This year’s agenda includes: a keynote by Susan Dentzer, Editor in Chief, Health Affairs and Health Policy Analyst, PBS on evaluating what the healthcare overhaul means for the industry, panel discussions with brand and marketing participants from leading Rx companies on topics like The Evolving HCP and Consumer Media Mix and Social Media in Pharma–What’s Working and What’s Not, and break out sessions on Consumer Marketing and Professional. You can read the full agenda here:

http://www.iirusa.com/epharmasummit/agenda.xml

As in past years, I will immerse in this community of passionate experts, trepidacious testers and occasional naysayers to go beyond the trade buzz and engage with the people behind the programs we support, critique and discuss day to day. In 2009 Underscore delivered impressive search results for patients and HCPs, developed innovative behavioral targeting models, and launched measurement and tracking methods that go well beyond the click. 2010 has begun with gusto and we’re challenging ourselves and our clients to deliver breakthrough innovations that drive the right results. There may be a short wait while we shepherd these things through legal and regulatory, but we’ll do what’s right.

In the meantime, share your e-pharma insights or challenges with us here to spark the conversations.

By using AJAX to build their interface, Google has created a platform that now uses common sense technology. If you see something you wish to change you click on it and change it. For example, in the old system if you wanted to update bids on a term you would check the term and click “edit keyword settings” and then make your changes and click “save changes”. While the page refreshes were relatively quick, to make changes you had to follow only this process. With the new platform, keyword bids changes can be made on any screen where that keyword appears, including reports. Additionally, the idea of bread crumbs have been eliminated and you can navigate between adgroups, even across campaigns, with one click and no loading, allowing more time for reporting and optimizing.

This is a huge leap from the technology found in Yahoo!’s Sponsored Search or Microsoft’s AdCenter. Yahoo! for example, actually takes Google’s setup and converts it to another document that then needs to be uploaded into their platform. This makes no sense. If you create the technology to convert it, why not just upload it straight in. As for making bid changes, tedious is not a strong enough word. While the process is just as many steps as Google, the average page load takes upwards of 10 seconds. This is fascinating since it takes Yahoo! 0.13 seconds to return 216M search results on the term “allergy”.

At least Yahoo! can allow you to upload something into their system, MSN has tried and failed miserably at creating a system for uploading new campaigns. Therefore you have to rely on people to do it for you, which can take days. And for the little amount of volume it typically brings, who has the patience for that?

I am not surprised that Yahoo! lags so far behind, it did take 3 years for them to implement a performance bid model, but MSN has no excuse. Microsoft, arguably the technology leader, should have the resources and the intelligence to create an interface that makes it easy and manageable to run a search campaign. Solving the dashboard issue won’t create searches, but if the plan MSN has to become a real force in the search world succeeds, the worst thing they can do is create a speed bump with their advertising interface.

My recommendation: For Microsoft and Yahoo! to please sign-up for Google’s new AdWords platform and try to learn a few things and accept the fact that Google knows what they are doing.

I’m headed out to iMedia Breakthrough Summit for the next few days where we’ll discuss and debate hot topics in successful digital programs.  Be on the lookout for live insider tweets!

-LB