I had wondered, since Publicis acquired Razorfish last year from Microsoft for $530 million, if something like this was going to happen. Razorfish’s health practice had been growing and my initial supposition was that with the acquisition, Publicis was going to fold Razorfish’s digital health practice into Digitas Health (Publicis owns Digitas, Digitas Health’s parent). But Razorfish and Publicis executives believed that the network could support two digital health agencies, according to Katy Thorbahn, senior VP, general manager, Razorfish Health.

According to Ms. Thorbahn, the impetus to separate out the healthcare business of Razorfish came last spring, when Razorfish had a change in leadership. Clark Kokich, who was CEO, moved to the chairman role, Bob Lord took over as CEO, and Dave Friedman took on the role as president of the Americas.

“As we were going through that change, Bob and Dave started to step back and look at the Razorfish business overall, and started to think about how do we think, as a brand, we can drive the most growth for our business overall and deliver the best work for our clients,” Ms. Thorbahn says. “When we took a look at that, and looked specifically at the amount of healthcare expertise we had built up, specifically in Philadelphia but also throughout the business, and started to think about the questions that clients were coming to ask us about, and the challenges that they were raising for us to solve … the landscape was pointing towards the fact that this was probably a really good time for us to verticalize the business under health. This enables us to make some different decisions around investment strategies, and talent, and all of those things to put forth a world-class digital healthcare agency, to turn loose the power of Razorfish onto that space. And ultimately, the reason that we did that was we believed that it will not only result in more innovative and business-building work for our clients, but also do the same for our business.”

When Razorfish was acquired by Publicis, the senior leadership there agreed that Razorfish Health should be separated out from Razorfish. “They [Publicis leaders] felt very excited about it and of course they’ve had some really great success in the healthcare space and felt that there was definitely some room for another strong player like us,” Mr. Thorbahn says. “Hence we got the go-forward from all the way up to Maurice [Levy, CEO of Publicis] and everyone else to stay focused on this.”

Razorfish Health is in no way a “conflict shop” for Digitas Health, Ms. Thorbahn says.

“Instead, what we’re trying to do is hold a distinct offering under the Razorfish brand for those clients who are gravitating more towards the types of things where we focus and where we bring into the market,” she says. “So for example, if you think about Razorfish, there’s a reason why we’re Razorfish Health – we’re very much growing out of the Razorfish brand and the business. Our goal there is to create experiences for our clients that build their business, and so we’re very much focused within the digital space and putting digital very much front and center and at our core, and looking at how, through insights, that we can glean about the end customer – whether that’s patient, whether that’s physician, whether that’s pharmacist – and how do we best use digital for our client’s advantage.

“That’s a little bit different than if you look at what Digitas Health is doing, where their scope right now is a bit larger, beyond that. Obviously they’re very much digital at their core, but they’re also handling more traditional work as well. In terms of how we’re working together, it’s really not that kind of a structure that we have set up, it’s more about how do we, under Publicis, have two really strong brands in the healthcare space that are digitally led and that have unique offerings for clients.”

Razorfish Health plans to be less specialized in some ways than sister agency Digitas Health, which has traditionally focused on pharma. “We obviously have a lot of pharma business, we believe that’s really important,” Ms. Thorbahn says. “But we’re also looking to be a little bit broader in healthcare, in terms of wellness brands, in terms of OTC, payors, and such.”

Another key differentiator between the two agencies is how they use digital. “Our goal there is to create experiences for our clients that build their business, and so we’re very much focused within the digital space, putting digital very much front and center and at our core,” Ms. Thorbahn says. “And looking at how, through insights, that we can glean about the end customer, whether that’s the patient, whether that’s the physician, whether that’s the pharmacist, on down the line – how do we best use digital for our client’s advantage. That’s a little bit different than if you look at what Digitas Health is doing, where their scope right now is a bit larger. Obviously they’re very much digital at their core, but they’re also handling more traditional work as well.”

According to Ms. Thorbahn, the agency has about 50 brand assignments, but due to nondisclosure agreements, can only list four clients on their Website: Aetna, the Alzheimer’s Association, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and Genentech (Razorfish designed the latter’s Website, gene.com).

