Recently, the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation announced the second batch of typical cases of false and illegal advertising in 2024, which involved a number of medical institutions and live streaming platforms. With the tightening of regulatory policies, the medical live streaming industry is facing unprecedented challenges. In particular, how to maintain professionalism and attractiveness under the premise of complying with laws and regulations has become an urgent problem to be solved.
Source: 369 Medical Lottery Network
Editor: Lingxing
Cover source: Bean Bao AI
On September 2, the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation announced the second batch of typical cases of false and illegal advertising in 2024. In recent years, the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation has organized and carried out a special campaign to supervise advertisements in the field of people's livelihood in Shanghai, and severely cracked down on false and illegal advertising in the fields of medical treatment, medicine, health food, medical equipment, cosmetics, education and training, which are closely related to people's lives, and since the beginning of this year, 318 cases of false and illegal advertising in key areas of people's livelihood have been completed and 1 case has been transferred to the public security department.
In a typical case, for example, Jinan Taikang Baibo Best Dental Hospital Co., Ltd., in the process of using live broadcast marketing to promote its oral medical service project, made statements on relevant medical services that included assertions indicating efficacy and safety, as well as comparisons with the efficacy and safety of other medical devices. In addition, the advertisement, which was published in the form of live marketing, was not reviewed by the advertising review authority. The conduct of the parties violated the relevant provisions of the People's Republic of China Advertising Law. In April 2024, the Law Enforcement Corps of the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation imposed administrative penalties on 6 entities involved in the case, including 1 advertiser, 1 live broadcast room, 1 advertising agency, and 3 MCN agencies.
Luo Yonghao's team participated
As early as the beginning of May this year, the news that Luo Yonghao's live broadcast team was fined 580,000 yuan for suspected illegal medical promotion spread throughout the medical community.
Tianyancha App shows that Beijing Make a Friend Digital Technology Co., Ltd. was fined more than 292,900 yuan and confiscated more than 292,900 yuan of advertising fees by the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation for illegally publishing advertisements for medical treatment, drugs and medical devices.
According to the administrative penalty information issued by the Shanghai Municipal Administration for Market Regulation on April 24, 2024, "Make a Friend" was established in June 2019 and is mainly engaged in advertising agency, production and publishing, and operates the "Make a Friend Live Room" for product marketing.
Relevant information shows that in the live broadcast, the anchor promoted more than seven categories of oral service projects in the form of oral broadcast, and declared that "this can ensure that you can go up 1-3 shades after you finish it", "so this is very safe, and very efficient" "But because our oral cavity is so complex, there are some imported brands that are not necessarily suitable for our Asian oral conditions, especially for Chinese." And this product is tailor-made for us Chinese" and so on. After the incident, the parties actively rectified and stopped the relevant live broadcasts.
According to the relevant regulatory authorities, the services promoted in the above-mentioned live broadcast involve the use of medical devices such as ultrasonic scalers, metal dental brackets, customized invisible aligners, fluorinated foams, light-curing composite resins, and dental whitening agents, which are medical service items. When accepting the entrustment, the parties checked the qualifications, advertising content, and supporting documents of the entities providing the above-mentioned medical services, but did not find that the "Medical Advertisement Review Certificate" submitted by them was not the "Medical Advertisement Review Certificate" of the advertisement in this case, and that the above-mentioned live broadcast had not been reviewed by the advertising review authorities before the publication of the above-mentioned live broadcast, and the approval documents for the publication of advertisements had not been obtained.
According to the Pengbai News report, the promotion business that Luo Yonghao's team took over included Jinan Taikang Baibo Best Dental Hospital Co., Ltd., which was announced and punished.
Jinan Taikang Baibo Best Dental Hospital Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "Jinan Taikang Company") entrusted Beijing One-Third Network Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as "One-third Company") to conduct live broadcast promotion in the "Make a Friend Live Room" in order to promote the Taikang Baibo Oral Medical Service Project. After making a friend and accepting the entrustment of one-third of the company, they entrusted the staff of Hangzhou Xiaoshan Xice Network Technology Studio, Hangzhou Linping Zhengzheng Culture Media Studio, Hangzhou Yuran Culture Media Co., Ltd. and other units as anchors to implement the promotion of the above-mentioned medical service projects in the "Make a Friend Live Room".
On September 21, 2023 and September 23, 2023, the above-mentioned anchors conducted live broadcasts in the form of oral broadcasts on seven categories of oral service projects, including orthodontic program design, children's fluoride, adult ultrasonic tooth cleaning, resin filling, dental whitening card, AO self-locking orthodontic, and Zhengya invisible orthodontics, and claimed that "this can ensure that you can go up 1-3 shades after doing it", "so this is very safe and very efficient", "but because our mouth is so complicated." , so there are some imported brands that are not necessarily suitable for our Asian oral conditions, especially for Chinese. And Zhengya's product is tailor-made for us Chinese" and so on. After the incident, make a friend to actively rectify and stop the relevant live broadcast. Make a friend and accept the commission to publish the above advertisement, the total advertising cost is 292,926.1 yuan.
