ZoomRx surveyed 50 US-based oncologists and hem-oncologists to learn about their trust in the manufacturers in their specialty. When differentiating the different firms, innovation was the most important element.

We don't mention companies or their brands directly in the Wire. For that, jump over to the ZoomRx rankings.

CMI and Impiricus used SMS messages to survey 1,000 HCPs: physicians, NPs, PAs, and RNs (n value per FiercePharma). This survey seems to be based on a single question with text analysis used on the resultant responses.

We have to guess at this because the report contains no methodology information but it would explain the low values in some of the charts.

Only 4% of HCPs mentioned AI in their responses. The majority wanted educational materials and help with financial tasks (probably including prior authorizations).

Breaking down the content that makes up "Educational Support" we see that it's heavily skewed towards product data.

There is more data in the source report and a lot of quotes from HCPs. Grab a copy and see if you agree with our theory about the methodology (CMI or Impiricus are welcome to reply and let us know as well -Ed.).

The US segment of the PatientView global patient association data shows pharma and biotech falling slightly from last year. 

Don't worry about the year, this is the 2025 report, PatientView always uses the year the data were collected, not that the report was issued. The losses are disheartening for the US though because overall the numbers were up slightly.

You can compare these numbers to the global averages from PharmaView earlier this month.

A new report from Influencer Marketing Hub is based on interviews from 265 "experts." We put that word in quotes because the document says precious little about its methodology. We think they took written submissions and then performed text analysis on them but it's not clear.

When the researchers asked "What’s Next for Influencer Marketing in 2025?" AI was far and away the biggest topic.

When talking about AI, the interviewed experts really see creators acting like marketers. They can personalize content and even use AI to help create content.

For the marketing clients of influencers, AI can help with identification, selection, and performance tracking according to the experts. This is true, but under no circumstances should marketers trust AI without double-checking its findings. Not in 2025 at least.

The authors make some big claims about this report but it doesn't really deliver. The section on political polarization and the plea for creators not to be held to account for their political posts won't fly with most pharma companies. 

Sensor Tower bought Pathmatics in 2021 and incorporates that platform's data into its reports. This report on Q4 2024 starts with Sensor Tower mobile data and then pivots to digital ad spend.

This number is misleading as the Pathmatics data does not include search or retail ad revenue in its charts. We're not sure why, and search usually outperforms social by absolute numbers so it's a miss here.

That said, when comparing social to online video and display ads it dwarfs them. If YouTube was included in Video rather than Social, the numbers would change to 27.6% and 66.4%, respectively.

22% growth puts TikTok in the lead for that metric, but it is still small compared to the Meta properties. X shrank by 9% according to SensorTower. Emarketer has the platform shrinking 2.8% for the full year (not just Q4) and projects growth for 2025 so that will be interesting to track.

Switching to mobile data, Sensor Tower's specialty, we find that Health & Fitness apps come in at #6 for in-app revenue (but #12 for downloads).

Much of the data in this interactive report is available per country. For global marketers wanting to see differences that can be helpful.

A study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences looked at how poor audio quality can affect others' perception of a speaker. The researchers used real human male and female voices and then introduced audio issues similar to a low quality laptop mic.

This result is for the human male voice and asked if the person seemed hirable.

The result was a significant drop in the respondents' reactions to the lower quality audio. 

Emarketer has a story looking at the four largest parts of the worldwide digital ad economy: search, social, streaming, and retail. We calculated the absolute increases for each channel because growth percentages are highly sensitive to the denominator.

Here, we can see that social got the largest absolute increase in budget while retail had the largest percentage. Meanwhile, it's important to note that search has the largest absolute amount ($54.5 billion).

Hopefully the rather cryptic headline makes sense now.

This report from Parks Associates seems to be a collection of data points from other studies. It contains no methodology which is a miss, but Parks Associates has been around since the 1980's so these numbers are likely well-founded.

The primary difference between traditional TV and social video is the ability to interact with the content so it's not surprising that 8 out of 10 do so. Live video is surprisingly high on the list here.

Data security is the top concern for users of connected TVs. Personally, I've always wondered how the lag time on CTVs is tolerated, but maybe that's just me (no personal opinions -Ed.).

ASCO announced last week that it is releasing an AI interface for its practice guidelines. Think of it as ChatGPT but ONLY using the legitimate guidelines.

The author isn't an oncologist so can't see the implementation, but it's likely similar to the ChatGPT tool we put in front of old Wire issues. The tool is also incorporated into the ASCO Member App.

In probably-not-a-coincidence news, Microsoft has announced it is testing a new AI agent orchestrator for healthcare teams, focusing initially on tumor boards.

Even two weeks after Business Insider found illegal drugs on Spotify the issue persists. We know because we searched for a well-known ADHD product and found this podcast episode:

Researchers published a study of US healthcare cyberattacks in the Journal of the AMA. They show that the number of attacks and patient records affected are reduced from recent highs, they are still large.

The number of attacks reduced in 2024, likely as providers strengthened their computer systems, but are still above 2019 levels.

The data volumes in these attacks continue to increase, however. So, while attacks are down, the number of patient records affected is not.

Pew Research tracked 2.5 million webpage visits to 1.1 million unique URLs from a group of 900 U.S. adults who agreed to share their March 2025 browsing data. 93% of these browsing histories contained AI in some way, shape, or form.

Search summaries driven by AI were particularly common with 58% seeing those.

Most respondents found AI content as a byproduct of other activities, rather than searching for it directly.

This is issue #666 of the Wire and this is story #13... so we have to make it extra evil (please, just don't -Ed.). Last week a filmmaker, PJ Ace, posted an AI-generated ad for Puppramin and it is evilly hilarious. Also, extremely high quality for text-to-video.

We bet you can't just watch it once.

And for anyone craving a more authentic 666 reference, here is Iron Maiden with the title track from their 1982 album The Number of the Beast to end with some classic metal (ok fine, but you owe me -Ed.).