A new report from SOCi is based on a survey of 317 "multi-location" B2C marketers in the US. The survey asked about AI in their marketing efforts and the results will probably resonate with pharma marketers. 

We took all the individual stats in the report and charted them as a summary. We did reword them for brevity but tried our best to capture the spirit of each finding. 

We did take a bit of creative license with items #2 and 3, though we don't think we hallucinated them (ha ha -Ed.). Here are the actual descriptions of these items in the report.

For those marketers feeling overwhelmed by the page of change:

For those marketers reacting to what is essentially a meme at this point:

It's the Klick Wire's birthday again... it seems to happen every year. In the tradition of loving data we have compiled an analysis of the most popular topics from the past two years.

The most popular topics that the Wire author selected for the email subject lines are here. It's not hard to see the bias of the person who also led the social strategy practice.

This one is your metric (don't talk to the audience, I don't care how long you've been doing this, you haven't developed a rapport -Ed.).

Here, we took only the first subject line topics as they are the most visible and compared the number of opens over the past two years. Raw opens are, of course, a combination of the number of times a topic is highlighted and the actual opens. The normalized opens looks at opens per number of issues highlighted that topic.

This one bears some scrutiny. Yes, some of the rarer topics like Digital Health, Omnichannel, and Influencers boost to the top but HCP Social is robust in spite of being commonly highlighted. This shows the robustness of interest in that particular topic.

And now, our gift to you, an XKCD comic. For no apparent reason.

If you've been intrigued by the rise of influencer marketing you'll enjoy the Virtual Humans website. It is a collection of influencers from around the world that have 1,000+ followers.

Naturally, we charted those with one million+ followers to show the top names so you don't have to (no one was going to do that -Ed.).

The general audience for these characters can be determined by looking at the platforms. Nobody Sausage is an irreverent hot dog and is big on TikTok. Barbie is more of a brand in and of herself but she does do brand collabs and her audience is Facebook and YouTube.

Virtual influencers are a niche marketing vehicle but for an example of a brand-character-turned-influencer look no further than Lu of Magalu. She is the product of retail giant Magalu located in Brazil.

If you get intrigued by this topic, you'll want to reach out to the Influencer team here at Klick (promotional, but helpful, so I'll allow it -Ed.). Just reply to this Wire and we'll get you set up.

The Cumulus / Westwood One folks are at it again, this time with a Nielsen study on radio attribution for website visits. In this case-study-rich report there are two examples that are at least aligned with health and pharma.

That's hard to read so the one on the left is an online therapy app (likely Betterhelp based on their advertising spend) at 3.4% and the right is an OTC haircare supplement at 14.6%. Pharma marketers would want to think about where they might fall on this spectrum.

When it came to exposures and saturation, however, no amount was too much. This example is for a local car dealership so the ads may have been more colorful (YouTube, beware, addictive) than most pharma allows.

But it wasn't just website visit lift that improved. Familiarity, sure, but affinity also improved with frequency as well. This data is no longer auto dealerships, it is cross-industry.

We have a couple of social examples from Dentsu's Retail and Shopping study for 2024. This study is based on a survey of 1,000 US consumers. 

There are interesting findings about mobile commerce (spoiler: it's bigger than desktop and is now used for large purchases) but we are focusing on social commerce. The reason is that if you look at the numbers, social commerce is more than a purchase journey, it also includes advocacy and that makes it a marketing activity as well.

Above we see that social ads are important but other activities such as organic posts, friends, and social search are also in the mix.

We took the liberty of reorganizing the platform list based on more common healthcare demos (Dentsu had it organized by GenZ).

If your brand has the opportunity for telehealth-enabled DTC it may pay to look at social shopping not just as a sales channel but also a marketing one at the same time.

The Sharp Healthcare medical system in San Diego is ensuring its staff, both doctors and nurses, gets comfortable with the new VR/AR technologies. The group has invested in Apple Vision Pro devices to test them out and see what works and what doesn't. 

Facebook turned 20 last week and this story from eMarketer gives the highlights of the company's rise and change to Meta. it's mostly a good news story and the strategic investments of the company have largely paid off. But not all.

Facebook is still the world's largest social network by a long way and Instagram just looks better all the time:

Happy birthday, Facebook. You won't be around another 20 years from now but whatever you grow into will certainly be interesting (don't talk to the giant multinational brand as if it was a person -Ed.).

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has issued a memo to Medicare Advantage insurers reinforcing to them that they cannot deny care based on AI algorithms alone. This comes at a time when patients are suing health insurers for using systems that have a 90% error rate.

The issue, in part, is that the AI systems being used cannot be explained and so get little trust from the CMS. The reasons for denials are supposed to be clear and public.

Social media companies get grief from both sides when it comes to content moderation. This story is mainly about a lawsuit that claims the government should not be allowed to ask social media companies to remove or downgrade posts on vaccine safety.

If that's the rock, then the hard place is a public grilling they got over child safety on the platforms. Predatory actors can't be allowed to operate with impunity on these platforms, and the legislators wanted to open the companies up to lawsuits based on these actions to force them to take stronger action.

Social media's strength and weakness are two sides to the same coin:

Yesterday was the Super Bowl (we assume, this was written on Friday). Ad prices are up 11% according to sources quoted by MediaPost:

If you're like 43% of Americans (24% of males, 60% of females) you already watch the big game for the ads anyway (Statista).

The article says that pharma is in the growing category:

As of now, we only know of one pharma unbranded ad. Come Monday we'll look again to see if there are more.

Marketing Charts highlighted some interesting data about Americans' trust in different professions. Health professions take up a lot of the top spots, as usual. While this is expected it's good to see, though Nurses above Doctors is an interesting finding.

We limited our flags to only human-centric health practitioners. Veterinarians were number two, sorry folks.

This story from USA Today is about the intense pressure being put on pharmacists and one of them having a heart attack but being unwilling to leave her post until it was too late.

On top of that we have dual stories from Amazon about layoffs in its Health division and then about how it is simultaneously providing 24/7 pharmacy service to New York City residents with delivery.

There is something going on in the retail pharmacies that needs attention.