YouTube Fixes Problem I Pointed Out Months Ago: Update on YAZ Case Study

YouTube Fixes Problem I Pointed Out Months Ago: Update on YAZ Case Study

In January, I pointed out that drug companies that place product videos on YouTube leave themselves open to association with other videos that poke fun at them, or worse, encourage consumers to join class action lawsuits against the company. The case that I pointed out was the YAZ Birth Control Channel (see "The Trouble with YouTube: YAZ Case Study").

The problem is that you cannot control what other videos may be highlighted by YouTube when your video is played OUTSIDE the channel. In the case of YAZ, for example, when you click on "related videos," what you see are many videos from law firms suing Bayer and spoofs of YAZ TV commercials. Even though Bayer has turned off comments, it cannot prevent viewers from seeing these related videos.

According to an article in AdAge, YouTube may have fixed this problem.

"Enter YouTube's latest feature, 'target excludes,' launching as part of the site's Video Targeting Tool, which gives advertisers the choice to exclude as few as one video they don't want their product associated with as well as specific genres and channels. The feature addresses the most often-criticized aspect of YouTube: You can buy video there, but you never know what you'll get" (see "YouTube Launches Brand Protection Feature").

Today, I revisited the YAZ channel and was greeted with "YazBirthControlPill has no videos available." See image of blank channel below.

It may only be a coincidence that this channel is now blank. Perhaps Bayer has taken down the videos as it looks into using YouTube's new feature? Considering ALL the anti-YAZ videos on YouTube, it must be a monumental task to track them all down and add them to the exclusion list one-by-one. I wonder if there's a app for that?

See More advertiser control on YouTube for the official announcement regarding "target excludes."

OTC Drugs and Children

OTC Drugs and Children

Recently, the news media and Congress focused our attention on the recall of contaminated over-the-counter (OTC) children's medication manufactured by McNeil Consumer, a division of Johnson & Johnson (see "Despite Its Social Media Expertise, J&J Fails to Use It Effectively to Communicate to Consumers").

But there's an even more dangerous problem than contamination relating to OTC medication for children: incorrect dosing.

"There is an urgent need to review the use of children's over-the-counter medicines by parents," said Dr Rebekah Moles, University of Sydney, as part of her research, which concluded that many parents are incapable of giving their children the correct dose of liquid medicines.

The Australian study, presented in Lisbon, tested 97 adults and found 61% measured the wrong dose - 17% measured an overdose and 44% did not give enough (see "Many parents are incapable of giving their children correct dose of liquid medicine").

As reported by BBC: "Dr Moles said that almost half of the 119,000 calls received by the New South Wales Poisons Information Centre, which handles emergency calls from across Australia, concerned accidental overdose in children, with 15% needing hospitalisation."

I covered this topic last year when I interviewed the principals of a company that invented a solution for the problem of incorrect dosing of children's OTC medicine. Listen to this Pharma Marketing Talk podcast: "A Solution to the Problem of Inaccurate Dosing of OTC Pediatric Medicines."

Alex Butler's Signature Says It All -- Well, Almost All.

Alex Butler's Signature Says It All -- Well, Almost All.

I am getting excited about presenting at the upcoming DigiPharm Europe 2010 conference in London at the end of September mostly because I will be meeting several pharma people who are doing digital marketing in Europe! One of these people is Alex Butler who is Digital Strategy and Social Media Manager at Janssen-Cilag.

You can tell that Alex is immersed in communication and social media just be looking at his email signature, which I reproduce below (without revealing his personal phone and email address):

I need to update my sig file to look more like this!

I first learned about Alex when I asked people to nominate candidates for the Pharmaguy Social Media Award (learn more about that here).

Alex's signature says it all, or ALMOST all. There is a lot more to learn about Alex and what he is doing over there in the UK! To learn more about Alex and the other speakers at the DigiPharm Europe 2010 conference, I invited them to participate in my Pharma Marketing BlogTalkRadio show on September 8, 2010. See "DigiPharm's EU ePharma Pioneers: Doing More with Less" for more information about listening to and participating in that show.

My presentation, entitled "New Rules for New Media: A Funny Think Happened While Waiting for FDA Guidance", will be on Thursday, September 30 (see here).

My newsletter -- Pharma Marketing News -- is a Media Partner for this conference.

Movie "Love and Other Drugs" is More an Ad for Viagra Than an Expose of Sales Tactics

Movie "Love and Other Drugs" is More an Ad for Viagra Than an Expose of Sales Tactics

If you were expecting the movie "Love and Other Drugs" to be a hard-hitting expose of pharmaceutical sales tactics as was the book it's loosely based on -- ie, "Hard Sell," by Jamie Reidy (see review here; use code 'JAMIE' to get it FREE! -- then you are in for a surprise. The trailer (see below) exposes that this is just another "love story" that happens to feature pharmaceutical sales reps and their shenanigans.

"[Anne] Hathaway portrays Maggie, an alluring free spirit who won’t let anyone - or anything - tie her down. But she meets her match in Jamie ([Jake] Gyllenhaal), whose relentless and nearly infallible charm serve him well with the ladies and in the cutthroat world of pharmaceutical sales. Maggie and Jamie’s evolving relationship takes them both by surprise, as they find themselves under the influence of the ultimate drug: love."

The "ultimate drug" may be "love," but the movie seems to focus on how great a drug Viagra is!