Sermo and LiveWorld surveyed 317 US HCPs on the Sermo RealTime platform in July to find out what they think of HCP influencers, We use that platform and love it... think of it as SurveyMonkey for HCPs (a bit excessive -Ed.).

HCPs are notorious for their no-nonsense attitude, amplified by their lack of time (ask any Rep). This "hard-nosed" approach comes through in the list of criteria to determine credibility.

Credentials and evidence, that's where you need to start with your influencer and content selection.

When asked in what form they want their medical social content, short form hits the top three spots. Social marketers have been promoting the idea of HCP "snackable" content for years and it looks like HCPs agree.

The research also shows that HCP influencer content can change behavior and spark actions. One stat in the article needs a bit more explanation, however. 

We're going to want to see the question and resulting data before we take that statement at face value. Avid Wire readers know how skeptical we can be.

That said, respondents to the survey indicated they take actions based on HCP influencer content (we reworded these for brevity, see the full article for details).

There are two places you can hear from Sermo and LiveWorld about this data:

If you're looking for immediate information on HCP influencer programs, grab a copy of Tim Mitchell's DOLFIN Effect POV from 2021 and reach out to the Klick HCP Influencer team by replying to this email (opportunistic, I like it -Ed.).

Mediaocean surveyed 1,231 marketing and media professionals from various disciplines in July to get a sense of the trends. 

66% of respondents said they were increasing social spend. For Pharma/Health this number is 70%, surpassed only by Entertainment at 76% and DTC at 73%.

Overall CTV beat Gen AI as the top consumer trend for media professionals by one percentage point. Pharma/health had this as its top item at 63%, surpassed only by Technology and Travel, both at 69%.

Media professionals are looking for immediate results. Performance took the top spot for investments (no industry-level data was provided).

The latest Business Group for Health report is out and it highlights the concerns of employers. Pharma marketers need to see the blame being put on PBMs and an "uncompetitive" market.

The supplied chart only goes back eight years, but we'll take the BGH at their word that the numbers are highest. The variability between projections and actuals is interesting and shows the pandemic hit in 2020 and 2021.

Employers in the US* are right to worry about these issues as they bear 90% of the costs in the system.

Take a look at this report to gain an understanding of what employers are thinking and what pressure they may be putting on payors regarding drug costs.

10Fold surveyed 450 B2B marketing executives in the US, Canada, France, Germany, and the UK to determine their content creation plans. The results were more, more, and then more.

The top two segments for content increases were 3-5x and 6-9x ... combined are more than half of marketers. Essentially no one is decreasing content and a small group are going big with 10x plans.

Even for B2B content social is the top of the heap. Video is pervasive as well and there is a lot of overlap in these two content types.

Where do marketers get insight into what content they need to produce? The results are split between passive types like website activity and social listening mentions and then active types such as requests from internal groups.

It's not surprising that most marketers are using generative AI, but the number is even larger than we might have guessed.

For marketers looking for insight into their B2B peers this report holds a deep dive and is worth a look.

The research company First Insight has conducted a study of audience members, influencers, and retailers of TikTok. Specifically the company is looking at what the different groups will do if the social network refuses to divest (and subsequently gets banned). The research included:

Facebook just keeps on performing in spite of being dismissed and forgotten by youth-chasing marketers. In this survey the social networking giant took top spot for all three surveyed groups.

Influencers asked about the primary platform they would use for content and consumers asked where they would spend the most time.

Retailers asked where they would shift media spend.

A difference between influencers and retailers is the amount of consumer movement they are seeing. Since influencers are engaging with consumers more directly it's possible, though not certain, that they may have better line-of-sight to behaviors.

If they are right, influencers are seeing a shift in consumer behaviors even before TikTok is affected by the enacted legislation (and before the company decides whether it will divest).

When asked about plans surrounding a scenario where ByteDance refuses to divest TikTok (it would be easier to write "ban" but that's not accurate -Ed.) retailers seem unprepared.

However, notice that the two combined "yes" answers total 67%. This is the same as influencers, so they are matched here.

This report has one of our favorite features, full data tables at the end of the report. If data from consumers, influencers, and retailers on TikTok is of interest then grab a copy for yourself.

In its Q2 earnings call earlier in August, Meta announced that it had hit 200 million monthly active users on its Threads platform. 

Social Media Today also looked at indications that the platform will soon support ads. Pharma loves Meta and advertisers will be interested to hear that app researcher Alessandro Paluzzi has leaked how ads will be identified.

Maybe don't get overly excited though:

A new paper published in Cornell University's free repository "arXiv" (assume that's pronounced archive) looks at inductive vs. deductive reasoning in LLMs. Think of this as providing the LLM examples (inductive) vs. instructions and rules (deductive). 

The following charts show the researchers' technique which they call "SolverLearner" (in blue) and which is based on examples compared to a more traditional, directive prompt (in orange).

The results are dramatic in a few of the examples and show how providing examples is a better tactic than carefully describing a ruleset.

This might explain why people who are naturally good at Google sometimes struggle with GenAI prompts, or maybe it's just me (don't include personal stories -Ed.).

Mostly Tinuiti's Q2 report is more of the same from Q1 but one trend became more visible on Instagram. Stories have taken over from the Feed as the top share of ad impressions on the platform. 

In a report on the importance of audio creativity, Cumulus and partners published a quadrant chart looking at right-brain vs. left-brain ad attributes. Based on 55 studied campaigns, the right-brain (creative) attributes resulted in more emotions and memory of the ad.

Just a reminder that creativity matters. Media spend on the wrong messaging is wasted money.

DoubleVerify collects vast amounts of performance data,  65+ billion impressions each month for the attention benchmarks. This report is based on that data with a 28-day rolling average and part of it looks at global performance for a combination of exposure and engagement.

DoubleVerify calls this combined metric "attention" which may or may not directly match your understanding of the word. Given that we can't yet reach across the screen and see where users are looking* it's a good proxy at least.

Here we see regional differences:

A new Emarketer projection shows social media following YouTube as the next channel to surpass linear TV reach. It is important to highlight this isn't time spent, it's US individual viewers.

Back in 2022 the FTC started work on protecting online reviews and it has now issued the final rule on the issue. The agency's press release covers the main points in the rule. Here is what they may mean for pharma marketers.