April 8, 2013
Healthcare ad on FaceBook’s homepage
There is more to FaceBook advertising than just the typical ads that you see on your profile's homepage, or sponsored stories. In March 2013, targeted Canadians got to see a healthcare ad right on FaceBook's front homepage. I hope we will see more of these.
March 1, 2012
An overview of recent Canadian pharma ads on FaceBook
Less than 2 years ago, I got very excited when I saw a Canadian pharma ad on my FaceBook profile. It was the first Canadian pharma ad that I had personally ever seen on FaceBook. You can read my post about it here.
We sure have come a long way since then. Throughout 2011 and so far in 2012, I have spotted several ads on my FaceBook profile, by Canadian pharmaceutical companies. In fact, Pfizer Canada might be the first Canadian pharma company to advertise a Schedule F prescription drug name on FaceBook. In Canada, pharmaceutical companies must follow very restrictive Rx-DTC (direct-to-consumer) guidelines. The only things that can be mentioned in the public regarding Schedule F Rx products are product name, price and quantity. The ad below complies with the regulations.
GlaxoSmithKline Canada promoted their vaccine Cervarix via FaceBook ads back in Q4 2011. Although the product name and disease state appear in the ad, it complies with Health Canada's Rx-DTC regulations because Cervarix is a schedule D drug, and it is not promoting a schedule A disease.
Now Midol might not be a prescription drug, but it belongs to Bayer which is a pharmaceutical company, so I think that they deserve kudos for entering the social media advertisement arena. The Midol FaceBook ads were very consumer-savvy, offering a prize and driving traffic to their site by offering entertainment in the form of punishment on the man in the ad - it doesn't sound very nice, but I saw the site and I did not find it offensive at all. It was all in the name of fun.
The rest of the FaceBook ads by Canadian pharma companies that I saw on my profile were all to help raise awareness of certain disease states. As long as no brand name is mentioned, this is a completely acceptable form of promotion according to Health Canada.
There might have been ads targeted to men, or younger / older audience, or other demographic that did not fit my profile, so this is by no means a complete inventory of Canadian pharma ads on FaceBook. If you have seen other FaceBook ads by Canadian pharma, let us know in the comments section. If you happen to have a picture, e-mail it to me and I will gladly add it to the post and give you credit for having found it.
February 1, 2011
Healthcare Engagement Strategy Awards: Case Studies
On January 31 2011, Daniel Ghinn announced the 2011 winners of the Healthcare Engagement Strategy (HES) awards. The list is below. I encourage you to click on the links to each of the case studies as Daniel and the judging panel have done a wonderful job of putting together some well thought-out insights for each, including some lessons learned by the award winners:
Unlocking Public Health Award
Embarrassing Bodies; Maverick Television for Channel 4
Patient Empowerment Award
Can You Feel My Pain; Pfizer with European Patient Groups
Connecting Patients Award
The Diabetes Hands Foundation
Engaging Patients Award
Psoriasis 360; Janssen
People Power Award
Born HIV Free; The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria
Emerging Star of Healthcare Engagement Award
CureTogether
People in Healthcare Engagement Award
Dave deBronkart / Alex Butler / Sabine Kostevc
Remarkable Healthcare Engagement Channel Award
SMS Text Messaging – Text to Change / Text4Baby / Indian Blood Donors
All of the award winners are fantastic and deserve to be recognized as healthcare social media leaders. If I had to choose a favorite, I would select Psoriasis 360 by Janssen. It is a new site (3 months) and has already helped thousands of patients, many of which seem to be very engaged. Patients can benefit from the main site, a FaceBook page, and an iPhone app. I was surprised to learn that Janssen is allowing patients to write comments on their FaceBook wall, and these are only moderated after the fact. Only 4 of the first 100 comments had to be removed due to inappropriate content or regulatory issues.
See Daniel’s blog post (2011 winners of the Healthcare Engagement Strategy (HES) awards) for more details, and also for a link to a thought-provoking post on the 3 success factors that all of the HES winners share.
Congratulations to all the HES winners, and to Daniel for hosting the awards.
Of all the Healthcare Engagement Strategy award winners, which is your favorite and why? Leave me a comment below.
Stay in touch,
Natalie
Connect with me on the following networks:
December 13, 2010
A wicked social media initiative by McNeil Consumer Healthcare (Division of Johnson and Johnson)
If you suffer from pain, are you inclined to see laughter as the best medicine? McNeil Consumer Healthcare (a division of J&J) is counting on it. McNeil Consumer Healthcare is the Canadian distributor of Motrin®, pain relief over-the-counter medication. On Thursday December 2nd 2010, a new Motrin® Canada FaceBook page was launched. At the moment, the main promoted feature of the page is an app called "The Wicked Pain-Poker". I was fascinated by this creative use of social media by a Canadian healthcare organization, so I joined the page 2 days after its launch, and I was the 170th person to 'like' the page. As of Sunday December 12th 2010, there were 1,046 members of this new community.