Committing crimes against the wind? The relevant policies have long been stipulated
Long before Luo Yonghao's team was fined, the relevant policies and platform regulations had already been "released".
On March 6, 2023, Douyin Health issued an "Announcement of Douyin Medical on Controlling the Content Chaos of MCN Institutions", which pointed out that the platform found that some MCNs and individual accounts had published low-quality medical homogeneous content, used false medical stories, and extreme cases to gain traffic.
1. Content or behavior that fabricates or disseminates unverified medical information during a social hotspot event or by borrowing medical events of public concern in order to attract attention, gain traffic, or cause harm to specific patient groups;
2. Disseminating harmful medical information or disseminating false content that endangers user safety for negative purposes, such as fabricating inside information about medical policies, spreading erroneous information about medical policies, and so forth;
3. Using false stories or extreme cases to publish false content that may cause public panic or disrupt social order, such as fabricating terrorist incidents or public safety incidents, predicting major medical incidents, or exaggerating the severity of such information; 4. Fabricating or disseminating low-quality and homogeneous content in batches, carrying out false propaganda, creating personas, and gaining traffic.
On November 24, 2023, Douyin also released the "Douyin Medical Account Daily Operation Specification", which aims to let health creators better understand the platform rules of Douyin Health, which clearly prohibits the publication of content and behaviors that produce illegal diversion, clarifies illegal marketing content/behavior, clarifies that medical and health accounts do not support and discourage MCN operations, bind MCN institutions, and do not support medical accounts to publish content with goods and e-commerce windows and private messages.
On September 18, 2023, Douyin Health announced the latest adjustment of doctor/institution certification rules on its official WeChat.
The adjustment said that Douyin will open up the certification of private tertiary hospitals and individual doctors above the attending level, and it is necessary to submit the operator's information, as well as the identity certificate of the legal representative or department head/dean/vice president and relevant physician qualification certificate & title certificate on the Douyin client.
It is understood that in the previous Douyin rules, only public doctors and hospital departments were supported, and some JCI and private tertiary medical institutions were piloted.
In addition to Douyin, platforms such as Xiaohongshu and WeChat have also launched various policies for consumer healthcare.
The National Health Commission also expressed its attitude
On June 6, 2022, the National Health Commission and other 9 departments jointly issued the "2022 Key Points for Correcting Unhealthy Practices in the Field of Pharmaceutical Purchase and Sales and Medical Services" (hereinafter referred to as the "Key Points"), which specifically mentions: "Strictly investigate and punish the staff of medical institutions who use their positions and identities to bring goods through live streaming".
This is the first time that the official has made a definitive conclusion on the behavior of doctors who have been in an ambiguous area for a long time, and in the "Key Points", "honest practice" is mentioned many times, and the meaning of characterizing this matter as "anti-corruption and clean government" is self-evident.
Is the dentist really "out of luck" with the live broadcast?
So, as medical workers, the majority of dentists really can't touch the live broadcast?
Not necessarily.
In 2019, the National Health Commission announced the "Healthy China Action (2019-2030)", which proposes to include health promotion and education in the evaluation and performance evaluation of medical personnel. In other words, the state has actually always encouraged medical personnel to conduct health science popularization through new media platforms.
In fact, on high-traffic new media platforms such as Douyin, Xiaohongshu, and Bilibili, there have been many high-profile Internet celebrity dentists, and in their spare time, they will also start broadcasting and interacting from time to time.
In terms of the content of the live broadcast room, most dentists will choose to popularize some oral knowledge and provide some non-diagnostic interactive Q&A online;
Some experienced dentists will choose to discuss their own diagnosis and treatment cases, such as wisdom tooth extraction and orthodontics, which many people are concerned about.
There is also a part of the live broadcast room is mainly chatting, and dentists share their life hobbies and industry insights with the audience through the live broadcast lens, which will enhance the sense of intimacy and make the personal image more three-dimensional.
Although there is no direct act of bringing goods, for the dental market that values customer resources, the commercial benefits brought by high-quality live broadcast are also very considerable. In addition to gaining a lot of fans and customers to seek medical treatment, it can also effectively enhance its commercial value and lay a word-of-mouth foundation for subsequent industry cooperation.
After all, the oral cavity is a market that needs word-of-mouth and precipitation, and the professional knowledge possessed by dentists has a certain value attribute, which we can regard as the "product" produced by the dentists themselves, so as long as the "product" is of excellent quality and the communication method is novel, no one is willing to "pay".
The emergence of online celebrity dentists and oral live broadcasts, in addition to symbolizing the rapid development of the Internet era, also reflects that the marketing competition in the dental market has reached a white-hot stage.
In such a competitive market, it is worth thinking about how dental clinics and dentists can stand out from the crowd.
/ END /
Source of this article: 369 medical color network
❖ Disclaimer: The content of this article is only for learning and exchange, the views only represent the author's own position, the copyright belongs to the original author, the pictures in this article are based on the CC0 license, has been authorized, if you have any questions, please contact the editor.