Razorfish Health will continue to headquartered in Philadelphia, out of the building on North Eighth Street and Willow that also houses Shampoo, a local nightclub. “It is sort of an entertaining part of the building, particularly if we’re there late in the evenings, we get to see if it’s goth night or teen night, or techno,” Ms. Thorbahn laughs. (Editor’s note: I fully confess to have sharked a Razorfish parking spot many a time when attending events at the club.)

Razorfish Health does have offices in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, and is supporting work globally through London and Paris. But cool nightclub neighbor in Philly aside, “Long term, our goal is that Razorfish Health will have physical footprints elsewhere, both in the U.S .and globally,” Ms. Thorbahn says. “We’re going to expand our physical presence as we go along, as the business grows.”

Houston numbers 2,170 physicians across 385 sites, according to SK&A. Meanwhile, San Antonio numbers 1,607 physicians across 332 sites, Fort Worth numbers 1,029 physicians across 303 sites, and Austin numbers 974 physicians across 137 sites.

Why is this? High skin cancer rates? Dust lung? The preponderance of bull-riding injuries?

Actually, as the Wall Street Journal Health Blog reported in 2008, “In the last three years, 7,000 doctors have moved to Texas. So many doctors want to practice there that the state has had trouble keeping up with the requests for licenses.”

Due, according to this opinion piece in the WSJ, to a clampdown on damages in malpractice suits.

But these clusters are major population centers, and Texas is a big state. Despite all the doctors in places like Houston and San Antonio, The Texas Tribune reported in January that, “Dozens of rural Texas counties have no primary care doctors, no hospitals, no pharmacies. Many Texans live more than an hour from basic medical care. Some border communities have so little health care that U.S. citizens cross over into Mexico to get it.”

The article explains the discrepancy as the “payer mix” problem: “Rural Texans, who are older and poorer on average than urban Texans, are often uninsured or on Medicare. Some are undocumented, particularly along the border. They aren’t profitable patients for doctors, pharmacists or hospitals struggling to stay in business in isolated communities.”

According to this December 2009 article in The Dallas Morning News, legislators in Washington tried to make a difference by getting some relief for the rural healthcare system written into the Senate and House healthcare reform bills in the form of higher Medicare reimbursements for some rural health programs and geographic areas and added resources to recruit providers to rural areas.

With passage of healthcare reform now on the rocks, however, even that help looks uncertain. Meanwhile, nonprofit rural clinics are struggling to fill the gap.

The Partnership for Prescription Assistance is also doing what it can. A year ago today the partnership announced that its “Help is Here Express” bus tour would be making stops in various cities throughout Texas in order to help uninsured and financially-struggling Texans access information on programs that provide prescription medicines for free or nearly free.

The Partnership for Prescription Assistance is a nationwide effort sponsored by America’s pharmaceutical research companies providing a single point of access to more than 475 patient assistance programs that help those who are uninsured or struggling financially. Nearly 200 of the programs are provided by pharmaceutical companies.

To say that pharmaceutical marketers would love figure out why patients won’t take their medication on a consistent basis is like saying whales are big mammals. Getting patients to adhere to their prescriptions would yield more sales for the industry, and noncompliance is costing the industry about $100 billion a year. Yet despite many concerted efforts, patients aren’t filling their prescriptions. For example, a Massachusetts study found that 22% of prescriptions were never filled, and the rate was even higher, 28%, for first-time prescriptions. One of the theories is that for health conditions with few overt symptoms, such as heart disease and diabetes, people don’t feel the need for the medication. Cost could also be another contributing factor.

Some companies are using cellphone and e-mail apps to give medication reminders to patients. But as Jonathan Richman of Bridge Worldwide says at his blog Dose of Digital, “Are you reminding me, or annoying me?” In evaluating some of these apps, he found most of the reminder programs to be annoying. “They are annoying because they aren’t smart and don’t learn from your actions (or lack of actions),” he explains.

Are these programs increasing compliance? Perhaps incrementally, but marketers are willing to take an incremental increase, because a little bit of $100 billion is better than nothing at all.

Yet, as Mr. Richman points out, so many of these apps and devices are “glorified alarm clocks.” Can’t the pharmaceutical industry do any better?

