The Harris Poll released some data on Americans' opinions on AI for three industries: travel, personal finance, and healthcare. The survey was conducted June 22-28 and included 2,072 adults.

Americans are still undecided on whether AI will be a net positive or net negative for society with 46% saying "it's complicated." When asked about health, however, they are comfortable with simple tasks being handled by AI but want their doctor involved for anything to do with their treatment.

The Harris Poll released just numbers but charting the data out makes it much more obvious that the two bottom tasks are not considered trusted for AI (although it's still close to half).

JD Power's 15th annual review of pharmacies is out and the press release has a couple of teasers pharma marketers may care about. 

Even physical pharmacies have a large digital expectations now with 81% of patients engaging there.

When asked what services they use at their local physical pharmacy, patients had a few. Pharma marketers wanting to know about the patient journey should consider the second most common one.

A new survey of HCPs on the G-Med platform (n=304) asked them if they would recommend a smartwatch with an ECG to their patients. Most said yes, but had some reservations. 

Healio held a webinar about HCPs on Threads on August 8. The company posted the discussion on it's podcast. There are four primary takeaways:

The platform has lost 50% or more of its ad revenue, so of course it is going to try and gain some of it back, but not at the expense of Elon Musk's free-for-all, anything-goes vision for the platform. 

Previously, the platform tried to convince advertisers that they could make their own ads safe by using self-managed keyword blocking. Hopefully it's obvious that this could never work as advertisers can't read the (presumed) minds of Twitter extremists. 

Now, it's using “machine learning to reduce adjacency to varying levels of content according to a brand’s sensitivity threshold in an upcoming campaign.”

Is this enough for pharma? We would obviously use the "conservative" setting. It's hard to say. In an industry where it's cool to be "first to be second" we need to see a brand make the leap and judge based on that.

Bain & Company looked at generative AI in healthcare and found different priorities over different timeframes. 

In the near term, the next 12 months, health systems are focusing on AI for financial and workflow uses.

When asked about the next 2-5 years, however, patient care takes a more prominent place.

These are just two insights from the Bain & Company article. Take a look to get more on strategies for success for healthcare providers.

FDA guidelines for risk information in broadcast media (TV and radio) are discussed in the Agency's guidance from 1999 on general requirements and the much more detailed guidance from 2009 that contains details on risk presentation.

In 2012 the Agency posted content in the Federal Register about how it defines "clear and conspicuous" in relation to these risk statements. We couldn't find an actual guidance document yet, the details all seem to be in the Federal Register.

So, why is this news now? This Rule review from the Office of Management and Budget contains a date of 07/00/2023 which makes it look like something will finally get approved / released. 

The definitions on "clear and conspicuous" will be familiar to anyone who tracks OPDP letters to brands as the most common violations are in this area of the regulations. Some, but not all, of the guidelines are around risk information that should be presented in:

While it's easy to "go with the flow" and rely on others to know the details of risk presentation in ads, it really is worthwhile for all pharma marketers to review these documents once in a while to remind ourselves of the details the FDA scrutinizes in market.

A new report from BTG looks at which skills are most important and growing in 2023. Interestingly, the top skill isn't knowledge of AI, in fact the growth of that skill is down at number six. 

Regardless, it is an important skill and CEOs are looking at it as a competitive advantage—hint, hint... might be a good growth area for marketers' careers (normally, don't talk to the audience, but that's good advice -Ed.).

A mini-report from Tinuiti looks at both global and US ad markets. The US market leads the global average, and is showing resilience based on the consensus opinion of four forecasting services.

Advertisers were bullish on digital OOH before COVID, and were again when the world "reopened" in 2022. Growth is slower in 2023 but still above other channels.

We don't often feature two stories from the same source but this analysis of the metaverse by Bain & Company was too good to pass up. It makes the point that while the metaverse was overhyped by Meta and others at first, it still has time to mature and will likely become a $900 billion market by 2030.

Included in the analysis is a chart that may make you feel old (don't tell the audience what to think -Ed.).

We added the fun icons at approximately the history "distance" they were from the technology today. 

The takeaway for marketers? Don't take your eyes off of the metaverse. As AI-driven NPCs in video games get better, AI-driven virtual influencers and performers take off, and virtual reality hardware becomes more mainstream it only makes sense for these "worlds" to gain popularity.

Users on Reddit tricked a generative AI system that was creating low-quality news articles by scraping the community site. They laid a trap by making up content about "Glorbo." 

The AI reporting on "Glorbo" shows that just like in other tasks, it can be as gullible as humans. The problem isn't that it's gullible, it is that editors will trust the AI to the point that they use it with no oversight.