The Edelman Trust Institute has its Trust Barometer report out for 2024 and it shows a world that is more divided than ever and untrusting of political authority.

When asked who people think will tell them the truth about new innovations and technologies, scientists come first. That's good, but they are tied with "someone like me." This is perhaps a side effect of social media echo chambers we build for ourselves.

When asked who they thought would do the right thing, scientists again led the charge followed by teachers. Journalists and politicians are at the bottom.

This must be disheartening for journalists but when news outlets can be ranked on a political spectrum it's not that surprising.

When asked where they get their news, world citizens said online search, followed by social media. Other outlets followed but this highlights the difference between what we trust and what we do.

Especially when it comes to social media, citizens don't trust the platforms but they do trust the other users of the platforms.

Here's us burying the lede again. The top industries for trust are technology, education, and healthcare mirroring the trust in scientists, educators, and doctors (not on these lists but are always high in trust rankings).

This report follows the Edelman tradition of large data samples: 32,000 from 28 countries. It looks at a lot of topics and spends time investigating trust in innovation including climate change, AI, gene-based medicine, and GMO foods.

A new report from McKinsey is based on a survey of 1,363 global participants in February and March of 2024. 

A chart that stands out is the equality of AI usage across age groups (Boomer, GenX, Millennial) and positions in companies.

We highlighted the average because the chart makes it look like everyone is above or at the average. In the report notes it highlights that they didn't have ages for everyone.

It's an unfortunate truth that pharma, with its conservative heritage, tends to lag in new technology adoption. It looks like AI is continuing that trend albeit perhaps with a shorter lag time than other technologies.

3% of pharma's digital budgets are spent on GenAI at this time, lower than most other industries, but to be fair it also has the highest "don't know" number in the list.

Meanwhile, when looking at analytical AI such as drug discovery tools pharma is second only to technology.

This 23-page report looks at many aspects of AI adoption and shows how companies are embracing these new technologies.

Klick released a new POV last week about virtual influencers (part one of two). This document looks at how pharma marketers can best use virtual influencers. First though, we want to define the difference between a "brand character" and a "virtual influencer."

Here is a list of virtual influencers with more than one million followers as presented in the February 12th issue of the Klick Wire.

Looking at the platforms on which these influencers operate, TikTok is at the top of the list for both total followers across accounts and number of influencers there. In the latter, they are tied with Instagram.

Check out the POV to see how your brand could benefit from these online personalities.

Singular has put out its second quarterly app report based on its database of client mobile ad spend and app installs. This data is interesting as it focuses on what marketers are doing in the space rather than user popularity. 

When it comes to other metrics, health and fitness apps are low in the rankings, but when it comes to installs per thousand ad impressions (IPM) they are strong. This drives a cheaper cost per install (CPI) compared to other app categories.

Here we wanted to highlight how different ad spend data can be from actual market usage data. This jumped out at us because China is an Android-dominated market but Singular's customers are only interested in the iOS demographic.

The highest-cost markets are mostly the usual suspects but a couple of unusual places sneak in because of their remoteness or just small population (or both). Jersey and Nauru we had to look up.

For mobile marketers there is a trove of data here that can provide insights into ad performance and costs.

GWI released it's 2024 social trends report recently  during a webinar on the 29th. This compilation of data looks at how global audiences are engaging on social platforms. 

This chart shows how the average ages are climbing on social platforms. Note the scales, however. For every year of measurement TikTok gains another year of average age on the platform. This simply means that it's not losing its older users, not that it's getting an influx of older ones. 

Notice that Facebook and LinkedIn are not that much older in their average ages at just over 36. Instagram, on the other hand, is younger than TikTok by about a year. (Numbers in the chart were added by us and are eyeballed based on the Y-axis.)

When it comes to discovery of and keeping up with brands social is at the front of the pack. The Meta platforms do the bulk of the work when it comes to brand maintenance as well, not surprising considering their higher audience reach.

When asked if they use the platforms monthly, most global social users said Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and YouTube. These platforms dominate the top three slots across the board. TikTok is a solid fourth in every demographic highlighting it's widened age range.

The fastest-growing platforms are ones to watch in the coming years. Can TikTok break through fourth place?

This report also looks at video trends, including long-form, and social shopping. It's a web page rather than a download so is mobile-friendly. 

Longtime readers of the Wire will know about our policy of not mentioning brands or companies directly. However, we must highlight this story about an unanticipated opportunity to measure DTC results because of an FDA letter. 

Essentially, the FDA issued an untitled letter to the drug manufacturer on Oct 31, 2023 (NDA 205422) and then issued a close-out letter Dec 20, 2023. It was another two months before the two companies that cooperate on marketing resumed, leading to a four-month period without DTC. 

This DTC pause resulted in an economic change for the companies which one company needed to explain during an earnings call.

Likewise, for a different indication for the same product, the other company mentioned its contribution from an unbranded campaign.

This story was a bit convoluted because of our brand rules, but it's good insight we don't often get and you probably already clicked on the link anyway (true, but don't talk to the readers -Ed.).

A new Research Letter in JAMA looks at 28 HCP endorsements of medical products on X (formerly Twitter) from 2022. As is often the case with these types of studies the researchers—one of whom is a professional witness—were actively looking for issues. They didn't really find any by the looks of the article, but they did their best to try and imply connections.

The researchers looked up the HCPs in the 28 posts that endorsed medical products and then looked up Sunshine Act information.

They found that 96% (26) of the HCPs had relationships with the pharma companies. Most of the time this was disclosed and for the rest the relationship was for speaking, not for social promotion.

This highlights to marketers that they need to alert sponsored HCPs that as "agents" of the company they will be held to a higher standard when making personal statements on social media. Even if they are on the correct side of the FTC disclosure guidelines (look up Example 4) it's better to over-disclose.

We'll let the HCPs have the last word here, to let our readers know how effective they think peer-to-peer activities are.

Last week search channels were abuzz with leaked API data about Google's internal search algorithms. The company has now confirmed that the leak is authentic to The Verge. 

Google cautions that an API reference doesn't show the context of how it is actually used:

That said, the major findings of the leak were summarized by SparkToro and iPullRank. 

Interesting model of how Google handles ranking (not official):

Emarketer reports from the IAB that the digital channels own the mindshare of marketers. When asked about the "must have" video channels, marketers said social and CTV.

As we know, creators account for a substantial portion of brand videos (at least in non-pharma industries). Recent data also shows how much more dependent they are on brands over the platforms themselves.

Social Media Examiner has a good primer for AI prompting that will be valuable for the 45% of businesspeople not yet using it regularly (see previous story). It talks about the RACE method of prompting and the PARE method of iteration.

Both of these methods try to get the user from the mindset of "read my mind and make something excellent" to one of "you're an eager intern, but I need to brief you on the ask."

Users of YouTube, the world's most popular long-form video site, are reporting strange behavior if they are using ad blockers. 

An infographic from Statista shows that 49.6% of all internet traffic is estimated to come from bots and 32% from malicious bots.

In the Wire we see that a few companies have bots that check links (they click every one in the Wire) but mostly users seem legit. If you find yourself forwarding the Wire encourage your friends to sign up (no argument from me -Ed.).