I believe it can and it will, and social media can help reveal some of the pieces to the adherence puzzle. I hope the panel I’m moderating provides interesting insights and suggestions on some ways social media can be applied to the medication adherence problem. But I also believe that the more pharma looks into this problem, the answers the industry will receive will be a little surprising, and the problems may be in parts of the healthcare system that pharma seemingly has very little ability to influence.

For example, take a typical prescription-filling experience. I have never been able to get my local pharmacy to fill any prescription that I have brought in, in anything less than an hour. That goes for even the few that a doctor was able to phone in. For a person with a chronic disease, how much of their time gets taken up in pharmacy visits? How many times have they had to cut out early from work, cut short an enjoyable activity, to rush to a pharmacy and get a prescription filled?

And for those who receive prescriptions through the mail, there’s another unique stress, as someone has to be around to sign for the package (especially if it’s a biologic). Although receiving drugs by mail is great for retirees, it’s not so great for people who head off to work early in the morning and don’t return until late in the evening, and can’t necessarily rely on the neighbors to sign for stuff.

Additionally, to get refills on many medicines, a doctor may want the patient to come in for an appointment and a consultation. This is only proper, and for drugs that may require monitoring for liver function or depression or other side effects, absolutely necessary. But if the medication is due to run out in a week or a few days, and the only appointment available is two weeks from then (because patients who are out-and-out sick take priority), then what is the likelihood that the patient will take the steps to get your refill? For some patients, these chances are much less than they were before.

Mr. Richman was also quite puzzled by the attitudes of cancer patients who wouldn’t take their medicines. He believes that these patients are just not “forgetting” to take their Gleevec or Arimidex. In a way, I believe he is right. And in another way, I believe he is wrong.

I believe that the cancer patients can get neglectful or “forgetful” because of their longing for normalcy. Anything that reminds them of how fragile that normalcy is – like having to stand around in a pharmacy waiting for yet another refill, get up extra early on a day when they planned to sleep in to sit in a doctor’s office or hospital waiting room for treatment or testing, endlessly negotiate around everyday or enjoyable activities – can be another twist of the knife, reminding them of the crisis that led them to be on some medication for weeks or months or the rest of their lives. In the months and years after recovery, time softens the memories of that hell they had to go through, but having to plan around obtaining the medicine they need to keep themselves alive, the additional doctors’ appointments, having to ask for yet another day off for a doctor or lab appointment after they’ve just gotten back to work, are diggingly sharp reminders that their lives will never be quite normal again.

As for those diabetes and heart disease patients who may feel relatively OK, the longing for normalcy can also apply to them. It’s so easy not to do something that reminds us of unpleasant times and Americans in general have absolutely no threshold for inconvenience. And I haven’t even brought up the challenges and obstacles thrown in front of patients by insurance companies. Go ahead and ask around; I bet everyone you know has a horror story or saga of irritation to share.

In the end, social media may help the pharma industry figure out the complex psychology and needs of each patient, and help create individual, tailor-made adherence programs for them. Social media may help companies focus less on the brand and more on the patient. That’s the goal, at least. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to more discussion on March 16 in Philadelphia.

“Frank was a pioneer in our industry, a legend, a leader for the ages. More importantly, he was a professional, a true gentleman,” says Scott D. Cotherman, CEO, Corbett Accel Healthcare Group. “His passion and drive for our industry was evident in all that he accomplished throughout his academic and professional careers.”

Mr. Corbett’s successes were recognized with the industry’s highest honor in 1998 when he was inducted into the Medical Advertising Hall of Fame after retiring the previous year. The organization has established a tribute Website to celebrate and preserve the legacy of its founder. Employees within Kinect, a business unit within the Corbett Accel Healthcare Group network, designed and developed the Web site.

This site commemorates Mr. Corbett’s life and accomplishments and presents the opportunity to submit a personal tribute about Frank for consideration and posting to the site, as well as the opportunity to provide a donation to the Michael J. Fox Foundation, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to finding a cure for Parkinson’s disease through an aggressively funded research agenda. Mr. Corbett suffered from Parkinson’s disease.

