Anti Vandal Site Accommodation, Modular Buildings And Storage Containers are high qualities. You can visit to our official site to get it at affordable and competitive prices.

Advantages of Portable Buildings

portable buildings are basically buildings that are manufactured in factories and the parts are shipped to the building site where they are assembled. portable buildings are not always portable once they're constructed, the only reason they're named this is because they're shipped to you.

Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Get ultimate online marketing solutions from Ingenious Web Solutions 24x7

In the online market, only having a company's website cannot help to generate revenue, as in order to generate maximum revenue, a lot of web traffic is needed on the website. And, in order to get the best from internet market, you must take the online marketing solutions such as SEM and SEO services from Ingenious Web Solutions 24x7.

Who's reading Inside Market Research?

Last month, we passed the sixth "candy or iron" anniversary of Inside market research without much fanfare. While the blog was launched in May 2005, it wasn't until April 2006 that the Google Analytics monitoring widget was installed. I'm a big fan of Google Analytics and other web traffic tools (like StatCounter). These tools allow a publisher to learn more -- often times much more -- about who is visiting the website and how they're using it.

Monday, November 26, 2012

Freelance writing: business digital marketing agency (pay: $15 per 400-word article | work from home | Massachusetts)

A leading small business digital marketing agency is looking for our next small business writer to join our growing team. The ideal candidate has a love for the written word and experience writing for newspapers, blogs or other media outlets. You can write a complete sentence and know (not now) the correct use of there or their. Your background consists of a degree or degree-in-progress in journalism, English or communications. What We Do: Our company develops blogs for small businesses. We construct strategic content campaigns that entertain, persuade and convert website visitors to leads. We work with our clients to help them develop new business through the power of the written word. Each month a typical client will receive 10 blog posts geared around a number of topics. Content is optimized by our SEO team, published and calls to action are placed to drive visitors to take action. In addition blogs are automatically submitted to social media sites and emailed to an existing client base. Month over month we are growing our clients' websites with relevant content that helps them increase revenue.

Mobile Marketing - The Elephant In The Room For Marketers

That's just one of I'm sure many definitions of the phrase "elephant in the room." Frankly I don't really care which definition you subscribe to. The fact of the matter is that mobile marketing - despite all it's continued hype and promise has been severely under utilized by marketers of all shapes and sizes.

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Consumer Behaviour in Brand Communities



Brand communities are widely recognised as one of the most effective ways of engaging target audiences as seen with aspirational brands like Harley Davidson and even commodity ones like the Duck brand duct tape. Instead of just focusing on the technology with presence across many social media platforms, these brands demonstrated that creating a brand community involves truly understanding the

Monday, October 29, 2012

Hard Work Hasn’t Changed

Over 4 years ago I started a blog (www.talkapex.com). A lot of people can say that they have done that as well. What a lot of people can’t say is that they’ve had over a quarter of a million page views since its adoption.

Though this is no Facebook success story I do consider my blog a huge personal success. For one person, who was an unknown in his respective industry at the time, going from

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

To advertise or not to advertise on 2GB’s morning show with Alan Jones?

Are brands political players that can and should use their voice to
contribute to ‘a better society’? Does it matter where they advertise,
even if what they advertise has nothing to do with the boarder message
of the medium?




 Campaign ...
shock jock Alan Jones / Pic: Ray Strange The Daily
Telegraph

For two weeks 2GB management suspended all advertising on its morning show following

Monday, October 22, 2012

‘Gangnam Style’ Marketing




South Korea’s rapper Psy, the performer of viral sensation ‘Gangnam Style’ song and dance, has just reached Australia. The insanely catchy video is approaching half a billion views worldwide and has become the most ‘liked’ video on the YouTube history. If you are as intrigued as I was to find out why, below are some of the marketing strategies behind it.

 Engage through co-creation

The South

Sunday, October 21, 2012

The Plight of the Newspaper (and Preparing for the Future)

A couple of years ago, I was speaking at a conference and someone from the audience asked me what I believed to be the biggest marketing challenge of the next five years. I answered with the death of the newspaper, which surprised many, who thought I would point to declining subscription bases or overall drops in arts participation.  We had just experienced the death of four major newspapers – the Seattle Post Intelligencer, the Rocky Mountain News, the Tucson Citizen and the Christian Science Monitor – at a time when most non-profit arts organizations had important symbiotic relationships with their hometown newspapers.  

So let me pause to ask – if your newspaper were to go out of business today, how would that impact your organization?  

And here’s why I am asking. According to the Newspaper Association of America (NAA):

·        Total print advertising has dropped from $47.4 billion in 2005 to $20.6 billion in 2011 – the lowest print advertising has been since 1983 (not factoring for inflation).
·        In 2011, the total daily circulation of all the newspapers in the United States was 44.4 million, the lowest on record since 1940.
·        Citing a 2010 Scarborough report for adults 18+, 47% of the U.S. population 35 years and older read an average issue of a daily newspaper in comparison to only 26% of the population under 35.

According to The Pew Research Center, since 2003, the Internet has been on par or more popular than newspapers as a news source, and currently just 21% of young adults report newspapers as their primary source of news. As the Internet has become increasingly popular as a news source, newspapers have invested tremendous amounts of resources in building their online presence, but here’s the problem – for every $1 gained in online advertising, newspapers lost $10 in print advertising in 2011. And the reason? In print advertising, newspapers are dominate, but online, they compete in a very crowded marketplace, where Google and Facebook combined will share just under 30% of total online display advertising revenue in 2012.  

Using the statistics provided online by the NAA, in 2005 1,452 daily newspapers shared $47.4 billion in print advertising for an average of $32.6 million in print advertising per daily paper. Six years later, 1,382 daily newspapers shared $20.6 billion in print advertising for an average of $14.9 million in print advertising per daily paper.  

In six years, the average daily newspaper lost more than 50% of its print advertising revenue, placing in jeopardy the entire business model of most newspapers and leading to drastic changes. Newspapers around the nation are slashing their newsrooms, laying off veteran reporters and in the best case scenarios, replacing them with freelance reporters with little experience. In worst cases, they aren’t replaced at all.  Just recently the theater world received news that veteran Philadelphia Inquirer arts writer and critic Howard Shapiro, after 42 years with the paper, was reassigned to cover South New Jersey in what seemed like an attempt to make him miserable enough to leave. And it looks like it worked.

With fewer reporters and less experience, not only has coverage decreased, but quality has diminished as well.  Many of us shook our heads when a small online magazine named Pasadena Nowhired two writers in India to cover local events but just recently we’ve learned of Journatic,a company that outsources journalism to the Philippines for US newspapers.  Others have transitioned from primary reporting to aggregating content from other news sources and then providing commentary on the aggregated material. When I was at the Smithsonian, one such company drew inaccurate conclusions by providing editorial on aggregated stories. When I called to tell them of the inaccuracies and offer to set up interviews so they could report on the story directly, the freelance writer told me they didn’t pay him enough to do any original reporting. Unfortunately for us, other outlets picked up his story.  I understand cutting as much fat as possible from budgets during tough economic times, but at some point, there isn’t any fat left, and what remains is only muscle. Cutting further sacrifices your ability to deliver an excellent product, which is why I advise arts organizations to avoid cutting investments in the artistic product itself if at all possible when making budget adjustments.  By sacrificing quality, I’m afraid newspapers could be pouring gas on an already blazing fire.  

