A new report from Ashfield uses a survey of 275 HCPs made up of 80% specialists and 20% PCPs. These HCPs were pulled from the US, UK and Western Europe with the purpose of learning congress plans for 2024.

It looks like for any given specialty, the same in-person congresses are on deck for 2024. Virtual, however, is reducing.

Obviously, the primary reason to attend congresses is to "Learn and keep up to date with new developments and the latest thinking" -- 58% indicated that.

The exhibit hall is no different. HCPs are attracted to data (and fun activities, but that's under-reported). The good thing for pharma marketers is that it's product and trial data they are looking for.

When asked what they would do after a congress, many HCPs said they were looking for follow-up from exhibitors, specifically in emails.

And when asked what they do with information gathered at a congress, peers and patients are top of mind. When asked who they would discuss findings with, they were peers first but patients were a strong second.

There is a lot more information in this report. Any marketers looking at their 2024 event plans should definitely grab a copy. In fact, this report gets the final "Must Download" award of 2023.

Klick Health (hey, I know that company!) announced a bounty for good AI ideas last week. The prizes are only for employees though, sorry, and the company has an innovative way to ensure the ideas are relevant to the market:

The judges benefit too:

With the speed of AI innovation the more brains a firm can get on the problem the better. This program looks like it will accelerate Klick's already strong AI performance. See the Endpoints article for everything happening.

While we're talking about Klick, don't miss our 2023 Holiday video!

If you're following the explosive growth of GenAI you're already familiar with the concept of "hallucinations." Google scientists working in it's DeepMind division have found a way to limit these errors in the field of mathematics, where they are unwelcome to say the least.

The article contains math beyond my (don't -Ed.) limited understanding but the results are impressive. Here is a demonstration of FunSearch (the Google system) beating heuristics for a bin packing problem (note the bin on the right):

If you're mathematically-inclined then definitely take a look at the full article. If not then know that researchers at Google are taking the answer accuracy problem in GenAI very seriously and are working on it.

Industries in general are not ready for the phase-out of third-party cookies ... but it's coming in 2024. Pharma is "third-best" on this list but still at 79% usage of the end-of-life tracking mechanism.

In a recent PharmaLive article, Klick's Mirelle Paris Vice President, Group Director, Social Media Strategy (hey, I know her -Ed.) talked about creator and influencer marketing.

Paris's main points were:

See the full article for Paris's and other's takes on social media in pharma.

A new study from AMN Healthcare, apparently the ninth annual, is based on an email survey of C-suite executives in healthcare systems. Based on the language used we assume it is US-only but it's not immediately apparent.

The report highlights the disconnect between doctors, nurses, and senior administration. 

We may be reading too much into this, but based on the above we can't stop looking at the cover art on the report. It's pretty illustrative.

When asked what roles were growing in importance, it's good to see clinical at the top of the list. Patient experience is second. Innovation and AI are way down however, perhaps indicating that health systems are again going to be laggards with the new AI solutions. 

While AI may bot be growing in importance, technology in general is seen as critical. 

When your Chrome password manager tells you that 136 of your passwords are compromised and that 389 are reused you should take note of this story.

The US and Russia are, by far, the most breached countries according to data from Surfshark.

Regardless of where you are, don't take security for granted, and listen to your password manager.

Google has launched MedLM, a successor to its Med-PaLM products. The toolset is available for select partners only but the blog post reads as if it might not be difficult to get into the club.

Four examples of the technology are given in the announcement:

As foundational tools like this improve creating business value through customized solutions becomes easier and more cost-effective. Just don't make a tool that's easily incorporated into the foundational system or you may find yourself with no market and a giant competitor overnight.

OpenAI has silently nerfed their custom GPT offering by eliminating its ability to open URLs. This is a blow to our brand new Klick Wire GPT we were going to release based on the past 100+ issues. The link on this story goes to that GPT but it may not be as compelling as we hoped as all it will have is a list of URLs. 

However, as we all know, when ChatGPT doesn't know the answer to something it has the amazing ability to make something up that sounds plausible. We tested this by asking what the top trends were from the past year. With the latest restrictions it should have been limited to just the words in the URLs but instead it made up a bunch of accurate-sounding trends that were not correlated to actual Wire stories (though they may be trends in the industry in general).

Consider this your cautionary tale for the end of 2023 about trusting GenAI information that you can't verify (don't speak to the audience, but good advice -Ed.).

A pharma marketer seeing the headline of this article would likely feel attacked by Bloomberg Law: "TikTokers Put Consumers at Risk as Drug Ads Go Unchecked by FDA."

Bloomberg is missing a couple of important details as they try desperately to imply that pharma ads are breaking the rules without consequence. Here are just three of the weaknesses in their arguments (our answers in italics):

Bloomberg Law either doesn't know the FDA social media guidances from 2014 to present or is willfully ignoring the facts to produce clickbait. 

Is misinformation on TikTok and other social media a scourge on our societies? Yes!

Are pharma ads contributing to this by flouting the FDA rules? No!

Bloomberg Law should retract this article, get their facts straight, and reissue it with an apology to the industry.

It looks like TikTok will become the first non-game app to hit $10 billion in app store revenue.

Pew Research is a top US-based social research group that provides insights into the country's population. They rounded up their top findings for 2023 and here are three that matter to pharma marketers.

The zeitgeist around AI is evolving every day but when Pew Research asked Americans in August how they felt, concerned sums it up.

AI systems will need to account for this bias when communicating value to their audiences.

Healthcare marketers can no longer depend on the nuclear family with the mother as the health gatekeeper for all of their audiences. 25% of the population isn't getting married and is looking for health information on their own.

Technically this is from a separate story, but it shows teen usage of social platforms. YouTube is loved by many demographics, and Snapchat is more resilient than we thought.

We look forward to more Pew Research in 2024.