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Pharmaceutical Executive - Leadership, Strategy & Market Access

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Spotlight

Latest Executive Roundtables

Asembia 2025 

Topic

Sales and Marketing

1rem

 Podcast, CEO and Founder of Sooth, Ian Baer, is back to discuss:

Why people trust friends and influencers over companies

Podcasts

Ian Baer, Founder and CEO of Sooth, discusses how the growing distrust in social media will impact industry marketing strategies and the relationships between pharmaceutical companies and the patients they aim to serve. He also explains dark social, how to combat misinformation, closing the trust gap, and more.

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Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, identifies strategies pharmaceutical companies can use to combat misinformation on social media.

How Pharma Can Effectively Combat Misinformation/Disinformation

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media and its impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Key contributors to this distrust include the spread of misinformation, the rise of AI-generated content, and the politicization of social media platforms. The conversation highlights the challenges faced by pharma companies in building trust with patients in this environment, including the need to combat misinformation and navigate the complexities of social media platforms. 

He emphasizes the importance of building partnerships with trusted voices, such as medical influencers and patient communities, to effectively communicate with patients. It also underscores the need for transparency and authenticity in pharma's social media presence, including acknowledging and addressing patient concerns and responding to negative feedback.

The conversation concludes with a discussion on the evolving role of social media in healthcare and the potential for private communities and personalized sharing to play a greater role in the future.

How can pharma companies effectively combat misinformation/disinformation and distrust?

Not with force. Not with being louder. Not with saying 

‘We're the authority. We know better’

, but actually with a much more cooperative spirit. If you know that the average person trusts friends, family, and influencers more than they trust you as an institution, partner with those people, give them the content.

84% of all social sharing happens through one-to-one sharing of links. Give the people who are out there, acting like authorities, the right information to share better information, more credible information, better produced information, people will share the content that most reflects on their own personal brand and authority. I would say don't treat the other voices as competition that needs to be squashed. Find some voices to partner with that can actually amplify it and give greater one-to-one credibility than then you have on your own as a pharma brand.

Videos

In this part of his Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, identifies strategies pharmaceutical companies can use to combat misinformation on social media.

Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, speaks about how distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media and is impacting the pharmaceutical industry. 

The Impact of Social Media Distrust on Pharmaceutical Marketing

What are the consequences of public distrust of social media? How will that impact pharma marketing and the industry's presence on the various social platforms?

Especially in the healthcare category, which in the US is going through so much in terms of public debate, political debate, the whole economic model being called into question, people having questions about their health insurance and what it covers. They're paying more for that insurance and often are paying more out of pocket for drugs. Now you've got companies out there purporting

, ‘Oh, I'll save you all that you don't need a doctor and you don't need a pharmacist and you don't need health insurance, just take this, this magic bottle of pills’

, and if it comes recommended by somebody I trust, who again, may be getting spiffed for making that recommendation, say, 

‘My God, I've never felt so good. I've never felt so young.’

 It's, it's potentially very damaging, and it's a debate that needs to be brought to the forefront much more. Again, I'm as big a fan of alternative medicine as anybody. I have been seeing a naturopath for 20 years. I'm a believer in that stuff, but it has to be regulated and, you know, I have to know that there's some standardization around what I'm getting and some science behind it. But you know, even science itself is now much more open to questions somehow than it's ever been, because even science often is seen as having its own biases, you know, as evidenced by the fact that the number of Flat Earthers is growing in this country.

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, speaks about how distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media is impacting the pharmaceutical industry. 

Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, identifies how uncertainty of where to find information, coupled with distrust, can damage the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the patients they aim to serve.

How Uncertainty & Distrust Damage Relationships with Patients

How does an uncertainty of where to find information, coupled with distrust in social media, damage the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the patients they serve?

Look, the healthcare industry has had a trust gap to close with most individuals in the US for years now, right? It's been growing, distrust in the institutions. Now, suddenly, there's distrust in certain areas of science. I think the no matter how you felt about the COVID pandemic and the way it was treated, you probably came out of that three-year period with a different point of view on how much you should trust any healthcare information that's put out there in social media. Certainly, you don't take anything at face value.

The [EMA’s] decision to pull out of Twitter [X], well, that's happening in a lot of places, because Twitter [X] has gone both more partisan than it has been in the past but also has backed off of a lot of fact checking. Meta has recent announced that they are going to adopt Twitter's [X’s] methods when it comes to fact checking. I think we'll call into question, similarly, the validity of that platform. Bluesky just doesn't have the adoption rate.

One of the big movements that we are expecting to see will be around private sharing of content. One to one sharing. Which it's funny, somebody nicknamed it “dark social” like 10 years ago. The result is everyone says,

 ‘Oh, that sounds creepy. That sounds like the dark web.” 

No one ever wants to talk about it, but all dark social refers to is one to one content sharing. It's dark because it's not tracked through any of the analytic platforms. Whether it's Google Analytics or the Meta package, or whatever the case may be, but there's going to be a lot more opportunity, especially because of that trust factor I mentioned earlier. Almost 70% of people say, 

‘I trust information more if it comes from someone I know’

, even if I only know that person as a social media influencer than if it comes directly from a company.

So, I would look for a lot more content partnerships where the individual putting their mark or their endorsement or simply forwarding or posting a piece of information may have that that bit of endorse. Trust that makes the recipient more comfortable with the information they're getting. But, I mean, how funky is that? That, 

‘I need my aunt to tell me this is true, because I don't trust Pfizer or J&J.’

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, identifies how uncertainty of where to find information, coupled with distrust, can damage the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and the patients they aim to serve.

Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the contributing factors growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media.

Main Contributors of Social Media Uncertainty & Distrust

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media and its impact on the pharmaceutical industry. Key contributors to this distrust include the spread of misinformation, the rise of AI-generated content, and the politicization of social media platforms. The conversation highlights the challenges faced by pharma companies in building trust with patients in this environment, including the need to combat misinformation and navigate the complexities of social media platforms.

What do you think are the main contributors behind the uncertainty/distrust in social media?

This has been building for a while, right? I think the last two political presidential election cycles have created a different awareness about social media, how content gets created, the nature of influence, the way data is used. Certainly, the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal from years back created a lot of alarm among people when they looked at content that was posted in social media and left them questioning, 

‘is this fact? Is this fiction? Is this opinion? Do I trust the source it's coming from?

’ Of course, now, with the advent of AI, you even have, 

‘do I trust that the source is actually who the source claims to be?’

There's just so much of a swirl. Unfortunately, where five or six years ago, none of the social media platforms had a very strong political bent one way or the other, now we have platforms that lean more in one direction and more in another direction. The whole notion of it being an echo chamber, it gets greatly increased, yet you have a lot of factors at play. The weirdness is, at the same time, people still trust friends and family and influencers in social media more than they trust companies in social media.

It's a really odd state of affairs and a picture that's continuing to resolve as certain things proceed here in the US. Whether it's some of the legislative things being discussed, what's going to happen to TikTok, we’ve got a lot of winds blowing here.

In this part of his Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Ian Baer, Founder & CEO of Sooth, explores the contributing factors growing distrust and uncertainty surrounding social media.  

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