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Articles

In this Q&A, Organon's Chief Communications Officer, Becky Edwards discusses how much social media and influencers sway decisions about birth control methods, potential consequences of these misinformed choices, and more.

Social Media's Influence on Young Women's Reproductive Decisions

 podcast, Jennifer Butler, chief commercial officer of Pleio, discusses:

The threat of misinformation to public health and how emotional appeal plays a part.

Where patients are turning for trustworthy health information.

Strategies that can be used to verify information.

Pharma's role in helping to ensure patients have access to health insights they can trust.

Why the industry is turning to peer-to-patient platforms, trusted patient communities, and pharmacies to educate patients.

What kind of role regulatory agencies should play in the battle against misinformation.

Podcasts

Jennifer Butler, chief commercial officer of Pleio, discusses misinformation's threat to public health, where patients are turning for trustworthy health information, the industry's pivot to peer-to-patient strategies to educate patients, and more.

The Misinformation Maze: Navigating Public Health in the Digital Age

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

Why people trust friends and influencers over companies

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.

Navigating Distrust: Pharma in the Age of Social Media

Sonam Dubey, a partner at Beghou Consulting, discusses the potential impact of a possible ban on direct-to-consumer advertising amid policy and government agency overhauls in the US.


The Future of DTC in Pharma

The I LUVY YA for The Long Haul campaign features stories about the emotional impact of the disease.

Art Garfunkel Leads Sun Pharma’s Psoriasis Campaign

The line-up consists of supplements to meet the health needs to patients taking GLP-1 medications for weight loss.

The Vitamin Shoppe Launches GLP-1 Inspired Line of Supplements

Novo Nordisk Expands Discounted Access to Wegovy

eHealth’s latest survey reveals Americans give the nation’s healthcare system a low grade and are open to significant changes.

New Survey Says Americans Choose Between Healthcare and Basic Necessities

Amy Hessels, Bayer‘s vice president of marketing, discusses how their "Your Decision" campaign aims to combat online misinformation about birth control by providing accurate, reliable information and empowering women to discuss their options with healthcare providers.

Effectively Cutting Through the Misinformation Noise: Bayer’s "Your Decision" Campaign

Amy Hessels, Bayer‘s vice president of marketing, discusses how the Your Decision campaign aims to combat online misinformation about birth control by providing accurate, reliable information and empowering women to discuss their options with healthcare providers. The multi-channel approach includes TV ads, social media, and partnerships with women's health outlets. Hessels explains how Bayer provides resources like patient brochures and online educational content to facilitate open discussions between patients and HCPs. Bayer also collaborates with influential voices to ensure credibility and aligns content with the latest medical research.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How does Bayer plan to ensure the Your Decision campaign effectively cuts through the noise and establishes itself as a trusted source of information for women seeking clarity on their reproductive health options?


 At Bayer Women's Healthcare, we recognize the growing challenge of online misinformation, especially when it comes to reproductive health. That's why Your Decision is really designed to be more than just a campaign. We hope women will see it as a trusted resource. We're leveraging partnerships with HCPs, voices of women, and utilizing different marketing insights to ensure women receive accurate information about their birth control options, like Mirena, while informing and empowering women to discuss their options in an open and honest way with their providers.

PE: How is Bayer measuring the effectiveness of each channel in driving engagement and ultimately, encouraging women to have informed conversations with their healthcare providers?


 We try to take a data driven approach to measuring impact of the impact of all of our campaigns, but specifically the Your Decision campaign, across all our channels. We track key engagement metrics like website traffic, social media interactions, sponsored and earned media, impressions, reach, DTC ad video views, viewership, and more to really understand how women are interacting with our resources and how they're also responding as well.

Beyond just the digital analytics, we will assess sentiment and direct feedback. We're going to monitor uptick in patient conversations and questions related to birth control through collaboration with some of our trusted sales force, helping us really refine our approach based on real insights and impact in real time. Our goal overall is really to ensure that women who engage with Your Decision feel more informed and empowered to have the best meaningful discussions with their providers.

Videos

Amy Hessels, vice president of marketing, Bayer, discusses how its Your Decision campaign tackles misinformation about reproductive health by providing the information to empower women to discuss options with healthcare providers. 

Effectively Cutting Through the Misinformation Noise: Bayer’s Your Decision Campaign

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.

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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