LiveWorld's Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Umar Siddiqui, has compiled a comparison of the different HCP-only social platforms. As a doctor he has access to these "walled gardens" and provides an insider's look into their functionality. 

The 3-page PDF includes this comparison chart with the functionality of each platform compared. 

In this chart is a comparison of membership and usage. Unfortunately, we aren't provided with a methodology for these numbers. That said, they are better than nothing so we charted the different values and ranked the "winners." 

Interestingly, the lesser-known Figure1 (the Instagram for doctors) leads here. The platform has a lot of medical students and includes nurses and pharmacists.

Medscape trounces the competition in visits while having the lowest registered members. How does it do this? By not strictly being a "walled garden."

The site includes some medical news in front of the login and only requires that for more in-depth interactions. 

As a site that requires a login, Doximity makes a very strong showing. 

Sermo has fewer US doctors than Doximity (it is global while Doximity is US-based) but it has a great showing for bounce rates (low) and time per visit (high). 

This little summary is a worthwhile download but we wish we knew where the author got the traffic data. 

Pharma marketers often want to compare themselves to non-pharma to see where they stand. Thanks to some consolidated data from Disqo now they can. 

Disqo took advertising results data such as brand favorability and averaged them across multiple categories (almost certainly not including pharma). This chart shows the percentage lift across different measures.

Brand metrics were strongest but the more action-oriented ecommerce was high as well. 

The report digs into the Brand Favorability metric to look past the average of +3.22 percentage points. Here, we see that a quarter of all campaigns have less than 1% lift in this metric. 

Meanwhile, 24% get 6 or more points of lift. There is no analysis of the individual campaigns but one can imagine that they have much better creative than the lowest 26%. Your creative matters, don't stifle it with budget cuts and short timelines (too much soapbox -Ed.).

Salesforce's 8th State of Marketing report uses survey results from 6,000 global marketers to identify trends. Interestingly, pharma marketers are specifically excluded from the cohort:

This may indicate that Salesforce sees pharma marketers as significantly different from the mainstream. This is something that we already knew but it's interesting to see Salesforce picking up on it. 

In the chart featuring top growth areas for marketers we see that video takes the two top spots for usage. Also included on the list are influencers and user-generated content showing how these interactive channels are increasing in importance. 

Sometimes the story is that there is no change. While marketers might talk about shiny objects all the time, email continues to be the workhorse of personalized messaging. 

97% of marketers either have or plan to have a Web3 strategy. As a reminder Web3 is based on blockchain identification and enables more decentralized interactions, it's not just the metaverse or NFTs. 

51% have a Web3 strategy they say. Many of these might be summarized as "wait for Web3 to become viable." Pharma marketers shouldn't feel like they are missing out yet. However, let's keep an eye on those technologies, they aren't going away.

It is being reported that Microsoft is looking to integrate the AI that runs ChatGPT into the Bing search engine. This may signal that the company is looking to provide a more conversational interface to the tool as it tries to compete with Google. 

This isn't the first announcement of the company integrating AI into Bing. Back in October they announced that they would integrate DALL-E into something called "Image Creator" in the search engine. One use case for the tool was the creation of unique thumbnails for repetitive images such as chapters in a podcast.

These stories highlight how search engines are being pushed to be more interactive as Gen-Z heads towards tools like TikTok for search.

TikTok is on track to pass YouTube in influencer revenue by 2024 and take the #2 spot, far below Instagram.

Note that these are all percentages of a growing market, all of them are likely increasing in terms of real dollars. 

Data.ai has released their State of Mobile 2023 and it shows just how massive video has become. First, however, the top-line numbers. They show that hours spent continues to rise on mobile.

This chart is total hours by country so in some ways it is just a population count. Regardless, it shows how mobile hours are rising almost everywhere. Note the scale change between the two charts, 0.2T to 200B.

The number one use case for mobile devices is communications with WeChat the top consumer of hours (we're not sure if the built-in apps are included in this data, we suspect Messages on Android and iOS are actually the top).

After chat, however, video takes the next two slots. 

Older demographics can use technology too, when they need to. When Data.ai broke down health apps by type and age-group the 45+ cohort dominated telehealth. The 25-34 group dominated Women's Health which likely includes fertility apps. 

Data from the USA is shown, other countries can be selected from the Data.ai interactive website. 

OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, is looking at tendering an offer to go public and could be looking at an initial amount of $300 million that would value the company at $29 billion.

It's not news but it reinforces what we know: Health insurance companies are not trusted. When it comes to health information roughly 67% (eyeballed from the chart) would tell their provider but few would voluntarily tell their insurer. 

Friends win in a couple of categories but by and large this report on social determinants of health show they are kept quiet by patients. 

When most marketers think "gaming" they think of younger people playing on a console or PC. This is no longer true, mobile is the number one gaming platform and has been for a while. 

Gamers are ok with ads, as long as they don't get in the way of gameplay. 

Here's a fun story from MNTN. It's all about local TV ads from the 80's and 90's. Notice that the top two elements of these ads were CTAs. 

The best part of this article are all the old ads linked on YouTube. When you have a minute check them out. 

We didn't know the US government publishes a yearly guide on personal income taxes. It costs $11 but seems like a good investment. We wish other countries did the same.

It's not surprising when HCPs are at the top of the chart for trust, usually with scientists. But the bottom shows Members of Congress below telemarketers. Ouch.