The Motrin® Canada page is being promoted, with a focus on the Wicked Pain-Poker app. It appears to be heavily promoted on FaceBook. So far, I have seen three variations of the "Motrin® Wicked Pain-Poker" ad on FaceBook, and an ad for the Motrin® Canada page seems to appear on my FaceBook profile every time I log on (and I log on several times per day). I also saw an interactive ad on Yahoo Canada. The ads all caught my attention very quickly - they are colourful, with an interesting voodoo doll, and the copy peaks your curiosity. The interactive Yahoo ad may be a bit violent for some people's taste, but these people are probably not the target market for the Wicked Pain-Poker app on the Motrin® Canada page (and they would definitely not like using the app itself).
[caption id="attachment_1588" align="aligncenter" width="468" caption="FaceBook ads for Motrin Canada FaceBook page - December 2010"]
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[caption id="attachment_1589" align="aligncenter" width="468" caption="Interactive Yahoo Canada ad for Motrin Canada FaceBook page - December 2010"]
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There was no promotion of the FaceBook page on the Canadian Motrin® site itself. The site looks a little outdated (customer comments all date from 2003 and the special offer that is promoted is no longer available), so promoting their social media activities may not be a priority for the organization at this time.
Once you click on one of the ads, you are brought to the Motrin® Canada FaceBook page, on the Wicked Pain-Poker app tab.
Then you select which friend you want to poke, crop their photo in the 'face' of the voodoo doll, identify whether it is a male or female, ... and then you get to poke the doll wherever you want.
SPOILER ALERT - do not continue to read if you want to find out by yourself what happens once you poke the doll, but please come back to tell us what you think though.
From what I could see, there are 3 variations of outcomes depending on where you poke the doll: A) if you poke in the head, a piano drops on the doll, B) if you poke in the torso, a shark eats the doll's arm (same as in the Yahoo Canada ad), and C) if you poke in the legs, a pinata donkey charges at the doll and makes the doll fall.
Ouch ouch ouch !!! Once the poke outcome is completed, you have the choice of sending the pain poke to your friend or not. So if you had a lot of fun inflicting pain on one of your FaceBook friends and then get a guilty conscious that maybe this person might not appreciate the joke, the person will not know unless you send them the message. Maybe I am being naive, but my bet is that most people will have fun with the app to see the different outcomes, but they won't send it to their friends. Would you send it? I am not sure that I would. But if you do decide to let your friend know that you have poked them, you can write a personalized note.
You will notice that at the bottom right corner, there is an offer for $5 off Motrin®. Just that might be enough to get some people interested in checking out the Wicked Pain-Poker app.
Community rules and monitoring: Now although this is meant for fun, McNeil Consumer Healthcare takes the management and monitoring of the Motrin® Canada FaceBook page very seriously. Members of the community may post statements and comments on the Wall, and they can also 'Like' posts, but there are rules that members must to follow. See the rules below. You will notice that members are asked not to post adverse reactions /events while using a particular product. The organization is very clear that if adverse reactions / events are posted on the page that they will be disclosed to the appropriate authorities, including member's name :
The posts made by members of the community have been minimal so far, but in fairness, the site is only 10 days old at the time of writing this article. There have been several posts that fall within the "I love this page" category, and 1 post from an offended pain sufferer. As the number of posts grow, we will see how the community members truly feel about the page. Motrin® Canada has so far only written 2 posts themselves, and have not commented on any of the members' posts yet. It is still early to see what type of engagement will fall out of the Motrin® Canada page, but I certainly look forward to watching it unfold.
My guess is that the target audience for the Wicked Pain-Poker is somebody who experiences pain on occasion, or maybe not at all (at least not yet, with the hopes that if they ever do, that Motrin® will be the brand that comes to mind first). Chonic pain sufferers might be more apt to find the application too offensive, and they could feel ridiculed. Although this has not been confirmed, my assumption is that the organization is prepared to respond appropriately if the Wicket Pain-Poker app gets too much negative feedback from pain sufferers based on J&J's previous (and very public) experience with the Motrin® Moms situation. Other Motrin® Moms case study resourcer here.
What is the strategy of the Motrin® Canada FaceBook page? According to David Akermanis, Producer/DJ. Account Manager, Health at Edelman, the strategy is to reinforce the brand’s position as the pain reliever that ‘targets your pain’. The Motrin® Wicked Pain-Poker Application is a fun and light-hearted way to bring that positioning to life.
