It’s not easy for a health care marketer making the leap from broadcast to broadband.  As reported by Jacob Goldstein in the Wall Street Journal’s Health Blog,  Johnson & Johnson received an FDA warning letter which prompted the removal of an online video for Ultram ER from the PainAwareness.org site. What strikes me as interesting is that PainAwareness is a site intended for health care practitioners and goes so far as to offer CME.  Would this have been different had the site required registration?  Hard to say as the guidelines are so antiquated (who uses diskettes for distribution anymore?) Until FDA issues usable, contemporary guidelines for online media, marketers would be well advised to leverage technology like YouTube’s Video Annotations in their online media.  This technology enables pharmaceutical, biotech and medical device marketers to embed hyperlinks to relevant information at key points in the video.  For example: Add background information about the video. Read more »

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) is making excellent use of social media tools in service to public health with a page devoted to the peanut and peanut-containing product recall.  The tools and resources for consumers include: Blogs. eMail Subscriptions. Read more »

To many business people information technology is neither “sexy” nor very interesting. To persuade this type of audience you need to appeal to both mind and heart. In working with time-starved pharmaceutical and medical device marketers, we’ve met with great success using a one-two approach:  Appeal to logic. Read more »

How The 80/20 Rule and Quick Thinking Saved Apollo 13 From Burning Up in the Atmosphere. Apollo 13 was supposed to be NASA’s third manned-lunar-landing mission but things didn’t turn out well.  Two days into the mission the spacecraft was crippled by an explosion in oxygen tank #2. Read more »

It turns out that what you instinctively knew all along is in fact true: “more is less.” Psychologist Barry Schwartz, PhD in “The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less” makes the case: “The presumption is, self-determination is a good thing and choice is essential to self-determination. But there’s a point where all of this choice starts to be not only unproductive, but counterproductive–a source of pain, regret, worry about missed opportunities and unrealistically high expectations.” But a great many options is an inescapable fact of current media culture. Read more »