Every great arts city has a great newspaper. Every great theater town, a well respected critic. If your city is affected by cuts to arts coverage, let your voice be heard. Activate your bases. Support outlets with extensive arts coverage with your advertising dollars. That said, I advise non-profit arts organizations to prepare themselves for the possibility that their local newspaper could go out of business.  Cultivate relationships with bloggers, social media mavens and other influentials in your community. Develop online communities where your audiences can speak to one another. Produce and distribute original content yourself. Diversify your advertising strategies. Budget resources to grow your database. Hopefully these efforts will be for naught, but if the day comes that your local newspaper declares bankruptcy, you’ll be better prepared.

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

sassystutorials

sassystutorials

Experience vs. Memory

Decisions are made based on MEMORIES of experiences and not the actual experiences according to behavioural economics Nobel Prize winner, Kahneman. This has important implications for the field of marketing, which is largely focused on creating the perfect customer experience.

A great example from the video below tells the story of a man who had been listening to a symphony, and it was

Monday, October 15, 2012

The 4Ps of marketing are dead. Today, it’s all about the 4Es.

Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, YouTube, Skype, Amazon, Cloud, mobile, tablets and many other platforms and technologies have not only changed the way people can communicate and interact with each other, but have also challenged Marketers to think differently about how they go to market and engage with prospects and customers.

It used to be relatively simple to focus on the 4Ps. Create a great

Thursday, October 11, 2012

In search of innovation in the entertainment industry


 


The internationally renowned Cirque du Soleil is now back in Sydney
with a new big top production called OVO, an immersion into the colorful
and energetic world of insects. With incredible stunts you did not even
think were possible by the human body and mind-blowing production that
takes you away from reality, it is hard not to become a fan once you
have experienced one of their

Monday, October 8, 2012

Are we all hard-wired to make bad decisions?

The Marketing Research for Decision Makers unit of the Master of Marketing program at the University of Sydney Business School has adopted a new approach this semester. Previously, the unit focused on teaching how to assess and evaluate marketing information so as to improve our decision making ability. This semester the learning objectives have been expanded to explicate psychological biases

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Market Strategy Wars – Apple vs Samsung

There is only a very select range of products that can successfully implement a marketing strategy that revolves around ‘low supply and high demand’, with with the goal of increasing the desirability of a product and ultimately increasing sales.

One company in particular has proven particularly adept at this strategy. Apple has successfully done this time and time again for the release of a

Monday, October 1, 2012

Facebook and Companies - Striking a balance between the Social and the Media aspects





A largely controversial decision made recently by the Advertising Standards Board (ASB) has deemed companies accountable for user-generated comments on their Facebook pages. Posts from ‘fans’ are now considered to be advertisement, which means these should adhere to the industry’s Code of Ethics and the Australian Consumer Law. Because companies have a ‘reasonable degree of control’ over

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Will Apple’s iOS 6 Passbook App be the New Digital Wallet?

I enjoy traveling light. If I could have things my way, I would leave the house with just my wallet, phone and keys. Now Apple has created an app to bring their product users one step closer to the freedom of leaving the house with only their iPhone (or iPad) and keys… I could not be more thrilled.



Apple’s new iOS 6 Passbook App is an Apple users’ dream in terms of de-cluttering their lives.

Monday, September 24, 2012

Building a successful personal brand: Barack Obama

Say the name “Barack Obama” to almost anyone, anywhere in the world and immediately, there is a picture of an imposing orator standing before the US flag. Obama has a personal brand that he and his staff carefully manage, trying to ensure that his identify is clearly differentiated from his opponents and is associated with the values for which he stands. Political figures like Obama know the

Sunday, September 23, 2012

Good Intentions Can Interfere with Success


To say that these are challenging times for non-profit arts organizations is probably an understatement. We're still struggling with the after effects of the global economic crisis. Previously viable business models are imploding. The elimination or severe reduction in government funding has resulted in a very quick need to replace public support with private funds. And who knows what is around the corner.

But, artists and arts administrators are a resilient bunch. One of our strengths is our never say die attitude. We confront each challenge head on in a "show must go on" fashion. We are inherently hard working. To make it in this field requires years of rebounding from rejection. When the going gets tough, we redouble our efforts.

After years of struggle, the fight in us undoubtedly begins to wane, as we contemplate the permanency of the current climate. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing. In moments of crisis, we ring the alarm and all hands arrive on deck to face the upcoming challenge, but this response is unsustainable for years on end. After downsizing, one human being can only do the work of three for so long before collapse. Our initial reaction of working stronger, harder and faster must give way to working smarter.

In the past few months, I've seen a couple of instances where hard working marketing departments, desperate to keep their heads above water, were working well beyond capacity, but were resistant to taking measures to improve efficiency for fear that if they took any time away from their current tasks, they would risk imminent financial peril. All while knowing that the current situation was unsustainable, they continued each day just like the prior, hoping that the financial climate would improve before they hit the point of exhaustion.

But for those already at the point of exhaustion, I'd like to offer up a few quick suggestions to improve efficiency in hopes of lightening the load:

Maximize Success to Minimize Risk. Often times marketing departments get into trouble when they have one business line or product performing very well, and a couple of others underperforming. Our natural instinct is to abandon the overperforming product in order to focus our attention on improving the underperforming others. Please don't do this. If you are understaffed and under-resourced (and who isn't), where and how you use your limited resources is incredibly important. If you reappropriate resources to aid underperforming products, at best you will most likely see minimal results, whereas if you applied your resources to the overperforming products, your returns could be exponentially better. High tech firms have built incredibly successful business models off of failure. They expect a very high percent of their products in development to fail, banking on the revenues from the one or two that will take off. And when a product does hit, the entire efforts of the company are focused on maximizing results. A good rule of thumb - spend 75% of your efforts on improving the results on overperforming products, and 25% on improving underperformance. All too often, we do the opposite, thinking that helping struggling products is what is best for the organization.

Analysis & Measurement, Before Action. Just a few weeks ago, I was in a meeting with a senior marketing executive in charge of a sizable national advertising campaign. He had a hunch that he was under-promoting a certain section of his business in the New York market, and had set aside a significant amount of money to test a new print campaign in New York dailies. When I understood what he was trying to accomplish, I asked him how he would measure success. He responded by saying that it was very hard to measure the exact outcomes of his new campaign, and besides, with his reduced staff and resources, he was doing his best just to get the campaign done and out the door. This is a common occurrence. When resources are cut, one of the first things to go is analysis, tracking, reporting and measurement. But when looking to work smarter, the one thing you need is what you have just cut. Before launching any major marketing campaign, make sure you have the tools in place to track results, analyze sales and measure success. Over the years, I have had more than one staff member get frustrated with me when I asked them to set aside the time they would normally spend promoting a production in order to create more sophisticated reporting tools. But without clear and reliable data, your campaigns will never improve, and if you do see an uptick, you won't be able to replicate what worked.

Don't Save Your Way to Trouble. Several months ago, I visited a client that was deep into their subscription campaign. The campaign was going well, but the company was financially struggling for other reasons. The marketing director, being incredibly conscientious, thought that ever dollar saved, was a dollar earned for the company, and started to decrease the amount of money he spent on his subscription campaign in order to come significantly under his budgeted expenses. He wanted to save, and give back the money in order to help the company. His intentions were admirable, but his plan would have placed the company in an even worse financial position. His cost of sales reports were showing that for every dollar he spent on the subscription campaign, he was selling five dollars worth of subscriptions. This wasn't the time to under-invest, in fact, this was the perfect opportunity to spend more if cash flow allowed. If your cost of sale is below $1, for every dollar you don't spend, you place your company at additional risk. You only want to consider cutting your marketing expenses if your campaigns are resulting in negative net revenue, and even then, it is risky if you are cutting acquisitions.