Mr. Corbett began his career in the healthcare market after earning his degree in pharmacy from Columbia University in 1938. Corbett’s subsequent accomplishments in pharmaceuticals and marketing eventually led him to establish Frank J. Corbett Inc. in 1962 with his wife Dolores as his creative director and partner. With Mr. Corbett’s leadership playing a key role, the Corbett agency helped develop brands, such as Keri Lotion and Fostex for Westwood, Synthroid for Flint, and Bronchometer for Breon.

In the past, healthcare has followed consumer-marketing trends. Although the only major healthcare recall headliner so far in 2010 has been Johnson & Johnson/McNeil Consumer Healthcare’s massive recall of OTC drugs including Tylenol, Motrin, and St. Joseph’s aspirin because of a moldy smell that made people ill, there has also been the banning of Abbott Laboratories‘ controversial obesity drug Reductil across Europe due to cardiovascular safety concerns; Nipro Medical Corp.’s voluntary recall of All GlucoPro Insulin Syringes; the Class I recall of ev3 Endovascular Inc.’s Trailblazer Support Catheter; and BD’s worldwide voluntary recall of BD Q-Syte Luer Access Devices and BD Nexiva Closed IV Catheter Systems.

So, being the marketing-minded pharma gal that I am, of course, my first question was: ‘Where are all the pharmaceutical recall incentives?’

The Med Ad News Insider corresponded with Rob Peters, VP, professional strategy, MicroMass Communications Inc., and Nancy Drescher, VP, account director, AbelsonTaylor, to glean healthcare ad agency insight into the idea of pharmaceutical recall incentives.

According to Mr. Peters, with increased publicity on product recalls — whether in consumer goods or pharmaceuticals — the question of whether competitors can use the situation exists.

In the pharmaceutical industry, this has already been occurring, though in a much less visible way than the GM example, he says. In most cases, short-term gains may be possible, but those often come at the expense of higher scrutiny on remaining products and more difficult market entry for developmental compounds.

There are several reasons why branded products disappear from the market. Usually this is the result of patent expiry or a withdrawal related to a negative event or safety concern. When something like this happens, remaining market competitors may be able to use the situation to their advantage. Mr. Peters believes as a result of the complexity of FDA and regulatory issues, however, competitors can not usually adapt quickly enough to take advantage of the immediate situation, but can change strategy to accommodate the new market dynamic that evolves in the wake of the withdrawal.

Competitors faced with this opportunity have to assess whether there are actions they can take, or whether they should let market forces work on their own. If the withdrawal of a product results in a small market with little competition, remaining players may choose to stay the course.

“For example, when Novartis’s Zelnorm was taken off the market, Takeda’s Amitiza was suddenly the biggest branded player in the IBS market,” Mr. Peters told the Med Ad News Insider. “Since HCPs and patients had few other options, Takeda let market forces turn the tide rather than to respond.”

On the other hand, he says, if a highly competitive market remains, a company may react by shifting the messaging to focus on other competitors to establish its points of differentiation. In some cases, this may necessitate a company’s distancing itself from any perceived class effects before differentiating.

“When Vioxx was pulled from the market, for example, the response from Celebrex was not to also pull its product from the market, but to stop promotion, ride it out, and then come back with stronger language around the appropriate patients and the safety concerns for Celebrex,” Mr. Peters says.

In a similar manner, when the statin Baycol was taken off the market in 2001, safety became a more sensitive issue for competitors, and as a result, a point of differentiation in promotion. This was beneficial for in-market products, but made entry of later competitors like Crestor more difficult.

In certain cases, regulatory bodies play a key role in opening opportunities for potential gain. Recently, Genzyme’s manufacturing problems with Cerezyme prompted FDA to ask Shire and Protalix to submit new drug applications for their experimental drugs so that physicians could use them before formal approval. Shire and Protalix will likely benefit from that action, but there is nothing they themselves can initiate.

Patent expiry presents another interesting opportunity for companies to profit from a branded product leaving the market. In these situations, branded companies may choose to enter into a supplier partnership with a generic company and provide product in return for a greatly reduced, but enduring, profit. One example of this may be seen in a current online campaign by Merck in the hypertension market.