Is this the first time that Motrin has been involved in light hearted jabs at pain? No way! You might recall the Motrin® Wickedest Wipeouts Contest which was held earlier this year. According to David Akermanis, the Wipeouts Canada contest really emphasized the passion with which Canadians are engaging online. As such, McNeil Consumer Healthcare wanted to take that a step further by starting the Motrin® Canada Facebook Page. David also states that although the Motrin® Canada Facebook Page is the only Canadian Motrin social media property at this point, there are additional opportunities that the Motrin® team is looking at for 2011.
Agencies involved: TAXI developed the Motrin® Canada Facebook Page and the Motrin® Wicked Pain-Poker Application, Edelman is responsible for community management/measurement and J3 Canada is responsible for the online media buy.
Many thanks to David Akermanis, Producer/DJ. Account Manager, Health at Edelman, and Rachel Segal, Consumer Marketing Account Director at Edelman for their help in answering some of my questions about this case study.
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Despite the fact that the Motrin® Canada Wicked Pain-Poker app is meant for fun, pain is a very serious issue that affects many Canadians. The Canadian Pain Coalition reports that 17% to 31% of the general community report chronic pain. Hopefully it is true that laughter is the best medicine and that some pain sufferers can relieve a bit of their pain for at least a moment or so by being a member of the Motrin® Canada FaceBook page.
I encourage you to join the Motrin® Canada FaceBook page and test out the Wicked Pain-Poker app.
Do you want to test the Wicket Pain-Poker app without risk of insulting any of your FaceBook friends? Then feel free to use me as your guinea pig - I won't take offense. You can find me on FaceBook here . Seriously - go ahead!
What do you think of the Motrin ® Canada FaceBook page and the Wicked Pain-Poker app? Is McNeil Consumer Healthcare targeting the right audience with this tactic to drive their business?
Stay in touch,
Natalie
Connect with me on the following networks:
FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn
December 2, 2010
FaceBook Healthcare-Related Ads (November 2010)
Here are some of the healthcare-related ads that were targeted to my personal profile on FaceBook during the month of November 2010. All previous posts on FaceBook healthcare-related ads that targeted my FaceBook profile can be found here.
FaceBook ads stats feature of the month: Comscore.com reported that from July-September 2010, FaceBook had the top online ad impressions at 297 billion. This represented over 23% of the online display advertising market. I would like to know how many of these ads appeared on FaceBook profile pages (many of the ads that I post in my blog come from the FaceBook ad board, and not from my profile page) and how many clicks they got.
This month, I will comment on the 'Will Grandma die' FaceBook ad. I am just one person, and my opinion on this ad is my own. Others may have a similar or different opinion based on their experience and their personal preferences. Therefore, I encourage you to add your feedback on this particular ad as well, whether you like it or not, or on any of the other ads included in this post as well.
I was drawn to comment on the 'Will Grandma die' ad because I am familiar with VirtualHospice.ca's unique and much needed services. I like this particular ad very much because it targets an audience that may not be in an emotional state to search out this type of service, yet they could benefit so much from it. Therefore, having an emotionally-charged ad flashed in front of them while they are on FaceBook, one that may hit home with the viewer, seems like an effective way to get the right person's attention. The title and text are well crafted in a simple yet very clear fashion. The chosen image complements the copy very well. In its entirety, this ad tells an emotional story quite effectively. There is no branding of VirtualHospice.ca in the ad, but this is not what is important to their target audience.
Also, although there are no words that spell out the call-to-action, it is evident that the organization is trying to drive traffic to its website as the website is clearly listed below the copy.
In my opinion, VirtualHospice.ca did a fantastic job with this ad.
Here are other ads that appeared on my FaceBook profile over the month of November. Note: Ddrops and Kidney Cancer Canada are clients.
Every once in a while, I see a non-FaceBook online healthcare-related ad that catches my interest. I capture these in my FaceBook healthcare-related ads post as added value to you, the reader.
The GSK ad was found on the paper.li e-newspaper by Ddrops Company (client), Canadian-Mom-Bloggers. For those not familiar with the paper.li e-newsletters, the posts and ads are automatically selected via the paper.li process. The hosting organization has no control over what articles or ads appear. The only control that the hosting organization has is either the Twitter hashtag that will be focused on, or the Twitter list. I am a fan of paper.li e-newsletters, but I do wish that more prominence would be given to the originator of the article, and less to the person who posted it (but that's another topic).
The other two were Yahoo ads.
Tell me what you think of these ads in the comments below.
Stay in touch,
Natalie
Connect with me on the following networks:
FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn
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