Sometimes working smarter means doing the opposite of what's intuitive. Have the courage to challenge systems, the ability to measure results and the good fortune to discover efficiencies.

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Advertise your flaws!

Another intensive weekend unit has begun and it looks like we are in for a treat with Kate Charlton as our Integrated Marketing Communications lecturer. Her enthusiasm for the subject is almost contagious!

In class this weekend we discussed the process of creating media campaigns. Kate’s experience working for large advertising firms such as Saatchi Design and RedBox Digital (to name a couple)

Wednesday, September 12, 2012

Billabong – Where Marketing Really Does Matter


When Launa Inman took over as CEO of Billabong in May 2012,
she knew she had a huge challenge ahead of her to turn around the company. Launa
recently announced a $275.6 million loss at Billabong, which means she has a
daunting task of turning around the fortunes of the company. However, her previous experience at Target
and Officeworks, along with her passion for marketing is likely to stand her

Monday, September 10, 2012

Book Review: Outlook: Australian Entertainment and Media 2012-2016



In an evening hosted by the Masters of Marketing Discipline at the University of Sydney, Megan Brownlow, Executive Director and Editor at PwC presented an interesting recently released report: Outlook: Australian Entertainment and Media 2012-2016 at the PwC head office in Sydney. Megan was one of three panelists to present at The Changing Media Marketplace night which attracted over 70

Sunday, September 9, 2012

The Law of the Few (and the Future of the Many)

About a year ago, I began designing a graduate certificate program for American University focused on technology issues in arts management, and this past summer, I taught my first course focused on the intersection of technology and marketing. To open the course, I asked students to read Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point, which if you haven't read it, describes how social epidemics evolve, providing a great platform to discuss word-of-mouth marketing and how technology can be used to ignite a movement.

Early in the book, Gladwell discusses "The Law of the Few," which boiled down is a riff on the 80/20 principle - 20% of the people are responsible for 80% of the work. As marketers, we latch onto this principle, as it correctly argues that if we can identify and cultivate relationships with a select group of influential people called "connectors," then our returns can be maximized. One connector can be worth his weight in gold, and easily as valuable as ten non-connectors.

As I was giving my lecture, it struck me that most non-profit arts organizations have designed their business models on the "Law of the Few" principle, not just in their approaches to marketing, but in how we program, fundraise and communicate. A previous supervisor of mine used to say that a grassroots movement begins with the grasstops. But if we are all focused on the few, are we ignoring the many?

I ask this question, because as society shifted away from a one way, web 1.0 world towards an interactive, web 2.0 one, the ways in which we do business and view the world radically changed. Previously companies had much more control of their brands as they could carefully craft messaging, but today, brands have a life of their own in the virtual universe. We used to seek out experts when we needed information, now we rely upon the collective of Wikipedia or Google (when was the last time you consulted an encyclopedia?). At one time knowledge was proprietary, but presently, a growing number of us look to the commons (and companies trying to maintain business models built upon charging for knowledge are struggling). We used to rely on authority figures to inform us, but now in moments of crisis, millions flock to Twitter, where we learned an hour before President Obama confirmed it that Osama Bin Laden had been killed.

I believe that many of us used to defer to the knowledge and experience of a small few, placing trust in their expertise to guide the rest of us. But when a handful of very powerful and experienced bankers plunged the world into a global economic crisis resulting in the loss of 40% of the world's wealth, the masses started to wonder if the few could be trusted to lead. In the web 1.0 world, most were passive recipients, willing to receive content as delivered. Today, the least among us now demands a seat at the table, and via web 2.0 technologies, an even playing field has begun to emerge.

So how will this affect the non-profit arts? Here are just a couple of examples:

The Citizen Critic (and the Future of Arts Journalism)
A couple of weeks ago, Barry Hessenius, former director of the California Arts Council, issued his annual list of the most influential people in the arts. On the list were a handful of notable bloggers, including Ian David Moss, Diane Ragsdale, Clay LordDoug McLennan and Thomas Cott, however not a single traditional journalist was mentioned as there wasn't a category for journalists. Was this an oversight, or a trend? Nielsen recently reported that 92% of consumers trusted word-of-mouth from friends and family, while only 58% trusted editorial content such as newspaper articles. Harvard University recently published a study that contended that average reader reviews on Amazon.com were just as trustworthy as book reviews from professional critics. Even Maura Judkis, a writer for the Washington Post, in her article for the NEA's blog ArtWorks states "readers of my generation, the Millennials, are more likely to want to see a movie or play because their friends like it than because a critic does." Word of mouth has always been powerful, but advances in technology have allowed connectors to broadcast their thoughts to followers instantaneously, and others, the opportunity to feed into social networking, user review sites like Yelp.com. So where does that leave us? Ask yourself - if you were visiting New York, and thousands of patrons had described a Broadway play positively in online reviews, would it have more of an impact on you than negative reviews by professional critics? [could this explain the mysterious success of Spiderman?]

Crowdfunding and Microfinancing
In her article "It is Broke, We Should Probably Fix It," Alexis Clements argues that many non-profit organizations chase a few, large foundations, whose money would have been public via taxation but is now controlled privately. She goes on to say that via grants from private foundations, wealthy individuals can "funnel money to organizations that will uphold their personal beliefs." That is a pretty charged statement, but I do wonder how often arts organizations manipulate their missions in order to receive a large grant or donation from a private funding source? How many arts organizations are alive today primarily due to the generosity of one or two major donors, and for those, do the donors in question wield too much influence? In 2008, President Obama demonstrated the power of the collective when he raised unprecedented amounts of money from small donations. As of August, the crowd funding website Kickstarter has raised $275 million in funding for projects, and has grown exponentially since its founding in 2009. And we aren't just talking about tiny amounts of funding either. The top 10 projects funded on Kickstarter all raised more than $1 million. And Microfinance website Kiva has leveraged $346 million in funds from 823,474 lenders to launch projects aimed at combating poverty in 63 different countries.

Crowdsourcing Curation and Programming
When I was at the Smithsonian, an internal debate was occurring about the "Art of Video Games" exhibit at the American Art Museum. The Smithsonian invited the public to help curate which video games would be featured in the exhibit, and in doing so, more than 3.7 million votes were cast by 119,000 people in 175 countries. Pretty impressive. However, questions began to arise about the role of the curator. For the most part, non-profit arts organizations are lead by artists with extensive training and sometimes decades of experience. As the resident experts in their fields, they are regularly called upon to make value judgements on what art to present, and how to present it. In the past, the public has remained a passive receiver of said art, but a growing number of patrons today would like to play a more active role. Technology has changed what used to be a one way conversation into a dialogue, and in turn, many community stakeholders now expect to be able to exercise their voice. I believe this phenomenon prompted Arts Journal editor Doug McLennan to host the "Lead or Follow" debate early this year. If you didn't catch it, here is a good recap.

Understandably, non-profit arts organizations have built models based on the "Law of the Few," and I am not advocating for the abandonment of those models. I am however suggesting that there is wisdom, money and resources to be found in the collective as well. This isn't an either/or proposition between the few and the many; it's a both/and situation. There is a significant role to play for the few and the many. But to tap into the collective, I believe we must become vital and essential to our communities again. I fear that for many non-profit arts organizations, if they were to disappear, we'd barely hear a whimper, when there should be protests in the streets.