“The campaign is aimed at informing HCPs about the impending generic form of Cozaar, however, the campaign includes a message recommending that patients be put on branded product so that they can continue uninterrupted use of the drug—and at a lower price—once generics are available this spring,” Mr. Peters says.

Two possibilities exist for this strategy: 1) Merck may be trying to head off another drug from that class that goes generic a few months before they do,or 2) the company may have an agreement with a generic supplier to manufacture its drug.

Ms. Drescher says there have been examples of products and companies in the pharmaceutical space benefiting from the misfortune of competitors. The actions taken in response to the negative press associated with pharmaceutical brands, however, have typically come from other players in the space versus the pharmaceutical companies themselves.

“The most recent analog that best mirrors this example is the failure of Vytorin/Zetia to affect atherosclerosis progression by failing to slow the growth of plaque in the carotid arteries in the ENHANCE trial,” Ms. Drescher explains.

Soon after, Vytorin/Zetia suffered another blow when the SEAS trial delivered disappointing results. Not only did the brand fail to affect outcomes in aortic stenosis patients, there was an observed increase in the risk of cancer.

“Physicians were quick to turn to generic simvastatin as a result,” Ms. Drescher says. “Astra Zeneca’s Crestor also benefited as the product was already indicated for the treatment of atherosclerosis and had just demonstrated an impact on cardiovascular outcomes in the JUPITER trial. Managed care companies were additionally quick to promote the lower cost — and lower co-pay — alternative simvastatin directly to patients in their plans taking Vytorin and Zetia.

Ms. Drescher cites an example that dates back to the ’90s, which took place in the highly competitive antihistamine market. Claritin had been held up for review for several years with FDA. With Seldane on the market and Hismanal already under review, FDA viewed Claritin as a me-too drug. It was classified as a low priority review, calling into question its efficacy — which was slightly better than placebo — and safety — concern with increased liver tumors in animals — given the two other nonsedating alternatives.

When serious cardiovascular adverse events were reported with Seldane, FDA required Dear Doctor letters to be issued regarding its impact on QT interval prolongation and ventricular arrythmias. As the number of incidences increased, FDA updated the Seldane and Hismanal labels and required their promotions and packaging to include a black box warning. In addition, the agency recognized the benefit of having an alternate safe, nonsedating antihistamine on the market, and approved Claritin not long after.

“Given the negative publicity around Seldane and Hismanal, physicians and patients turned to Claritin and it quickly became the market leader,” Ms. Drescher says.

In both cases, other forces — whether physician, patient, managed care or FDA — were responsible for pushing a competitive brand, she says. In the case of branded competitors, the pharmaceutical companies used promotions and messaging to reinforce their brand benefits, but the push, and desire, for an alternate choice was already in play.

“In the case of generics, managed care organizations typically have the most to gain from a move to a generic competitor, so they tend employ aggressive marketing tactics to generate a switch,” Ms. Drescher says.

“The agency’s perfectly positioned to build on its unique blend of direct marketing, cutting-edge digital expertise and deep knowledge and experience in healthcare to deliver efficient, effective solutions that build brands and optimize marketing results,” Mr. Bolling says. “Dynamic market forces create the perfect springboard for Roska Healthcare to leverage the agency’s hallmark strategy to create programs that push beyond just building awareness to generating acceptance and sparking action and lasting behavior change.”

Mr. Roska founded the agency as a direct marketing firm in 1981. Mr. Bolling joined the team in 1993. Since then, the company has grown into a full-service healthcare advertising agency. Roska Healthcare acquired digital shop Mueller & Wister in 2008. Kurt Mueller is leading Roska Healthcare’s digital expansion as the agency’s chief digital and science officer. Craig Little is general manager and head of client services.

Look for an interview with Mr. Bolling about the transition and the future direction of Roska Healthcare in this space soon.

The Website features the network’s culture, family of agencies, knowledge, and a showcase. A news section visually profiles their awards and features employee news, business news, and some food for thought. The network even playfully leads into its own “code of conduct.”

Most intriguing to me, personally, is the whimsical design of its text.

Each line to the point.

Tight like a prose poem.

Here is a taste of the CommonHealth Home page…

According to CommonHealth executives, this entirely new Website is revamped to better reflect who they are as a company. The navigation is simple and reads in column form, a bit like a newspaper. Many Websites present copy and images in scroll-down form, but this form of navigation is unexpected and helps suggest a sense of depth to CommonHealth’s story.

