It is well documented that the general population's view of pharmaceutical manufacturers has improved during COVID-19, though it seems to be slipping again.

Patients with rare diseases are also seeing their impression of pharma improve. We have combined two press releases from Patient View to provide data for the rare disease community and two specific condition types:

When asked how "good or bad" pharma has been at "specific activities" (really, could you get more vague?) we see that products, patient safety, and innovation are at the top but the whole list is interesting.

This data shows it's a bit of a roller coaster for pharma with some conditions but overall the positive scores are reasonably good. Still room for improvement though, especially with the pandemic slowly fading (very slowly -Ed.)

Facebook took a beating last week with Frances Haugen, a self-proclaimed oversight advocate stepping forward after releasing a large number of confidential, internal documents to the WSJ and seeking SEC whistleblower protection.

In a move obviously devised to take the wind out of the whistleblower's sails the social network released two of the reports that hold the most damning evidence: that of risk to teen girls. The company annotated the original presentations to make it clear where there are errors in the interpretation of the data.

Also in these decks was this chart that shows which mental health issues Instagram helps with:

The top three "made it better" issues were:

Body image was number three on the "made it worse" list at 18.9%. When limited to the subset of the audience defined as teen girls who indicated they were having issues then the number rises to 32.4%.

However, it's unlikely that this will cause immediate issues for the company. Advertisers are showing no appetite for reducing spend and users were 6.7x more likely (data on file) to talk about last week's outage than the whistleblower case.

Some other reading on the topic:

The latest CMO Survey from August looks at many topics, only a few we can touch on here. The first one is marketers' spending growth, it is expected to surge over the next 12 months.

In that spend mobile and social are set to be big areas of expansion. This question asked for predictions 12 months and five years out:

The survey also asked marketers where they were investing in digital marketing. Pharma and biotech were the top industries in a couple of the categories (numbers added to right on chart).

This 76-page report covers a lot of ground for marketers and is worth a download to see what the industry in general is up to.

36% of patients have used telehealth in 2021, compared to only 9% in 2020 according to a J.D. Power survey of 4,676 U.S. healthcare customers. Convenience drives telehealth usage as the top factor, with speed of being seen a strong second:

Direct to consumer brands mixed it up with the health insurers in the top of the charts. We combined the top three for each type to show how close they are to one another:

A new report on email for H1 2021 shows that healthcare marketers are missing out on an important opportunity. Between 7-8 billion emails were sent globally per month in the first half of this year but only 1% of them were from healthcare sources: 

These emails ranked number three in terms of opens at over 25% unique. During the pandemic health is on everyone's mind and healthcare organizations, including pharma, can benefit from this increased interest.

Healthcare email marketers need to up their game on mobile optimization but they have strong open rates to help with ROI on campaigns.

The chart is scaled a bit small so we'll highlight that healthcare has the lowest mobile optimization at 84%. It has the second highest open rate though at 28.1%.

Marketers could probably get more mileage out of email though, as they rank it fairly low on the list of effective tactics (but with a very narrow band of differentiation).

When Facebook goes down the joke is that people find out about it on Twitter. This isn't as true as it used to be. This time the outage of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp drove users to Snapchat over Twitter. At least for global Android users.

We can see that Snapchat more than doubled the percentage of new users compared to Twitter. This is a legitimate metric as well as Snapchat is actually starting from a larger global user base than Twitter (514 million compared to 397).

A survey of 108 corporate leaders looked at how they view the risks of social chatter online. 

The leading risk of these social movements is expected to be negative corporate and brand reputation, of course , but employee morale is #3 on the list:

This is the first article we have found that looks at agile marketing and addresses the elephant in the room: lack of specificity on deliverables. It highlights that while this makes the transition to agile difficult, it is not insurmountable.

If you've ever thought about trying an agile process this is a good introductory read that can spark a lot of ideas. 

CB Insights released its Q3 analysis for 2021 and healthcare investing has already surpassed all of 2020 and is well on its way to pass $100 billion for the year.

The number of unicorns (valuations over $1B) in healthcare did dip in Q3 though with "only" 10 which is still more than any quarter before 2021. 

While it is important to recognize how much of YouTube's audience time is on mobile, it's equally important to recognize that now over half of viewers are also using large smart TVs (a.k.a. connected TVs). 

This really highlights the varied audiences that the platform can reach. YouTube plans should differentiate these audiences and provide content customized to those the marketer wants to reach. 

To further complicate the issue, the platform is extremely popular for short form content, something more aligned with mobile than CTV. Again, know your audience.

Marketers already know that the US is around half of all pharma revenue with the rest of the world accounting for the other half. However, this varies by condition: