Wait . . . Pharma hasn’t figured out the web and now it’s dead?

Just when we ‘thought,’ as an industry, we were getting a handle on the Web and formally working a line item for web investment into our collective budgetary process, the web is now dead. A must read for any pharma marketer who is planning to stay in this vocation is Chris Anderson’s article in the August edition of Wired entitled “The Web is Dead! Long Live the Internet.” The article provides objective evidence showing that we’re no longer surfing the web for information and increasingly visiting web sites less.

We are using the Internet to access more information, but not the Web, and devices like the iPad are only going to accelerate the trend. My own habits in accessing sports information reflect this important paradigm shift. Only a year ago, my #1 bookmark was ESPN.com – the WEB site – and I often checked the site 2 to 3 times a day to stay abreast of sports scores and news. I haven’t been to the site in over six months. I still access sports scores and news daily, even using ESPN to do so, but now I use my Blackberry ESPN app and my ESPN iPad app to do so.

I’m using the Internet to access content, but no longer using the web. If you stop and think about the implications for your Brand.com, Unbranded.com, CRM.com, and web-based media plan, it could paralyze you . . . or energize you to leapfrog your current state to where online health behavior is going.

What implications do you see?