Monday, September 3, 2012

The War on Privacy!



With the explosion of social media activity, the rise of on line retailing, and real time bidding to reach the ever-increasing online audience, the spotlight is well and truly focussed on privacy. More than ever, this is a hot topic in the daily media and in the legislators’ agenda. This is a fertile field for shock headlines and fierce political debate, with prominent commercial players such

Wednesday, August 29, 2012

What’s happening in Innovative Marketing Strategy class?

We are nearing the completion of the unit on Innovative Marketing Strategies. The unit coordinator, Professor Donnel Briley (Chair of the Marketing Discipline), has imparted his truly global interpretation of marketing strategies. Having lived and studied in North America, Europe and Australia, Donnel’s vast cultural experiences are exemplified through the cases studies he presents.

My favorite

Is Pharma Republican or Democrat? Follow the Money & Find Out

According to data reported by the Center for Responsive Politics, the pharmaceutical manufacturing sector has contributed nearly $12 million during the 2012 election cycle to federal candidates, parties, and outside groups (PACs). Fifty-eight percent (58%) of that went to Republicans. 61% of the funds came from PACs and 33% came from individuals. Around this time during the 2008 election cycle, the drug industry donated slightly more than $16 million, of which 51% went to Republicans.

NOTE: "The numbers on this page are based on contributions from PACs, soft money donors, and individuals giving $200 or more. (Only those groups giving $5,000 or more are listed here. Soft money applies only to cycles 1992-2002.) In many cases, the organizations themselves did not donate; rather the money came from the organization's PAC, its individual members or employees or owners, and those individuals' immediate families. Organization totals include subsidiaries and affiliates."

Here are the Top 20 pharma contributors in this cycle (click on image for an enlarged view):


To make it easier to see which pharma company employees/PACs are "Republican" and which are "Democrat," I prepared this chart from the table above (click on image for an enlarged view).


Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Who Owns Your Social Media?

"Twitter just announced a complex, confusing, and developer-alienating system that restricts their once-open, always cherished but now apparently taken for granted API," complained Michael Spitz, SVP and Managing Director at Zemoga. "The new rules change the playing field for third party developers, establish caps on number of users, and shift guidelines to requirements across four categories of businesses that Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land humorously characterized in Star Trek terms." Spitz characterized this as #TWITTERFAIL and he thinks the new rules "ruin the spirit of social media" and are "bad for healthcare" (see here).

Spitz's "rant" raises a couple of interesting issues that I will discuss with him this afternoon in a live Pharma Marketing Talk podcast (listen here or use the playback widget below).


Listen to internet radio with Pharmaguy on Blog Talk Radio

First, the premise that changes to Twitter's API can be "bad" for healthcare is based upon the notion that Twitter has been or could be "good" for healthcare. I'm not sure what Spitz includes in his "healthcare" category. Since he works for an agency with pharmaceutical company clients, I am sure he includes the drug industry as part of what he means by healthcare. I'd like to focus at least part of today's discussion on how Twitter can be good (or bad) for the pharma industry's goals of selling more drugs.

I have written several articles about how pharma can use Twitter to help support patients (see "Supporting Patients via Twitter and Beyond" and "Use of Twitter for Patient Support") and criticized pharma for using Twitter (and blogs) to promote their products (ie, "market"; see "Novo Nordisk's Branded (Levemir) Tweet is Sleazy Twitter Spam!" and "AstraZeneca's Timely CRESTOR Branded Blog Post: Did It Violate Its Own Policy?"). My view is that Twitter has been good for pharma mainly in the public relations realm, which may or may not translate into increased drug sales.

Most tweets from pharmaceutical companies are about what they are doing in this therapeutic area or that therapeutic area (e.g., support for COPD, atrial fibrillation, diabetes innovation, etc.). Pharma tweets a lot about clinical study results (mostly the positive results) and news from medical conferences where they are exhibiting ("come to our booth"). They also tweet about investor presentations and other news about their company that Wall Street finds of interest.

None of those tweets do healthcare any good -- e.g., improve outcomes of drug treatment. They dn, however, provide benefit to pharma companies by getting them more attention by the media, which dutifully followup with articles based on these pharma "Tweet Releases."

Another issue related to the lament about the more and more restrictive Twitter API is the question "Who Owns your Social media?", which was brought to my attention by Phil Baumann of "Health is Social." Baumann is also a member of the Advisory Board at Mayo Clinic Center for Social Media, so he has a healthcare perspective beyond pharma.

I invited Baumann to be a guest on this afternoon's podcast, but he was not available. He did, however, send me some thoughts, one of which is:

"Too much emphasis has been placed on social media in general - at the expense of focusing on the only thing Healthcare or Pharma can own on the web: their own domains. Social Media should not be seen as the center of a web presence - ever. It's a tempting thought, but the reality is the other way around. Healthcare and Pharma organizations should learn [from] these API changes that they don't own anything on these social media sites. Many experts have laughed off blogging and traditional websites, but I still maintain that if you can't build your own solid presence on your own domain, you won't do well on social media in the long-run."

You should also read "The Over-promising of Healthcare Social Media" written by Baumann.

Here are a few other thoughts from Baumann on the Twitter API issue:
  • The first thing that Healthcare and Pharma need to realize is that social software is pliant and tenuous. With social software, the tiniest tweaks can produce huge ramifications throughout a digital ecosystem.
  • If the industries are going to be involved in social media, they need people on staff who can keep up with the technical changes that happen - in fact, they need to anticipate them and have plans to turn to when those changes take place. 
  • The average person probably only cares about Twitter clients - I suspect that Twitter will eventually whittle clients down to a very few. It already owns TweetDeck, but hasn't developed this asset much. 
  • The larger Healthcare/Pharma Enterprise impacts of the API changes are likely to be more in the area of data-mining, monitoring, metrics, etc. For example, Twitter might rate-limit calls for certain kinds of data - let's say a Pharma company or its vendor monitors for mentions of a drug and or keywords related to possible Adverse Events. Depending on the API changes over time, there may be limits to the amount of data that can be captured in a timely manner. 
  • None of what Twitter is doing with its API is at all unexpected - at least it shouldn't be. Ultimately, this is Twitter's product - albeit one that increasingly is becoming a virtual public utility.

Monday, August 27, 2012

McDonald's Sponsorship Case Study

Another Olympic Games has come and gone. And while Australian swimming may not have done as well as usual and are looking to review their performance, one organization that performed well in this period was McDonald's in Australia.

Obviously, we're not privy to the detailed financial results of McDonald's or their ROI on their significant investment as a major sponsor of the Olympics in London.

Thursday, August 23, 2012

The Blog Ate My Job!

I just received this comment via my "Contact Us" form:
"John, while the information you post online is informative and I am glad someone is bring (sic) things to public attention it is also can be estremely (sic) opnionated (sic) and unjust. Please realize that the actions you take in your writing can and has cost people their jobs. I work for an ad agency. I try my best to ensure my contributions are not to just sell drugs but to educate consumers. Pharma is about money but its also about making people better. When ads come out they are a result of multiple hands touching a piece from agency, to brand teams to mlr. When you decide to callout an ad you are impacting all those people. So please think about that when writing your blog. And look at what guidelines fda has set and where they still need to go. Rather then being a tatle (sic) tale be a solution maker."
I'm guessing this has something to do with the post I made earlier today about "Retro Relpax" ads (here).

