Just because it looks right...

On the Today programme this morning Alistair Darling confidently said that the Lehman Brothers bank collapse in the States last year caused the financial crisis over there.

Well 'no', Darling. If I heard you correctly as my bathwater gurgled down the drain then this was not the cause of it. It was partly a result of it - and it happened it around the same time as things started to get really bad globally.

Similarly, most of my pharmaceutical clients keep on pouring money into various corporate websites and expensive sales rep materials - insiting that you need these if you're to have a successful drug.

Well, and I think there are a few people beginning to wake up to this now: NO. You just keep commissioning these marketing materials - and your drug sometimes does well. But one is not the cause of the other.

It's correlation at best.

You speak of ROI, Mr Client, but pretty much none of you has an idea of how to measure this. You really mean: 'does that sound a lot based on what we reckon we'll make from the drug'.

It's not even worthy of the term 'cost effective' because you don't have any end-to-end metrics in place to work out whether it was that cost that brought about the desired effect.

However, if my clients change their tune tomorrow I'd love to think that this blog post caused it.

How are you?

£1m per hour, or 10% of annual spend, is what the NHS is paying to treat diabetes and its complications, according to a BBC News article out yesterday.

Yikes that's a lot of cash. That's £24m per day. Or £8.8bn per year.

And that's just 10% of it.

So multiply it by 10 and the NHS budget is actually £88bn per year on this basis.

Although HM Treasury says that this figure is closer to £111bn.

UK GDP - a pretty good measure of how much money our economy generates each year - is estimated at just £1.4 trillion. Drilling down a bit further, total Government revenue in 2007/08 was 39.2% of this - or £548bn.

So the Government is currently paying out over 20% of ALL the money it receives from companies and individuals - many times over if you look at the combinations of direct and indirect taxes that we all end up paying on the goods and services we ultimately receive.

That's got to be more than defence. Oh yes, so it is. Over 3 times as much. Only 'Social Protection' is higher at £169bn. That's for old age pensions, unemployment and so on.

So illness, old age and unemployment make up nearly half of our taxes.

Or to put it another way, nearly half of what I pay to the government goes on looking after my health and making sure I'm able to work for as long as possible. And I'll only really be able to work as long as possible if I'm healthy - which I'll do my best to do, especially given how low the pension payments to individuals are.

So: looking after our health really is the single most important thing we can do.

No wonder most conversations start with 'how are you?'.

All change

OK. Got fed up with trying to fit ideas into a medical context, so generic observations are back.

Same rules, but more pictures.

Anyway, some recent thoughts...

I met a lovely Jewish chap in the Bell and Crown the other day who brightened up my day no end. 

I refer to his religious status up front because he wears a kippa and so this, visually at least, defines him. 

In the twenty or so minutes during which we spoke we covered the following topics: the buildings in Strand on the Green, and why there are so many 1950s houses in the middle of Victorian terraces; Fleming and the fortuitous discovery of penicillin; life on Welsh peninsulas, and German wire-haired pointers. 

Everything he noticed sparked another story, and everything became richer and more nuanced for its discussion.

He was perhaps the most intelligent and gentle fellow I've chanced upon in years. And I'll be honest with you: with all the recent hoo-ha in Israel I've not had a lot of time for Jewish sentiment of late. Extreme, I know, but there's been rather too much self-assertion of a bad type going on there. 

But this chap was how I'd imagine Rabbi Lionel Blue to be if he were to be plucked out of the radio and stuck in a pub. To my mind, the best of Jewishness (or probably anyone-ness): kind, intelligent, funny and interesting. 

Which made me sad that their Israeli brethren are giving them such a bad rap at the moment. 

Praise v. complaints

This ad prompted 458 complaints to the Advertising Standards Authority. Because of that, together with the legal technicality that the promotion of a prescription drug via the 'backdoor' of an application device is illegal, meant that the ads had to come down.

But I don't mind the ad. I don't find it offensive. And neither does Tony from Creative Services.

So we wondered if it would be possible to set up a rival to the ASA, or suggest to the ASA themselves that if more people wrote in in praise of an ad than wrote in to complain, then maybe the ad could stand.

Why should a few prudes from Tunbridge Wells dictate whether or not the rest of us can see something potentially useful?

Your thoughts, please...

Beyond compare

You just can't compare some things. Apples with oranges with example - well not in a meaningful way anyway. But we seem obsessed with putting everything in some kind of relative order.

Perhaps because it helps us navigate this ever more complex world - the world in which Sainsbury's now puts traffic lights on food to alert the thickies to the previously unknown dangers of doughnuts.

The wireless (seems suitable to use these sort of words when having a green-ink tinged rant) was blasting out news this morning that the Government is considering reclassifying Ecstasy as a 'safer' drug than cocaine and heroine.

Class B rather than A, and therefore one league 'above' cannabis, which used to enjoy class B privileges before it was downgraded to C. Although it might pop up again soon.

I can see why drugs need to be classified for legal purposes (assuming they should remain illegal, that is), but what this over-simplification of drugs does is actually rather dangerous.

