Pharma Marketing Blog a “Must Read” OpEd by John Mack
When I started Pharma Marketing Blog (www.pharmamarketingblog.com) back in January 2005, I didn’t realize how popular it would become!
Colleagues and friends at conferences often come up to me and tell me how much they enjoy the blog. “Great post about Merck and mountain climbing,” said a CEO of a market research company. “Where do you come up with this stuff?”
Or I might get unsolicited kudos via e-mail, such as “Your blog has proven to be an excellent source of both information and entertainment for me on a daily basis. I see a lot of what I hear from professionals across the nation reflected in your posts. I especially want to thank you for keeping me up to date on the DTC hearings… I now keep a watchful eye on the Nasonex bee.” These comments inspire me to continue. I must, after all, be doing something right to receive the accolades.
Last week, however, my quest for blogging stardom got an even greater boost — the Wall Street Journal cited Pharma Marketing Blog as a blog insiders should read to stay current!
OMG! The Wall Street Journal! The venerable publication I have been reading every weekday since graduate school when I used it to gather statistics to attack capitalist scum (not all capitalists, just the scummy ones).
Surely, my career will now take flight and big bucks will roll in. And behold! Google ad sales via the blog site actually increased 115% the day the article appeared. That’s $28 of pure profit! Not enough to take Laura Landro — the WSJ journalist who wrote the piece on my blog-out to lunch, but it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye!
I’ve been quoted or featured in the WSJ a few times before, but this time is special. I could actually measure the power of the media by tracking visits to the blog site on that day. There were 1100 visits, about five times the average up to then. That impressed me. I hope all these new readers come back often.
This power of traditional media (TV and print) is intoxicating. No wonder pharmaceutical marketers allocate so much of their DTC advertising budgets to TV and print and so little to the Internet. A paragraph about Pharma Marketing Blog on the Yahoo! home page, for example, may reach as large an audience as does the WSJ, but I doubt it would have the same cache. Not that I wouldn’t welcome a story on Yahoo!
Anyway, if you want to know what the WSJ said about Pharma Marketing Blog, Click here.
Vol. 4, No.10: November 2005
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