The person who wrote chose to remain anonymous, so I will I will just refer to him/her as "Anon."

Anon claims that my writing "can and has cost people their jobs" and I assume he/she means his/her job because the subject line of the message was "lost my job."

First of all, it seems pretty unlikely that someone would be fired within hours after an "opnionated" and "unjust" blog post was made. Who can be so cruel to fire someone on the spot like that, especially someone who is just one of the "multiple hands" responsible for creating and approving ads?

I wonder if Anon also complained to Deborah Dick-Rath over at MM&M. She wrote her critical piece about the Replax print ad way before I did. She really ripped into the creative team: "And while the Relpax creative team put in a valiant effort, in the end, they were defeated by too many typefaces, too much copy, too many messages and a somewhat unfortunate choice in art direction."

I suppose she gets a free pass because she started out with praise, faint though it was.

Maybe this doesn't have anything to do with Relpax at all. I just can't recall, however, any recent critical posts I have made that may have gotten Anon fired.


Anyway, I assume Anon will be able to collect a couple of years of unemployment insurance, unless Congress refuses to extend that benefit. When I was laid off many years ago during the dotcom bust, I only received 26 weeks of unemployment insurance - damn George Bush and those Republicans!

Retro Relpax Web Site Features Woman Mopping the Floor. Inspirational? Not!

The "DDR on DTC" column in the August 2012 issue of MM&M magazine ripped into a print ad that showed a woman migraine sufferer being able to mop the floor after taking the Pfizer anti-migraine headache drug Replax.

"DTC ads used to be over-aspirational," said the author, Deborah Dick-Rath, "we saw relieved arthritis sufferers running marathons or playing Frisbee. With Relpax, the insight seems to be that sufferers just aspire to do such everyday activities as mopping the floor...We hope that Relpax is a success for Pfizer and that migraine sufferers find relief. We also hope they get (strictly aspirationally) excused from swabbing the deck" (see "DDR on DTC: Relpax").

Here's the ad that DDR reviewed:


This is probably the result of Pfizer's conservative view of what modern women aspire to at 11:00 Am in the morning (note the clock).

I couldn't find this ad in a recent issue of People Magazine, which is the publication in which DDR found the above ad. Instead I found this much more politically correct, although still not too inspirational, ad:


In this version, two hours after taking Replax, the migraine sufferer is able to go out and do whatever her business is -- probably commuting to work given that the clock is showing 8;00 AM (or is it PM?).

Perhaps Pfizer read DDR's column and revised the print ad campaign, at least as far as image is concerned. Surprisingly, however, the Replax.com Web site still portrays the woman mopping the floor:


It appears that it takes longer to swap out a Web image that a print ad image.

Pfizer is asking Replax.com visitors to tell their "stories" by submitting photos or video. "Tell us about your experience with migraines by submitting a story," says the promo page (here). "Your story can include a photo or video. If chosen, your submission could be featured on RELPAX.com."

I don't imagine a single submitted photo or video will feature a woman mopping the floor. Do you?

You can tell that pharma marketers are getting desperate when they have to beg consumers to submit stories to compensate for the fact that their image of the modern consumer dates back to the 1950's.

Wednesday, August 22, 2012

When’s the best time to return to University?

Is there really a best time to return to university? After a few years into your career you might begin feeling less sense of achievement. Perhaps the challenges you originally thrived on are gone. The determined amongst us are contemplating our next move. That could involve a change of careers, or perhaps even climbing a rung or two higher on the career ladder.

Many people who feel this way

Lipitor U.S. Sales Tank 70% in 2012 vs 2011!

According to Drugs.com, Lipitor U.S. sales in Q2 of 2012 were only 30% of what they were in Q2 2011 ($579 million vs. $1,949 million, respectively (see chart below; Source: http://www.drugs.com/stats/lipitor).


Meanwhile, sales of Crestor (a competitor anti-cholesterol drug) increased only somewhat during the same period (see chart below; Source: http://www.drugs.com/stats/crestor).


I conclude that most of the loss of Lipitor sales was due to direct competition from generic versions of Lipitor now currently available, which is further proof that Pfizer's "innovative" attempts to stem the generic Lipitor tide has failed (see also "Pfizer Throws In the Lipitor Marketing Towel").

BI to Launch Beta Version of its Syrum FaceBook Game on September 13, 2012

John Pugh, Director of Digital for Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH (BI), announced that BI will release a BETA version of the FaceBook game SYRUM at a PSFK conference in London on September 13, 2012.

I have been anxiously awaiting the launch of this game after I first heard about it 10 months ago at a pharma industry conference (see "Pharma & Fun, Not Oxymoronic? Here Comes Gamification!" and "BI's Facebook Game Syrum to be Launched 'When It's Ready'"). At least BI is speedier than the FDA in delivering on long-awaited promises!

I have not heard of the PSFK conferences until now. According to its website, PSFK "conferences offer a diverse program of speakers with backgrounds in art, technology, design, marketing, and media, creating an environment where disparate ideas can come together in new ways to fuel work that changes the world for the better. We set an agenda that allows participants to meet and discuss with one another, together sharing and building upon the ideas brought forth from the stage."

I am a bit surprised, however, that Pugh/BI did not choose to launch SYRUM at a pharma industry conference such as DigiPharm Europe, which will take place less than a fortnight later, also in London. Over the past year, Pugh has been making the rounds at such industry conferences promoting SYRUM. I'm not one to speculate (ha ha), but is Pugh getting ready to move on to greener pastures in another, more "innovative" industry? To be fair, it's important for pharma company employees to make connections with like-minded people in other industries to get new ideas that may be applied to pharma.

In any case, here's some of what Pugh revealed to PSFK (read the full interview here):
“We are taking a Silicon Valley approach,” said Pugh, “where we know we have got a really good game that’s stable but we’ll launch a beta version. We really want to make it so that we get lots of feedback from the people who are playing.”

“We’re offering rewards and prizes for people to give feedback so that we can really create the duration of the game, and develop it, and have more of a crowdsourced collaborative effort to develop the future stages of it, so the game will grow and evolve, as more people play it. This is a very unique offering from a highly regulated industry.”
"Crowdsourcing" seems to be all the rage now in the pharmaceutical industry. See, for example, "Crowd Sourced Creative Commons Drug Information" (free subscription required).

Meanwhile, here's a first glimpse of actual SYRUM game screens - previously, we've only been able to see the opening screen with the message "coming soon."


Tuesday, August 21, 2012

Is the macro-environment really a PEST?

When marketing students learn to consider the macro-environment in the development of their marketing plans and strategies, they are provided with the acronym PEST as a simple way of recalling political, economic, social and technology factors.

But this view stems from the traditional business outlook that environmental change was essentially a nuisance and that stability was preferable.

But

Monday, August 20, 2012

Certifying Prescription Grade Smartphone Medical Apps

An article in yesterday's NYT focused on what I call "Prescription Grade Smartphone Medical Apps." The article said the idea of such apps "excites some people in the health care industry, who see them as a starting point for even more sophisticated applications that might otherwise never be built" (read the article here).

"But unlike a 99-cent game, apps dealing directly with medical care cannot be introduced to the public with bugs that will be fixed later. The industry is still grappling with how to ensure quality and safety." I have written about this issue before, although for apps created by the pharma industry and not "Prescription Grade" apps. See, for example:
Lee H. Perlman, managing director of Happtique, a subsidiary of the business arm of the Greater New York Hospital Association, says "he believes that doctors will soon prescribe both clinically tested apps and more modest apps, like those that track physical activity or remind patients to take their pills. The company has established its own set of guidelines to determine the quality of health care-related apps, and helps doctors integrate them into their medical practice."

