This is crowd sourcing in a small way, implemented by the FDA through an unusual approach. Always known as being overloaded and understaffed, the FDA has established the “Bad Ad Program” in which it has asked medical professionals to review and report back to the FDA via anonymous email address, any marketing material that is not complaint with fair balance or suggested for use through off-label marketing as established by the FDA. 

The FDA has been in the news a ton lately with tremendous scrutiny on an Ann Taylor blog nailing them for incentivize customers to write about a brand, they have issued severe warning letters to many pharma companies for improper marketing and now again with this HCP enabled review committee.  What’s next for the FDA – time will tell.  As partners to all of our pharma clients, we MUST ensure all of our media and creative efforts are fully compliant.

Read up here:  FDA Deputizes Doctors

This looks amazing…

http://www.engadget.com/2010/05/20/msi-shows-off-convertible-sketchbook-laptop-concept/

It’s PAC-MAN’s 30th birthday.  Go to Google to play!

SearchEngineLand.com reports that Google regained some of its recent losses in search market share according to the April statistics just released by Experian® Hitwise®.

The company says Google held 71.4% of the market during April, up from 69.97% in March. Yahoo and Bing saw slight drops in market share between March and April.  As far as Hitwise tracking goes, this represents the end of a three-month slide for Google. Its share peaked at 72.25% in December, then declined slightly in January (71.49%), February (70.95%), and March (69.97%).

Interesting article on the use of expletives in advertising:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/14/business/media/14adco.html

While enduring massive criticism from Apple CEO Steve Jobs, Adobe takes the higher ground and does what any company would do against a giant – it reaches out to the consumer.

Banner as observed on NYTimes – Business Day:

Landing page on click through:

This is getting interesting.

Source

In Q1 Facebook accounted for over 16% of all U.S. served display ads. According to comScore those numbers make the social network the largest online display ad publisher in the country.

comScore estimates total impressions served at 176 billion for the quarter. Rounding in second in display impressions was Yahoo! – where more than the 132 billion impressions were attributed to Yahoo-owned properties. That accounts for 12% of all Q1 online display ads.

Facebook’s display ad impressions have grown by 52 percent versus Q4 2009, where it served around 115 billion impressions.

We should applaud Facebook in its exponential growth and development of ad sales. It was not too long ago that people questions Social Networks’ ability to generate ad revenue efficiently.

There is all this talk about the iPhone, the iPad, the i”insert gimmicky name here” – but what ever happened to the Android? So get this, during the most recent quarter, the Android handset accounted for 28% of smartphone sales, while the iPhone OS accounted for only 21% of smartphone sales.

My point is this, as iPhone continues to win the publicity contest, the Android is rapidly sneaking up on them. With it’s open source platform, no limitations on ad serving (iAd can’t ruin this), and the fact it can run flash products may prove to be the unique selling propositions for consumers & advertisers needed, and the winning formula for the smartphone battle.

Funny news today about a Twitter bug which can force any account to follow you. Feel like having Megan Fox follow you? Care to impress a few friends as your account shows over a million followers?

According to TechCrunch “the flaw appears when a user tweets this format: “accept [Twitter Username]”. So, for example “accept TechCrunch”. Magically that user appears as one of your followers.”

Try it out if you’d like but as an FYI if Twitter catches you they will reset your account to 0 followers