ALL drugs have side-effects, legal or otherwise. Some are mild, some severe; some mental, some physical; some temporary (we bravely say, without that long a study having been done on longer term effects), and some permanent.

Ecstasy heats your body up as it encourages increased electrical activity in the brain; coke does likewise as it causes your heart to beat faster - but the way it does this is subtley different. Cannabis acts in a totally different way, but its longer term mental effects may be even 'worse'.

What do I mean by worse? I'm not sure. Perhaps I'd rather have a fucked heart than a fucked head. I really don't know. But I do know that it's not as simple as A v. B v. C.

It's too simple, and sometimes we need to avoid making things simple that shoudn't be.

Google's ill

I just googled something and every single search result told me that if I proceeded to the site then my computer would be at risk. In fact it didn't even LET me progress to a search result - I had to cut and paste the result into the URL bar.

It was a bizarre sense: Google broken? No, surely not. They're infallible. They rule the world. They're pioneers. 

And it was bloody ANNOYING that I couldn't get my information fix in the nanoseconds I'm used to.

Is it a virus? Has Google been infected and, if so, how safe are all the things I trust it to keep on my behalf? My emails, addresses, search history, my blog ... the list goes on.

The effect this has just had on me is disproportionate to the minor inconvenience that actually occurred. Perhaps we should try to wean ourselves off Google.

This much we don't know

Yesterday while writing a brief for a new anti-epilepsy drug I posted a few status updates on Facebook stating that I was finding it rather difficult to come up with a proposition. I was astounded at how many people commented on the update and how many - admittedly in a humorous way - felt that the answer should be quite simple.

Along the lines of 'this drug stops epilepsy and all the shit that goes with it'.

That would indeed have been an ideal proposition if it weren't for the facts that:

- epilepsy is the tendency of the brain to produce sudden bursts of electrical energy - but this can be caused by many different things including tumours, accidents, birth defects and infections;

- there are dozens of enti-epilepsy drugs out on the market, yet around 30% of people with epilepsy are yet to find a treatment that stops their seizures;

- some of the drugs on the market seem to work, but no-one's quite sure why or how;

- even the 'best' drugs on the market can't really claim to be efficacious in more than about 50% of patients.

I was amazed at how little we still don't know, and how that in turn makes it very difficult to come up with something useful and interesting to say that actually holds up to scrutiny.

United by devices

A few years back, when working at Whitewater in the In Memoriam fundraising department, we used to receive copies of journals as bizarrely titled as Funeral Directors Monthly and The Embalmer.

So I'm quite used to seeing niche publications and enjoy discovering those that somehow embrace a new (to me) and unknown corner of interest, industry or, quite possibly, obsession.

At my new job in healthcare marketing I'm exposed to all kinds of dark recesses of the pharmaceutical world, but I really didn't expect an old school friend - one Guy Furness - to be owner/publisher of a journal called On Drug Delivery. Yup, there's a title devoted to needles, syringes and the like - all the myriad ways in which you can stick drugs into yourself.

I like to think the Pete Doherty has a regular column.

In all seriousness, Guy and his team (comprising himself and a girl called Nicki Macadam, with whom we were also at school) write about the science of delivering pharmaceutically active ingredients to the required site in the body, in the right quantities, at the correct time and in the most effective and convenient manner.

And the coincidence is that this Wednesday I'm going to Zurich to present creative concepts to a client whose sole raison d'etre is to promote insulin and growth hormone delivery devices.

I'm looking forward to seeing Guy again. There should be loads to talk about...

Up the brand ladder and into the clouds

It's possible to do this in any field of marketing, but it's a particular danger in healthcare: taking the facts about a product, identifying their key features, deriving patient or physician benefits from these, finding a universal truth ... and ending up, before you know it, with a pivotal thought that reads something like:

'Product X gives you a better quality of life' ... or 'Product X is both effective and safe' ... or ... 'Therapy X is the simplest yet'.

And how very uninspiring these thoughts or 'propositions' are. Reductio absurdum at its very best.

This morning I had to reject a proposition that read 'simply the best'. And another one that read 'freedom to get on with life'.

Frankly, instead of being on the topic of anti-retroviral treatment, it could have been a piece of chewing gum or a tampon. And you don't want to confuse those.

So the trick when you're messing around with a 'brand ladder' or whatever species of wanky marketing tool you happen to be using, I reckon, is to stop short of the clouds and give people real sight of what the damn thing is that you're talking about.

Medicine time

Dear all

With effect from some time quite soon, the theme of this blog will change.

With any luck, this change will be A Good Thing.

Thing is, now that I'm working in the fascinating world of all things medical, the stuff I notice is necessarily to do with drugs, bodily functions, weird and wonderful apparatus and some really rather clever science.

But my job as a planner remains unchanged: to simplify things.

So my hobby as a blogger will be to put various medical observations in the glass flask of the blogosphere, place it above the hot blue flame of conciseness (and occasionally the flappy yellow flame of digression) - and boil it down to its witty (or otherwise) essence.

Watch this space...

M