Monthly Archives: January 2012

Health, Wellness, Food Marketing and…Refrigerators?

We believe one of the most exciting trends in the digital world is the massive amount of convergence going on and the extent to which it is influenced by both the infusion of wireless data and integration with social media. At CES (#ces) this year, you were almost as likely to see a car or an oven as a tablet or a PC. At some level, that’s nothing new. Centuries-old durables like cars and washers were infused with electronics decades ago. But it was awfully hard at times not to take a step back at the amount of sophistication and usability that is coming and say “wow.” As a firm with deep roots in public affairs and corporate responsibility and with health care as our largest global practice, we are well of the obesity crisis, the pressure on food producers to deliver healthy alternatives and the fierce debate going on about the appropriate level of regulatory oversight about how food products are marketed and sold.

Posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2012 By HealthScope
Catogories Nutrition | Tagged CES, CES2012, LG refrigerator, nutrition, SmartThinQ | Leave a comment

The FDA Encourages Pharmaceutical Companies to Keep Off-Label Discussions Off-line

The FDA provided marketers and communicators in the pharmaceutical industry a holiday gift last week by releasing guidelines on how to respond to unsolicited requests for off-label product information. The FDA issued guidelines for both “private” and “public” requests, drawing a distinction between “private” and “public” for the first time. But let’s face it, this is also about social media, so from that standpoint the “public” guidelines are what we really care about. I’ll break out the guidelines in more detail below, but the bottom line is that companies didn’t gain any additional leeway to communicate with the public through social media vehicles. The FDA guidance basically says companies cannot communicate off-label use data or information to the public, but instead must restrict off-label communications to more “private” means.