Category Archives: As I See It

Pharma’s primary customer is Wall Street, not patients

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  • The S&P 500 healthcare sector has been on a tear in recent months, on track for its best quarter in five years and surging to an all-time high on Friday.
  • A forensic accounting of available financial data of the pharmaceutical giants Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and Abbott—shows that from 2013 to 2015, these four multinational drug makers collectively avoided paying about $3.7 billion in taxes.
  • Publishing in JAMA Internal Medicine the median estimated cost of the full range of studies: $19 million to get new drug approval.
  • Pharma’s primary customer continues to be Wall Street.

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Let your audience design the perfect website

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  • Pharma marketers often view website creative as the key to building a great website, but bounce rates indicated that online health seekers disagree.
  • Your website homepage should be a combination of key messages that are important to USERS and intuitive navigation that makes it easy for online health seekers to find the information they are looking for.
  • As your brand moves through the life-cycle your home page should change to reflect updated needs of your audience.

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Spending more money on TV ads doesn’t make sense

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  • In 2019, people are expected to spend an average of 170.6 minutes each day on online activities like watching videos on YouTube, sharing photos on Facebook and shopping on Amazon. They’ll spend slightly less time — 170.3 minutes —watching TV.
  • In the U.S., however, TV is still king. Internet usage will not eclipse TV viewing there until 2020, according to Zenith.
  • Most advertisers are ahead of the curve, except pharma.. Globally, they’re expected to spend $60 billion more on internet than TV advertising in 2019.
  • 80 percent of Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for a health-related topic online, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

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Business as usual for drug companies

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  • Despite Trump’s plan to lower drug prices companies still hiked prices far more often than they cut them. This year through the end of July, there were 4,412 brand-name drug price increases and 46 price cuts, a ratio of 96-to-1.
  • Pharma continues to try and confuse the issue of drug pricing by blaming hospitals and PBM’s.

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Smartwatch sales are going to double but…

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  • IDC is predicting that wearable sales in 2018 will grow by just 6.2 percent to 122.6 million body gadgets compared to 2017 sales of 115 million units.
  • Smartwatches will buck that trend, with IDC expecting smartwatch shipments to grow 39 percent on 2017 shipments of 33 million units to 46.2 million in 2018. Apple Watch accounts for just under half of all smartwatch shipments.
  • The use of smatwatches should be encouraged by health insurer, but HCP’s are still not on board.

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