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Merck is advertising Gardasil directly to college students that utilize Barnes and Noble's bkstore.com. For those unfamiliar, bkstore.com has a plugin structure where students log on to their college's bookstore, choose their class number (e.g. PHRM 328), and their books are loaded up, and you can either pick them up or have them shipped to you. No going to stand in lines or trying to figure out what books you need. One click shopping at it's most convenient.
So these are college bookstores inadvertently advertising prescription drugs to the entire college population. Well, more accurately, to the population that chooses to have their books shipped to their home, anyway. I don't know if the bundles that can be picked up have similar advertising info.
Merck's going about it in a strange way, though. They're sticking the prescribing information into these boxes. No fancy brochures, just the PI packet, which I find rather bizarre.
I can't say it doesn't make sense, or that it's a terrible idea — I think it's better than advertising Ambien on television — but it does make me wonder what's next… Cephalon advertising Provigil to high school and college kids? Med students? Pharmacy students?
Hey, why not?
(No discounts for having advertising in your box of books, either. 
)
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marketing
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money
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A new version of Twitterrific, the popular Twitter client for Mac OS X, was released today. The changelog details new features and improvements.
The most glaring change, however, has to be the monetization scheme: either you pay $15 for it or you get an ad in your tweet list every hour. If there ever was a desktop application that could function as well on an ad-supported model as websites can, Twitterrific is it. The ads fit in so seamlessly and they're so not bothersome that it feels like Iconfactory could have gotten away with more ads. But I'll stop before I give them any more ideas.
Technorati Tags: Twitter, Twitterrific, The Deck, ads, ad-supported, Iconfactory, software, OS X
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announcements
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mac
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os x
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software
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twitter
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Whatever little ethical integrity or journalistic standards the Daily Pennsylvanian still had left, it probably lost after a "guest editorial" ran this past week. The so-called editorial was basically an advertisement for the Ruckus Network, an online music subscription service that aims to compete with Napster, Rhapsody, et al by forming agreements with universities for campus-wide coverage instead of having to deal with pesky end users.
The editorial is "written" by Ruckus President and CEO Michael Bebel and tries to extol the benefits of using Ruckus over illegal services by running the RIAA line about how illegal downloading steals from the record industry ("According to industry observers, more than 25 million songs are illegally downloaded daily. This translates into roughly $4.5 billion worth of pirated music annually, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry.") and how it can lead to getting sued ("Last year, the RIAA sent letters to 700 colleges nationwide, informing those students who ignore warnings and continue to engage in illegal downloading of music they will be sued.").
How do I know Ruckus paid to run this "editorial"? I don't. But why else run something like this? Surely the paper isn't starved for content; I haven't seen anything like this in the 3.5 years I've been reading the paper and there definitely hasn't been a shortage of news either (like what the University is doing about the string of assaults on campus?) Either it was a straight ad buy or there were promises of ad purchases or free iPods or something else fishy. I do think that running this type of ad under the guise of an editorial shows how morally bankrupt the editors of Daily Pennsylvanian are. This ad is a cut and paste/mail merge job. An almost identical piece was run in the Daily Princetonian on December 15th. And that was what I found from just searching for the last sentence of the article.
I've detailed why I don't like Ruckus when the Penn service was announced. Between this and the Brock Ruckus/Facebook incident that I just read about on the Wikipedia article, I like them even less. Only now I like the DP much less also.
Technorati Tags: Ruckus, file sharing, music, p2p, Ruckus Network, PayPerPost, Daily Pennsylvanian, Daily Princetonian, advertising, editorial, RIAA, University of Pennsylvania, UPenn, Penn, Pennsylvania, Ivy League
Posted in:
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college
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drm
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file sharing
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internet
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music
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p2p
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penn
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piracy
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school