Happtique, in July 2012, released a draft of standards that it will be using to certify medical, health, and fitness apps under Happtique’s App Certification Program. The purpose of the program is to help users identify apps that meet high operability, privacy, and security standards and are based on reliable content. You can find the Happtique certification draft standards attached to this post.

The Happtique Certification Standards include these categories:
  • App Operability Standards
  • App Privacy Standards
  • App Security Standards
  • App Content Standards
My interest at the moment is in the App Content (C1) and Security (S6) Standards because these are most relevant to my concerns about the credibility of some recent pharma apps.

Content Standard C1 states: "The app is based on one or more credible information sources such as an accepted protocol, published guidelines, evidence-based practice, peer-reviewed journal, etc.

Performance Requirements for Standard C1
  • C1.01 If the app is based on content from a recognized source (e.g., guidelines from a public or private entity), documentation (e.g., link to journal article, medical textbook citation) about the information source is provided.
  • C1.02 If the app is based on content other than from a recognized source, documentation about how the content was formulated is provided, including information regarding its relevancy and reliability
I have seen pharma apps that do not comply with C1.01 (e.g., read "Be Aware of What's Behind a Pharma Mobile App: Disclaimers Only Tell Part of the Story").

But more troubling than the lack of documentation regarding content, is the accuracy of the apps software. Happtique Certification Security Standards address some of my concerns.

Security Standard S6 states: "The app owner has a mechanism to notify end users about apps that are banned or recalled by the app owner or any regulatory entity (e.g., FDA, FTC, FCC)."

Performance Requirements for Standard S6
  • S6.01 In the event that an app is banned or recalled, a mechanism or process is in place to notify all users about the ban or recall and render the app inoperable.
  • S6.02 In the event that the app constitutes a medical device (e.g., 510(k)) or is regulated by the FDA in any other capacity, the app owner has a policy and a mechanism in place to comply with any and all applicable rules and regulations for purposes of handling all aspects of a product notification or recall, including all corrections and removals.
Unfortunately, I do not find a standard for addressing the problem of "buggy" medical app software, which I discussed in a previous post to Pharma Marketing Blog (see "The Problem with Unregulated "Calculator" Apps for Physicians"). Specifically, shouldn't there be some certification standard that specifies how the app software was tested for accuracy? I think so.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Public's Confidence in Science Remains Steady Over 38 Years, But Not So for Medicine

Michael Ritchie, Postdoctoral Fellow at Pfizer, recently posted to the Think Science Blog that he was NOT surprised that the American public "lost significant trust in the institutions of education, the executive branch of the federal government, organized religion, congress, banks/financial institutions and the press" over the period from 1973 through 2010. He cited results of a study conducted by the University of Chicago, National Opinion Research Center.

"In contrast," Richie said, "the American public’s trust in the scientific community remained virtually unchanged over this period" (see "Perspectives from a Postdoc: The Public’s Trust of Science").

Ritchie may have been using "Science community" as a surrogate for the pharmaceutical industry, which wasn't a specific category included in the study. What Ritchie didn't mention, however, is that public confidence (which is what the study actually measured, not "trust") decreased more or less "significantly" with regard to "Medicine" and "Major companies," two other -- perhaps more relevant -- surrogates for the pharmaceutical industry.

I plotted the data for Medicine, Science, Organized Religion, Major Companies, and the Press in the following chart. You can find the complete set of data here.


What do you think is the better indicator in this study for the trend in public confidence in the pharmaceutical industry? Science? Medicine? or "Major Companies?"

BTW, if you look at the public's confidence in Congress and the Executive branch of government, you will see that it bounces up and down according to the political atmosphere and whether or not we are war. It's hard to say if there was a significant decrease over the years.

Friday, August 17, 2012

The $400 Million bapi Drug Failure: Are Patient Advocates the Scapegoat?

"Few people in pharma or the investment community were surprised at bapineuzumab's failure, as most odds makers put its chances for success at approximately 25 percent," said Daniel R. Hoffman, Ph.D., in a post to the Philadelphia Inquirer Check Up blog (see "Choosing between baldfaced political lies and Pharma's half-truths").

Bapineuzumab is an experimental drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease (see "Pfizer and Janssen Halt Alzheimer Drug Development: Why Not Try Gamification?").

"But why do pharmas advance poor prospects to expensive, Phase 3 testing and throw half a billion dollars of shareholder money out the window in the process?"

The former head of Pfizer's R&D, John LaMattina, offered the following as a possible answer:

“Perhaps the answer lies the fact that there were groups of stakeholders who desperately wanted bapi to advance. AD [Alzheimer's Disease] patient advocacy groups would top the list. These people, who are doing their utmost to help find any treatment for this disease, would have been outraged had bapi been dropped at phase 2. Furthermore, their concerns would have been supported by leading experts in the field. Back in 2008, many of the leading experts in AD strongly believed in the science behind bapi and they would have been quite negative about ending the bapi program. Finally, dropping bapi would have caused public relations damage. Imagine the headlines: ‘Big Rich Pharma Companies Dump Promising Drug For AD. Patients, Scientists Crushed.’"

LaMattina says that he "had no part in the bapi discussions," but he suspects that Wyeth/J&J "knew that bapi had less than a 50-50 chance to succeed" and he agrees that it was a $400 million dollar gamble.

Obviously, LaMattina is just speculating on the role that Alzheimer patient advocates may have had on the decision to proceed with the phase 3 trials of bapi. But I seriously doubt that the "deciders" were worried about bad publicity if they refused to take the gamble. Drug companies, after all, pay corporate communications professionals big bucks to favorably "spin" bad news.

"Patient advocacy groups can exert some effect," said Hoffman, "but basically they stand several rungs down the influence ladder from the greed, ego and similar motives of senior executives. The area where patient advocacy groups scream the loudest concerns the exorbitant pricing of drugs for their respective therapeutic areas. Yet pharmas seldom let these plaintive cries influence their inexorable price increases. Certainly the patient groups didn't deter pharma's industry-wide strategy of pricing as many new products as possible at the vastly higher level of biologicals and, for some, even into the orphan drug stratosphere."

True that!

Dr. Hoffman complains of "half-truths and misdirecting statements that pharma's cheerleaders now communicate regularly" when referring to LaMattina's analysis. LaMattina, said Hoffman, "didn't place even a smidgeon of responsibility at the feet of fiduciary officers and senior R&D people who receive bonuses based upon the number of compounds they advance to Phase 3. Nor did he state that C-suite people uniformly believe they look better to shareholders by throwing a Hail Mary pass against a stacked secondary, rather than limiting their losses by punting the ball."

Football: Another reference to games! See my post cited above.

Obviously, drug development is a risky business - high risk vs. high reward. These days, however, the rewards are less "stratospheric" than they used to be.

Instead of looking for scapegoats -- whether they be patient advocates or C-suite football quarterback wanabees -- we should talk about the broken pharma business model and how to change it to be less risky. A guest Forbes post by Christopher Bowe, the US Healthcare Analyst at Informa Scrip, addresses this issue in his analyis of the bapi failure:

"To save itself - and save more patients - the industry should take two vital steps: develop a more flexible approach to drug approval and patent exclusivity and change its business model to encourage more scientific collaboration among companies," said Bowe. "The first change is relatively closer to our grasp; the second requires a sea change in the industry" (see "Big Pharma Failures Light the Way to Change").

