WE Communications surveyed 540 physicians in six markets (Australia, China, Germany, India, United Kingdom and the United States) to see how company reputation impacts prescribing behaviors. Turns out, quite a bit.

Reading into how the data is presented, it seems that the survey used a five-point Likert scale because the data is presented twice:

With the "moderately" influential chart we see that HCPs see multiple benefits to a strong corporate reputation. 

With the "extremely influential" chart the corporate reputation is only one point below disease-state leadership. So, it's important to have a good corporate record as well as be seen as leading in the disease state.

This report also asked about the use of social media for professional purposes and got 52%. This is lower than the 84% found by Elsevier but we wonder if that is all usage and not just professional. Check out the full report for more insights into how HCPs think pharma can contribute to the conversation.

A study from the Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) surveyed 2,428 U.S. adults in June to determine their opinions about AI chatbots in health. The top line finding is that only 17% of the population is using these chatbots.

AI usage in general is reasonably strong with a third of the population saying they use it several times a week or more often. We wish that "weekly" was included as that number would be higher. Here we also see that younger demographics are adopting the technology more quickly.

One of the background issues surrounding AI chatbots for health is that people don't feel like they can tell "human" from "AI" information. Only 42% are at all confident they can.

The real friction in the way of further use of AI chatbots for health is the quality of the answers. Only 36% are at all confident in the information they get from these tools and the tools are to blame, not the people. We have all seen "hallucinations" mixed in with real information and had the AI tools cheerfully admit the error when prompted. 

If we want AI chatbots to help more than 17% of the population we need to first focus on the quality of the answers they generate. Don't worry, at the pace of advancement in this field that won't be too far away.

Last week's iPhone 16 launch event held new information for the whole ecosystem of products, not just the phone. This highlights how integrated the Apple products are; a major competitive advantage for the personal technology provider.

The health features announced by Apple highlight how the company's personal mobile devices can help with individual health.

Connected TV, podcasts, and digital out-of-home (OOH) show the largest budget growth increase year over year according to Kantar's survey of 18,000 consumers and 1,000 marketers across the globe.

Average media receptivity is almost at 50% (it's 47%). We often joke that "no one likes ads" but perhaps all the paywalls going up on online content is reminding the audience that nothing is free.

Some channels have higher acceptability than others, and here we see that TV and social lead the way but that online video and games have the biggest gains. 

Percentage of consumers who are receptive to ads

This report from Kantar is a good snapshot of the media landscape from both the consumer and advertiser perspective.

Mark Bard, co-founder of the DHC and health marketing research expert, ran a poll on LinkedIn asking peers about their opinions of influencers for pharma brands.

Turns out almost two-thirds of respondents considered them valuable. This was part of his blog post on the subject titled "HCP Social Influencers: Sourcing, Integration, and Measuring Success." 

The post is in support of a webinar the group is hosting on September 25 which we highlighted in issue 629 of the Wire. If this subject is of interest, sign up for the DHC webinar.

A new report from Sprout Social is based on a survey of 4,500 social media users across five English-speaking markets. The researchers asked respondents on which platforms they have an account.

These numbers will be larger than monthly or daily active users but they show interest in the platforms by social users. 

This is worth repeating: these numbers are only social media users, not the entire population. This will skew the older generations higher. For example, Pew Research shows that 58% of those over 65 ever use Facebook whereas the Sprout numbers for Baby Boomers say 91% (not a perfect match, but illustrative -Ed.). Likewise, TikTok shows 10% on Pew and 38% on Sprout.

Meta remains at the top of the heap for product discovery with both Instagram and Facebook above TikTok. The relative newcomer is making a good showing, however, and has proven it has wider appeal than it's rival Snap. YouTube is surprisingly low but may be used more for research than discovery. X is exactly where it should be based on its untrustworthy content (opinion, but relevant so I'll leave it in -Ed.).

This story is tough for the author to write, the reason for which will become clear in the final section. Until then...

The Influencer Marketing Factory surveyed 1,000 Americans in April and found that most already know about virtual influencers. When asked how familiar they were with the idea, only 21% said they were not familiar at all.

This data is reinforced with 53% also saying they follow at least one virtual influencer.

When asked where they follow these virtual influencers, respondents focused on video and image platforms.

When average Americans were asked what topics they thought virtual influencers would be most effective for, pharma and healthcare were low on the list. Read on for why this may not be as accurate as it may seem.

At first blush that might appear to be a challenge for virtual influencers in pharma. However, consider these insights:

This report seems to show virtual influencers are a viable option, even for some pharma marketers. If you're looking for more insights about this tactic, check out our POVs on it.

A survey of 153 qualified retail experts across the spectrum of company sizes were surveyed to see what Q4 2024 looks like for this industry. It's not pharma but still interesting data to see how retailers are dealing with media in an election year.

Interestingly, even with its recent growth, retail media trails search and social for retailers. It's a solid third place showing though.

The number of channels each company deals with vary as well. Most fall into the 3-5 range.

Depending on the type of company, search and social traded places for number one channel. 

While not directly relevant for many pharma marketers, it's interesting to see what the retail folks are doing in media.

Self-harm content on social media is a problem. A study in 2022 showed that 83% of people who had engaged in self-harm or suicidal activities had seen related, unprompted materials in their social media feeds.

The platforms all have mechanisms for reporting violative material and policies for taking down anything that is against the terms of use. And Meta in particular has systems that attempt to police the content on the platform. From the company's blog post discussing this initiative:

Essentially, by joining together the three companies can share alerts in real time and help speed up the removal of violative content.

In the near term Google shouldn't be affected by Perplexity, according to Emarketer. This story highlights that Perplexity has announced that it will start enabling ads in Q4 but this is what they see happening for Google:

This is an important prediction because GenAI users are expected to pass 100 million in the US this year and continue growing robustly.

And, since we're looking at AI users, here is more data from Emarketer about usage by generation.

This story is a bit of a departure from our "hard news" focus at the Klick Wire. This opinion piece published in Psychology Today discusses the pace of change and frames it as "psychological climate change."

The article highlights the issues facing humanity:

The author, Mike Brooks, sums up his thoughts on AI this way:

And then:

If philosophical thoughts on our modern, digital world spark your interest take a look at this series of articles from Brooks. 

This isn't news—Alphabet's Google is the world's most popular search engine—but the scale took us aback when we saw it.