Category: Featured News

The two companies will advertise to people who order drug refills and who visit their doctors.

Smartphone advertising firm, 4Info, has just joined up with Crossix, a pharmaceutical data company, in order to test mobile ads within the market of patients who have either visited their doctors or have ordered refills of their prescription medications.

The goal of this partnership is to determine the level of influence mobile advertising can have in this space.

The new partnership will work to measure the level of influence of mobile ads when they are delivered to people who are visiting a medical specialist or having a prescription filled. The new strategic relationship between the two companies is being made to gauge the potential of mobile devices when carefully targeting consumers within the space of the highly regulated health care industry. This has been among the goals of 4Info for some time, as it has been seeking a strategic partner for stepping into the pharmaceuticals market.

The key is to make sure there is an appropriate balance between the timing and industry regulations for the mobile ads.

According to Tim Jenkins, the CEO of 4Info, “Pharma is a huge opportunity.” Before his company partnered up with Crossix in this effort, it had previously been working with advertisers in the pharmaceutical industry in the area of targeting advertisements for non-prescription medications, through the data available via loyalty card programs.

To be clear, no medical data is used by Crossix in order to identify a specific disease or condition that an individual is treating. This will not be the nature of the mobile advertising strategy pursued by the two companies in the partnership. Instead, it obtains information from healthcare data distributors as well as individual businesses. With an analysis of that data, it determines the likelihood of a specific individual for a certain health affliction based on the non-prescription drug purchases that person has made along with the use of a loyalty card, information from prescription refills through retail pharmacies, or medical claims data that suggests a doctor has been seen.

The outcome is that, by way of data models, the companies will be able to make certain educated hypotheses as to what type of conditions each consumer could potentially have. Beyond that, 4Info tracks mobile device locations when certain apps are opened in order to determine whether or not the user is at home. When a location has been decided to be a user’s home location, targeted mobile apps based on the assumptions about that individual will be issued.

Google, Samsung, and Apple may have trouble engaging consumers in various markets

Google, Samsung, and Apple have all entered into the competitive mobile payments field and are looking to compete with one another for the favor of consumers. These companies may be facing an uphill battle, however, as the majority of consumers are more comfortable using traditional payment cards than they are using mobile wallets. A new report from Juniper Research shows that the number of people involved in the mobile commerce space is growing, but consumers are still more willing to use their credit and debit cards.

Report predicts that 148 million people will be using mobile wallets by end of year

According to the report from Juniper Research, 148 million people throughout the world will be using their mobile devices to make a purchase in a physical store by the end of 2016. An estimated one in five point-of-sale systems in the United States now support NFC technology, which forms the backbone of mobile payments. The report also shows that there is a major uptick in the number of cards registered to mobile payment systems when they launch in new markets. When Apple Pay launched in China, some 40 million new cards were added to the service in just 24 hours.

Registering cards with mobile wallets does not translate into using new payment devices

Consumers registering their cards with mobile payments services does not mean they are actually using mobile wallets, however. The report from Juniper Research shows that just 22 million consumers in the United States have decided to transition away from traditional wallets to their mobile counterparts. Even with the availability of services that can be used with any point-of-sale system, consumers are still more comfortable with traditional forms of commerce.

Europe may be the most attractive market for mobile commerce

Companies participating in mobile commerce are becoming more focused on Europe, where payment cards have become more secure and NFC technology is already quite popular. Europe may serve as the tipping point for the mobile payments space, as consumers in this region are feeling more comfortable with paying for products with their mobile devices.