Although the animations are meant to be fun and whimsical, all have a definite purpose for being. The Website is a hybrid site — with Flash and HTML — with motion-capture technology used to bring the stick figure to life.

CommonHealth’s in-house interactive group, Qi, did all of the creation and production. It was a team effort with many individuals putting countless hours in after the clock to bring this Website to life. Beth Paulino, senior VP, director of corporate communications and public relations, provided the strategic direction. Scott Watson, executive VP, group chief creative officer, CommonHealth, handled the creative direction.

“Our priority is always about meeting the needs of our clients so often the site took a back burner to client-focused work,” CommonHealth executives told Med Ad News. “It took a little longer to develop than we’d typically want — about six months. You know what they say about the cobbler’s kids and their shoes…!”

CommonHealth’s intent with the new Website is to engage the viewer, not overwhelm them, while other companies are trying to impress and over-communicate their offerings. CommonHealth executives believe that after a while it all begins to look the same.

“We believe if you can cut through the clutter, it’s easier for people to hear what you have to say,” executives say. “To develop a site like this, one that speaks to your offerings as an organization, communicating in a clear, concise, yet creative way that engages the viewer on a personal level – it’s almost like a whisper that rises above the din. That’s the intent, at least – to eliminate the excess so the message can stand out.”

“Entering the second decade of the 21st century, the imperative to take a human-centered approach in everything rings loud,” Ms. Hoenig-Carlson says. “This means getting inspired by people; especially those who share the condition which we seek to improve, and adopting a more collaborative and engaging orientation. Excelling in a patient-centered world requires that we observe and dialogue with customers in their real-life environments.”

Six key themes emerged in the book:

1) e-Patients are at the center and critical to learning and design;

2) Authenticity isn’t a “nice to do”, but a “must have”;

3) Don’t get distracted by social media bells and whistles – remember the basics (especially SEO) and keep your brand core strong;

4) The marketing cycle of life is going through unprecedented change requiring the industry to unlearn much – movement from paid marketing to earned marketing requires a different mindset and skills;

5) New marketing requires new ROI thinking…the ROI of connection, authenticity and compassion; and

6) Effective marketing and engagement requires new kinds of leadership skills.

According to Ms. Hoenig-Carlson, the early response to the book has been positive. “We’re seeing continued interest as healthcare marketers dig into complex change,” she says. “Social media, e-patients, consumers, and healthcare organizations continue to converge online, and brands are challenged to find a new voice and new online roles.”

The e-book is posted on the AdvanceMarketWoRx site at: http://bit.ly/5kuxO5.

This past Thursday, we received an e-mail teaser previewing the launch of Pixels & Pills, a joint service offering by Zemoga and Palio. The offering was “designed to fulfill the pharmaceutical industry’s demand for digital communications strategies combined with expertise on regulatory compliance issues.”

My response was a loud yawn. We’re always getting press releases about new digital agencies, new digital partnerships, new digital this or that or the other thing, and none of them seem very different from the rest. So I thought no more about it.

Then, yesterday, we found out about Pixels & Pills’ little science project, The Health Tweeder. And in about the amount of time it takes a Manhattan cabbie to honk at you after the light turns green, I knew that this was serious business.

In the words of its creators, Health Tweeder “aggregates Twitter content on various disease states. Using the laboratory that is social media and Twitter, we’re visually and metaphorically using petri dishes to culture cells of dialogue on specific disease states. Each cell in a petri dish represents a distinct tweet that has been gathered using relevant disease search terms, hashtags, and people we’ve identified to follow. Growing and shrinking based on the volume of content at any one time, each dish, and all of them combined, provide a dynamic view of disease state dialogue in real time.”

Social media is the buzzword of the year in pharma marketing. I spend a lot of time volunteering with a college organization, and the 18-year-olds I work with there spend less time talking about social media than pharma marketers do. They just spend time actually using it – and that’s the big difference.

Here, though, we have a creative, visually interesting, and actually useful experiment in social media monitoring. And it, the bigwigs say, is only the beginning.

