The ascent of pharma marketing

Pharmaceutical companies with a chief marketing officer are thin on the ground, but their number will shortly see a slight increase thanks to a new appointment at Pfizer.

The pharmaceutical company has recruited Andreas “Drew” Panayiotou from Verily, the life sciences business of Google’s parent company Alphabet, to the new role of biopharma global chief marketing officer.

He will join a short list within pharma of companies with a chief marketing officer, despite the job title – and the responsibilities it comes with – being commonplace within the consumer sector.

In the age of COVID-19 social media is giving dangerous lies rocket-powered wings

Pic: Annie Spratt on Unsplash

“A lie has no legs, and cannot stand; but it has wings, and can fly far and wide.”

It’s safe to say the 18th century English writer and cleric William Warburton wasn’t talking about social media during the coronavirus pandemic, and yet his words are all too relevant today.

BBC partners with Facebook, Google and Microsoft to tackle fake news and misinformation

The BBC and a host of major media organisations from around the world are to work with Facebook, Google and Microsoft to try and tackle the dangerous misinformation that’s all around us.

It’s not the first time some of these organisations has attempted to combat fake news – which, at this stage, seems so commonplace that it no longer feels necessary to call it ‘fake news’ as systems struggle to cope within the post-truth era.

Google Translate moves ever-closer to being a Babel fish for our times

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams introduced the Babel fish, a creature that enabled instantaneous translation between different languages.

Google Translate would seem to be our nearest current equivalent, with the instant camera translation on its mobile app.

Google launches online media literacy course for kids

Google has expanded its Be Internet Awesome programme, adding new lessons to help kids learn to evaluate what they see online.

The online media literacy course aims to make it easy and fun for kids to learn these key skills, though more than a few adults could probably also benefit from it, given the general state of much online discourse these days.

Automated verse with Google’s Poem Portraits

“If the digital future is to be our home then it is we who must make it so.”

That passage by Shoshana Zuboff on the “information civilisation” was the inspiration for London-based artist and designer Es Devlin’s online collective artwork Poem Portraits.

An experiment at the boundaries of AI and human collaboration, it combines poetry, design and machine learning, overlaying your self-portrait with a unique poem created by AI.

Coming on like predictive text put through the Dadaist cut-up technique, famously used by William S. Burroughs and David Bowie, the project is in the process of producing an ever-expanding poem based on each user’s donation of a single word (mine was ‘tenacious’).