Grant Winter
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If you've been thinking of online video as a toy or, worse yet, as something that's going to happen at some point in the future,
let me offer you a picture: Me, a target pharma customer, on the elliptical machine at the gym, watching, no, not CNN or Katie
Couric, but "Nephrology Consult 101, Unusual Causes of Renal Failure" and "Internal Jugular Central Line Placement," a pair
of free video podcasts I downloaded from the Yale School of Medicine.
Just a few years ago, pharmaceutical companies got wise to the fact that there was an amazing amount of health information
on the Web and that patients were increasingly using it in preference to traditional media. They responded by making a Web
presence part of the basic marketing strategy of virtually every pharma product.
Today, the same thing is happening with Web video. There's an astonishing amount of video content online, some of it amateur,
some professional, some of it streaming (such as the videos on
http://YouTube.com/), some of it downloadable and playable on a variety of devices (like the video podcasts at
http://iTunes.com/)—and/
all of it transforming the way that people communicate. Your customers are discovering, as I did, that you can learn
a lot about health online without having to read reams of text. And that means that, once again, it's time to start including
a new technology in your basic plans.
Peephole and Public Library
Building a Better Podcast
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If you visit
http://YouTube.com/ and type in a few drug names, you'll find some amazing stuff. From high-quality commercials for Rozerem to various former
drug reps talking about what they did and did not tell doctors during detailing, it's all on the Web to view at your leisure.
On a recent visit to YouTube, I saw plenty of commercials. Much like iTunes before it, YouTube is a perfect place to host
commercials. The ads have already aired for millions of dollars on television—why not take advantage of the free server space
and post them on the Web for more people to see? But there was much, much more:
A rep for an antipsychotic medication talked about how he couched side effect information when talking to doctors: "A professor
of mine said statistics are like prisoners of war," he announced. "You torture them long enough and they will say anything."
A pudgy, pasty guy sat in front of his computer talking about his Generalized Anxiety Disorder. (Not to play amateur doctor,
but judging from his skin tone, I'd bet that one of his symptoms is agoraphobia.)
A well-coiffed woman in a tailored suit said she was a former rep and discussed how she both detailed an antianxiety medication
and got hooked on it herself.
You may not like all the messages these folks are sending. But they've become part of the way health information is spread.
It's time you joined the party.
Med School in My Pocket
One leader in health-related video is the Cleveland Clinic. When it first started uploading video podcasts in November 2005,
the fear was that the technology skewed so young that the audience would be interested only in stories about skateboarding
injuries.
PharmExec Blog
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