On that note, I invite you to read this Pharma Marketing News article: "Crowd Sourced Creative Commons Drug Information" (subscription required) and/or this Pharma Marketing Blog post: "OMG, LCOI! Open Source Pharma: Creative Commons Coming To Pharma."

An open crowd-sourced approach to pharmaceutical research is not a hairbrained idea. An article in today's Wall Street Journal describes how the U.S. military is using crowdsourcing to design a new amphibious vehicle for the Marines (see "Tapping Crowds for Military Design"; subscription required). "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, is preparing to assess whether crowdsourcing, a freewheeling collaborative method sometimes used to develop software, can be an effective means of designing military equipment."

IMHO, if the military can handle open source data sharing without revealing secrets, so can the pharmaceutical industry.

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Lilly Overtakes Pfizer as Biggest DTC Advertising Spender!

According to cegedim Strategic Data, Lilly overtook Pfizer in total direct-to-consumer (DTC) spending in April, 2012. The chart below shows the top 10 DTC spenders between July 2011 and April 2012.


Pfizer spent nearly $900 million in DTC advertising in 2011. $220 million of that was for Lipitor. I predicted that Lipitor would hold the "Key to DTC Ad Spending in 2012" (see here) and this chart proves it.

Lilly's Cymbalta and Cialis were the #2 and #3 highest in DTC ad spending in 2011. It looks like they will be #1 and #2 in 2012.

Fake vs. Real Pharma Twitter Followers

Piotr Wrzosinski (@pwrzosin), IPM Digital Marketing at Roche and a member of my Pharma Twitter Pioneer Group (see here), recently posted this to Twitter today:

"0% of my followers are fake. How many fake followers do you have..? http://sttsp.pl/ahaf @StatusPeople #FollowerSpam"

Goodie! Another social media metric I can use to compare pharma Twitter accounts. I quickly followed the link to StatusPeople Web site where I was invited to "Find out how many fake followers your friends have."

Before looking at my "friends" data, however, I looked at my own and found out that 73% of my nearly 12,000 Twitter followers were neither "fake" ("spam" accounts that "tend to have few or no followers and few or no tweets, but [which] tend to follow a lot of other accounts.") nor "inactive." This was quite better than most pharma Twitter accounts as can be seen in the following chart (click for an enlarged view):


I do not have 0% fakes like Piotr; six percent (6%) of my followers may be fakes. This is the lowest percentage among the 16 pharma Twitter accounts I measured. @Abbottnews had the highest percent of "fake" followers: 18%. Fouteen percent (14%) of followers of Roche, Novartis, Pfizer GSK(U.S.) are "fakes" or suspected spam accounts.

Why is it important to know how many fake and inactive followers a Twitter account has?
"There are two reasons," says StatusPeople. "First it's important for you to be sure when you communicate on Twitter that you are communicating with real and active followers. Because the more active your follower base the more likely they are to share your content.
The second reason is there are a growing number of Fakers out there. People who buy followers in a vain attempt to build legitimacy. "'Look at me I have 20,000 followers, I must know my...' They are essentially trying to game the system and it's important for you to be able to spot them, and steer clear of them. Becatse ultimately if you're willing to lie about how many friends you have you are not a very trustworthy individual."
Well, Pfizer has over 31,000 followers. Way back in 2010, I asked "How Did Pfizer Get So Many Twitter Followers?" (see here). I suggested that Pfizer sent out a memo to all their more than 100,000 employees worldwide telling them to follow @pfizer_news. I was kidding, of course. But I suspected something was up because Pfizer_news somehow attracted about 3-4,000 NEW Twitter followers in just a few days (see chart below)!


Did Pfizer "attempt to build legitimacy" by "gaming the system?"

One caveat: StatusPeople contends that its tool provides "very accurate insight into how many inactive and fake" followers a Twitter account has, but ONLY if there are fewer than 10,000 followers. "If you're very 'popular' the tool will still provide good insight but may better reflect your current follower activity rather than your whole follower base."

Only 6 out of my sample of 16 pharma Twitter accounts have fewer than 10,000 followers (Phrma, SanofiUS, Diabetes_Sanofi, BoehringerUS, BMSnews, and Abbottnews).

If you want to learn how many fake followers you have, go here.

How Johnson & Johnson Uses Twitter for Patient Support: A-plus for Effort, D-minus for Sharing

Every day, I get a synopsis of tweets and newsfeeds from selected pharma companies that I am following (see "News Direct from the Pharma Industry"). Lately, I've been noticing a number of tweets from Johnson and Johnson (@JNJComm) that are direct responses to complaints from consumers about its products. In some cases, complainants have had an extended conversation with JNJ.

However, you won't find these conversations if you look at the @JNJComm Twitter timeline here but you can find them in the PMN Forum archives here. More on this later. Right now I'd like to focus on one of these conversations.

@hiltmon (Hilton Lipschitz) complained about an Acuvue contact lens problem in a tweet posted to @JNJComm. @hiltmon said: "@JNJComm, could you please fwd this to Acuvue team: See the hole in the lens (top right), happened twice now. Thanks. pic.twitter.com/50ML8IrT" The link leads to this photo:


Whether or not this could be classified as a legitimate "adverse event," is a matter for debate, but JNJ responded as if it were: "thanks for alerting use. Please call us at 800-843-2020. It's important that we fully understand what occurred. Thanks! ^DE" Here's a screen shot of the full exchange:


I am not sure what "^DE" means. It appears that JNJComm uses it only at the end of responses to these sorts of complaints. I assume it allows some kind of tracking or followup. [Actually, it indicates the author - in this case Devon Eyer; see UPDATE at the end of this post.] In any case, the end result was one happy (I assume) customer.

I cannot find a legitimate Acuvue Twitter account, although the brand does have a Facebook page. After a quick scan through the Acuvue FB page, I can find no consumer complaints or conversations like the above. It's all good brand "conversations" over there on the Acuvue FB page :-)

The above Twitter conversation might be considered a "brand conversation," which is what brand marketers would like to see (although they would like positive rather than negative conversations about their products). So, JNJ corporate communications people are having these brand support conversations via Twitter, but the brand people -- who presumably manage the FB page -- do not. That's telling in respect to the question I asked in a previous post: "Who's Your Social Media Daddy?"

This conversation is somewhat hidden from most of the nearly 20,000 @JNJComm followers. As I mentioned above, it does not appear in @JNJComm's Twitter timeline because each tweet begins with "@". That makes it a personal conversation in Twitter. Unless you access @JNJComm's Twitter RSS feed as I do, you won't see these tweets. That's unfortunate, IMHO, because it means that the power of social media (e.g., sharing content with followers) is sidestepped. In this case, other consumers may not learn about important safety and other information about Acuvue lenses. Public health would be better served if everyone could learn from the conversation (e.g., the batch number of the faulty lenses).

Of course, it also means that these conversations may not be picked up by the media -- presumably the main audience for @JNJComm and other pharma corporate Twitter accounts -- or by regulators who may like more information about faulty medical products.

UPDATE: ^DE indicates that the @JNJComm posts were written by Devon Eyer, Director, Corporate Communications, Social Media at Johnson & Johnson (see her LinkedIn profile here).

