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Vintage medicine packaging from the 1960s-1980s

More can be seen on Lovely package…

Amanda Strong is soft-launching a job and event board for biomedical and health care communications in Canada. www.biomedcomjobs.ca

This job site is specifically for medical writers, editors, illustrators, graphic designers, translators, project managers, and for any other professional in the field of biomedical communications.

In her own words:

“BioMedComJobs is owned by Amanda Strong, a medical writer based in Montreal. The site was set up to facilitate contact between various professionals working in the field of biomedical communications in Canada.

Our concept in setting this site up was simplicity, so we don’t have all the bells and whistles of the larger job boards and networking sites. Instead, what we offer is the ability to search for a job, event or professional opportunities in your field of expertise: biomedical and health care communications.

How much does it cost to register?
Registration is always free.

Why should I register?
Registration allows you to post a profile, jobs or events. If you are freelance or seeking a job, posting a profile is a good way to find collaborators or potential employers. If you are an event organizer, posting an event exposes it to a wider audience, for free!”

Check it out here: www.biomedcomjobs.ca

Ever had to include charts or graphs in your ad layout? Most pharmaceutical advertisements, especially those for healthcare professionals already have so much copy that it’s close to impossible to balance them in a visually effective, and pleasing way. Now more and more ads include charts, which usually is a nightmare, because ads then start to look like sales aids, which have a completely different communications purpose. The sales aid has the sales rep to direct the HCP’s attention where it’s needed, whereas the ad has to live and be attractive on its own, by grabbing the interest of physicians literally in seconds.

Art Directors and Graphic Designers have then to find ways to make those charts either interesting on their own, or fit within a creative (photo, illustrations or type/graphic treatment) that usually is visually interesting only when it has enough space to breathe a little.

Unfortunately, these charts are most of the time necessary. In order to help with this, we have gathered a collection of examples in the AdPharm gallery that may be of inspiration when in front of such a challenge.

To view our “Charts in Ads” collection, just click here or type in ChartsInAds in the seach box on AdPharm.

Happy designing!

3M just launched a brand new online Visual Attention service which analyzes images and tells you how viewers will look at your image, or advertisement and in which sequence. And this is based on 30 years of vision science research.

Some of the views you have access to when on the site

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking for pharmaceutical ads with specific visuals?

A big part of what AdPharm was created for is to provide pharmaceutical advertising industry people with the ability to conduct searches using keywords (or tags) on a wide range of print, TV and web advertisements. The sample shown here is just a portion of the “stomach“-related ads you can find in AdPharm’s visual database. We chose the word “stomach” simply for the sake of the demonstration. It goes without saying that you can conduct a search with any other word(s) such as: brain, arm, limb, child, parent, heart, CV system, cells, skin, animal, etc…

In a similar fashion to searching for stock images on the Web, the search results depend on which keywords are used. If it’s a combination of keywords vs. a single keyword, the search results may vary drastically. It all depends on what you are looking for. For example, to get the results shown above, the search words we used were “stomach” and “belly” (as seen on the inset image). We wanted to be sure to have a wide variety of ads, so we used the “OR” condition to get ads that had either one of the two words. Choosing the condition “AND” would have narrowed down the results to ads that had both words in their tags.

We could have checked all the terms in the list (Title, Description, Tags and Brand name) but that would also have given us results that did not necessarily have a stomach or belly in the visual portion of the ad. For instance, an ad for Midol, which is for stomach cramps would not necessarily show a stomach but it would have the word Stomach in its description, as it is part of the indication for that product.

So if you are looking to create a new ad for your pharma brand or your client’s, try a search on AdPharm. There you can find out what’s been already done…

From the AdPharm gallery

When you (or your client) decide to place an advertisement in a publication, there are certain production rules that apply when laying out any ad. Some Art Directors or Graphic designers – and let’s face it, sometimes it’s a client directive – may dare to go past the infamous “type safety area” or “live type area” set by the publication. It’s not a good idea to do so, even when the size of the safety margin seems exaggerated.

We have an example here (the Januvia/Janumet ad on the right) where not much harm was done, but you can see that something is cut off at the bottom right of the page. It’s the information box that the PAAB (Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board) of Canada requires to have in order to direct readers to the drug’s Prescribing Information page. So this is obviously something that should not be cut off.

Type safety, minuscule legal text, ads with too much content… that’s life in the pharmaceutical advertising industry, no matter what country you work in. And there sure is a lot of pharma advertising out there that falls in those categories. We plan on showcasing more examples in the future (and there are lots in the AdPharm gallery). The idea is not to point fingers, because we all know that many great ad concepts and layouts go south once account people, clients, medical departments, regulatory bodies, to name a few get their hands on it. The goal is to help improve and find better ways to build ads. The challenges of creating and laying out pharmaceutical ads are daunting sometimes. Seeing good and not so good examples can help us make better decisions.

So we would love to see other ads examples that got cut off badly.

If you have such examples, please send them to blog@adpharm.net.