Leadership representing the 2018 Manny Award agency and network winners and finalists share their views on various healthcare industry trends and developments.

For the 11th year, Med Ad News selected new Pharmaceutical Marketing Ventures to Watch that could change the way pharmaceutical products are marketed and sold.

Pharma continues to lag behind the consumer space in the use of mobile marketing technologies, but the steady advance of consumer tech giants Google and Amazon into the healthcare space means that the industry will have to adapt the tools of AI, voice and chatbots into their marketing, just as their consumer brethren already have.

Intouch Solutions’ Sean Hartigan and Heartbeat’s David Sakadelis say their pharma clients are skittish about the use of chatbots and AI, with an understanding of these technologies more influenced by the grim future of Skynet in the “Terminator” movie franchise rather than the reality of where AI is right now.

In the initial excitement over the possibilities of mobile marketing, pharma rushed to create its own apps. And then these apps languished.

WPP integrated its specialist health networks into major agency brands in the United States, with the goal of creating a simpler, more flexible offering for healthcare clients.

Jon Bigelow was named executive director of the Coalition for Healthcare Communication, succeeding John Kamp, who continues his association with the Coalition as its Washington counsel.

Fingerpaint opened the healthcare agency’s fifth location, situated in Morristown, N.J.

The Medical Advertising Hall of Fame membership selected Carol DiSanto, trailblazer and former president of Cline, Davis & Mann, and Charlene Prounis, renowned entrepreneur co-founder of Flashpoint Medica and Accel Healthcare, as the MAHF’s 2019 inductees.