“We’re currently working on a couple of projects that revolve around semantic filtering of content,” DJ Edgerton, the CEO of Zemoga and a co-founder of Pixels & Pills, told us. “So if a user goes into a site, I’ll use Facebook for an example, and acknowledges terms and conditions of interaction and provides us with contact information, that individual is allowed to participate in a conversation on a Facebook wall post. Any wall post will go through an algorithm and an application that is pre-built with a myriad of warning signs and flags for adverse event reporting, et cetera.

“And this is a very, very large database; it’s like a conversational scrubbing tool. The tool allows a post to either be presented immediately on a Facebook wall or be responded to with an auto response that addresses a particular concern and then flagged another way, or it gets put in a queue for human intervention. Currently, either wall posts are not allowed or Twitter feeds are not allowed at all because nobody wants to manage it and it’s too much of a bear – or the monitoring is such a slow process, days in some cases, that the novelty and the immediacy of social media and the conversation dies. It’s that regular customer service immediacy that people are looking for. What we’re hoping to do is build applications for customers that take a little of the weight off their shoulders in managing that conversation and reducing the risk as much as possible.”

Health Tweeder, DJ told us, was created for a long list of reasons…but mostly because it was fun and interesting and a great way to stretch the muscles and show off the abilities of the Palio/Zemoga collaboration. His fellow co-founder, Palio president Mike Myers, agreed.

“This is an exemplification and illustration of the type of work we can do and the type of thinking we’re bringing to the marketplace,” Mike told us. “So in many ways the monetization of it comes through our ability to use it to illustrate what we can do and what we can deliver for customers. We looked at this as something that would have value to the market, that we would continue to work with, that we were building, frankly, to have something to play with, because we thought it was interesting. It’s something to demonstrate who we are and what we can do.”

To this I say – thank you. In the torrent of words that pours out of our industry every day about “uniqueness” and “core competencies” and Lord knows what else, here we have something creative and cutting-edge and interesting in its own right.

Speaking of things that are interesting in their own right, our editor in chief Chris Truelove’s interview with DJ Edgerton and Mike Myers about Health Tweeder and Pixels & Pills will be appearing as an online extra to an article on the subject in the Interactive & Digital Marketing section of the March issue of Med Ad News. How’s that for a tease?

A lot of press releases stream into my e-mail inbox. Some of them are interesting, some of them relevant, some of them both. Like many journalists, I hit my delete key a lot.

One from the Marketing Research Association nearly went into electronic limbo, until I caught that quote, from Howard Fienberg, the association’s director of government affairs. Mr. Fienberg was in Minnesota on Monday testifying on this measure, H.F. 1641, which would put medical device manufacturers under the same restriction as pharmaceutical companies when it comes to banning gifts to medical practitioners and requiring disclosure of payments made by pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers.

“Thanks to a vaguely crafted law and misguided interpretations, Minnesota is a dead zone for pharmaceutical marketing research with health care practitioners,” Mr. Fienberg says. “The legislation being considered, H.F. 1641, would shift the regulatory authority and expand that dead zone to medical device research.”

According to the MRA, “Even a change that would allow such payments to practitioners but require them to be publicly reported would not likely change the status quo for research. Pharmaceutical and medical device companies have stopped doing research in states with even the most rudimentary reporting requirements. To date, the only exception has been Massachusetts, where MRA won an explicit exclusion for marketing research in regulations last year.”

It’s not the first time MRA has lobbied against market research restrictions at the state level. Last October asked Maine’s Joint Standing Committee on Judiciary to exempt survey and opinion research from tthe Prevent Predatory Marketing Practices against Minors Act. The law, aimed at protecting minors in Maine under 18 years old, prohibits any transfer of their personally identifiable information, for any purpose, regardless of any parental consent. This, of course, prohibits health-related information.

But what’s this at the bottom of the release? “Diurea grindable farm neighborship superadiabatic ypserver. Debris leveller spinach hydrotherapeutics isolable, epoxy!” And then about 200 live links to things such as Thai stock traders and illicit online pharmacies.

It’s not particularly reassuring to imply to legislators that you can keep minors’ personally identifiable information safe, yet your industry’s own site is hacked. Ah, delicious, delicious irony.