I have included Devon in my list of contenders for the 3rd Annual Pharmaguy Social Media Award. You can learn more about this award here and/or vote for your favorite here.

Monday, August 13, 2012

New Pharma Business Model: Prizes, Not Patents, for Innovative Drugs

A BMJ articled titled "Pharmaceutical research and development: what do we get for all that money?" was roundly criticized by Rich Meyer of World of DTC Marketing blog and Derek Lowe of In the Pipeline blog. Both have both ripped into the central premise of the BMJ article; specifically critiquing these statements made by the authors: (1) the "widely touted innovation crisis in pharmaceuticals is a myth" and (2) for every dollar pharmaceutical companies spend on "basic research, $19 goes toward promotion and marketing."

Meyer (here) tackles #2 using data from Lilly (ie, see this chart embedded below), whereas Derek tackles #1 (here).



Everyone fools around with the numbers to reach their desired pre-ordained conclusions. I have blogged about this many times. First, I wrote about differing estimates of pharma's expenditures on total marketing, not just direct-to-consumer (DTC) spending, which was used to create the above chart of dollars spent on advertising vs. sales. I've also compared this to how much the industry spends on research (see, for example, "Promotion vs. R&Deja vu all over again!").

My conclusion: The drug industry spends approximately the same on marketing as it does on research. So, can't we all agree to that and just get along?

If you actually read the BMJ article, you might be surprised to learn that the authors' goal seems to be to promote a NEW business model for the pharmaceutical industry:

"We should consider new ways of rewarding [drug industry] innovation directly, such as through the large cash prizes envisioned in US Senate Bill 1137, rather than through the high prices generated by patent protection," said the authors.

I was intrigued to learn that a US Senate Bill has been proposed -- although long tabled -- that actually seriously proposed getting rid of patent protection for new drugs as an incentive for innovation. Here's how the BMJ authors describe what SB 1137 proposes:

"The bill proposes the collection of several billion dollars a year from all federal and non-federal health reimbursement and insurance programmes, and a committee would award prizes in proportion to how well new drugs fulfilled unmet clinical needs and constituted real therapeutic gains. Without patents new drugs are immediately open to generic competition, lowering prices, while at the same time innovators are rewarded quickly to innovate again."

The authors assure us that the approach advocated by SB 1137 "would save countries billions in healthcare costs and produce real gains in people’s health."

Maybe so, but I seriously doubt that prizes awarded by a government committee (ie, "Board of Trustees for the Fund for Medical Innovation Prizes") would be more effective than the profit motive or less prone to corruption than the industry's cozy relationship with the FDA (ie, drug industry "users fees" directly cover the majority of FDA's drug approval expenses).

SB 1137 also calls for 5 percent of the prize rewards fund (ie, 5% of about $80 BILLION or about $4 billion -- the approximate amount pharma spends each year on DTC advertising) to be distributed to those who "provide open access to knowledge, data, materials, and technologies." The bill claims that such "new open source business models... will induce greater access to useful knowledge, data, materials, and technologies."

That's interesting because I recently talked to people at Lilly -- not the same people who created the above chart -- about an "open access" project they are launching for innovative pharma research (see "Crowd Sourced Creative Commons Drug Information").

Friday, August 10, 2012

Who's Your Social Media Daddy? A Panel Discussion

That is one of the questions/topics to be discussed by a panel of experts I will be moderating at the next PharmaForce conference in Princeton, NJ, on October 30, 2012. Actually, the real question to be considered is "Who Owns Your Social Media Initiatives?"

Pharma Marketing News is a Media Partner for this event and is helping promote it through advertising. The panel I volunteered to moderate is titled "Effectively Building Your Social Business" (see here). I am not getting paid to do this, but I hope to learn a lot from the experience, especially from meeting and working with the expert panelists.

Not all the panelists have been chosen as yet. I and the conference organizers are interested in finding pharma panelists who can give their POVs regarding the following discussion bullet points:
  • Tap into social media data to reveal customer behavior
  • Understand the power of influence and influence mapping
  • How to best balance the risk and rewards of social
  • Who owns your social media initiatives
  • Determine the desired outcomes of your social media strategy
  • Align social media activities to your multichannel marketing strategy
I'll be contacting a few qualified people from my contacts, including my list of Pharma Twitter Pioneers (here) and candidates for the 3rd Annual Pharmaguy Social Media Pioneer Award (here). If you are interested in being a panel member or know someone you'd like to recommend, please let me know by filling out the following form.

NOTE: I am looking specifically for pharma people. There is no compensation for participation on panels except for the 45 minutes of fame and notoriety involved (I probably will write up a summary of the panel discussion afterward).

Create your free online surveys with SurveyMonkey, the world's leading questionnaire tool.

Thursday, August 9, 2012

Marketing is getting infinitely complex.

Marketing is getting infinitely complex.

But here is some context to help you deal with that complexity.




Today’s marketer not only has more channel choices than at any other time in history,
but the number of channels is increasing every day. Plus they are often
operating with effectively less budget, to deliver higher, more accountable
performance, while a waterfall of data thunders down

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Is Type 2 Diabetes Drug Marketing Responsible for Misdiagnosis of Type 1 Diabetics?

A Wall Street Journal article documents several cases of people being misdiagnosed by general practitioners as having Type 2 diabetes when they actually have Type 1 diabetes, "a substantially different condition" (see "Wrong Call: The Trouble Diagnosing Diabetes"). According to the article:

"An incorrect diagnosis usually occurs in the offices of primary-care doctors, many of whom haven't received adequate education in medical school about rising rates of Type 1 in adults and how to diagnose it. 'It is not on their radar because they see so much diabetes and it is by far mostly Type 2,' said Irl B. Hirsch, professor of medicine at the University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle."

As I continued reading, I couldn't help but wonder if the current competition among drug companies to sell Type 2 diabetes drugs has something to do with this. Fierce marketing of these drugs - see box below - may be contributing to emphasizing Type 2 diabetes on GP's "radar screens."

The Three Type 2 Diabetes Drug "Amigos"
  1. Januvia - marketed by Merck
  2. Onglyza - marketed by Bristol-Myers Squibb/Astrazeneca
  3. Victoza - marketed by Novo Nordisk
See "Three Companies Compete for Diabetes Market Share"

In each case cited in the article, misdiagnosed patients were taking oral drugs, none of which were mentioned by name, and none of which are effective or approved by the FDA for treating Type 1 diabetes. "For six years, Mr. Jones [a patient] treated what had been diagnosed as Type 2 diabetes. He changed his diet and took three oral medications daily." It's likely that at least one of those drugs was one of the "Three Type 2 Diabetes Drug 'Amigos'" mentioned above.

Of course, many GPs would probably misdiagnose patients as having Type 2 diabetes when they actually have Type 1 diabetes even without being bombarded with marketing for Type 2 treatments. But having multiple pills available to prescribe makes it easier, in my opinion, to avoid taking the patient down the path to a possible Type 1 diagnosis.

The ultimate responsibility for misdiagnosis, however, must rest with the physician and not the pharmaceutical marketer, unless of course, the marketer offers physicians inducements (ie, money or non-monetary rewards) for prescribing products.

On that note, I also read a story in today's WSJ about Pfizer and other drug companies bribing doctors to prescribe their drugs. Pfizer settled with the DOJ -- admitting nothing -- but paid $60.2 Million to "Resolve U.S. Allegations That It Used Illegal Payoffs to Win Business Overseas."

Of course, such things do NOT happen here in the U.S.