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).

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.

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.

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.

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