IHOP celebrates its seventh annual National Pancake Day across the U.S. today, hoping to raise up to $3 million for the Children's Miracle Network Hospitals and other local charities. Laura Kaeppeler, the 2012 Miss America, is one of the celebrities (with NFL Hall of Famer Steve Young) helping to give away a short stack of Buttermilk Pancakes in one of America's biggest annual customer appreciation and corporate philanthropic efforts. 

Children's Miracle Network showed its appreciation for IHOP's fundraising efforts (nearly $8 million raised since 2006) on its blog today, where it comments that "we always hear about the warm feeling IHOP visitors get when they make a donation to our U.S. hospitals before heading back out for their day."

IHOP also is giving kids free seeds as part of its sponsorship of Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, which is likely to be the new #1 movie after this weekend:Continue reading...

Above, GE Chief Marketing Officer Beth Comstock discusses the "great mash-up" — the collaboration between big companies, start-ups, government and academia driving healthcare breakthroughs, as GE demonstrated in the "big data" elements of its Super Bowl campaign. Feel free to follow and join in the conversation via the #WhatWorks hashtag on Twitter.

The drug Lipitor has made Pfizer so much dough that it isn’t planning to just turn its attention to newer products now that the drug can be sold generically as of Wednesday, according to the Associated Press.

The problem is that Pfizer doesn’t have anything new that can make up for the $11 billion that Lipitor brings in, the AP points out, so it is doing everything it can to hang onto the customers it has.

The AP has it that when a drug goes generic, the revenue that is has been pulling in from that drug generally disappears for the most part within a year, but Pfizer has bought itself about six months by “devis(ing) discounts and incentives for patients, insurers and companies that process prescriptions” that will “make the brand name drug about as cheap as or cheaper than the generics.”Continue reading...

Walmart may employ more than 1% of the U.S. labor force, but it's not ingratiating itself with the 99% who are marching in its streets — at least, the ones who were marching in the nation's capital last night.

Economic pressures in the United States continue to roil the world's biggest retailer, which this week told its U.S. employees that it plans to shift a substantial share of the health-care cost burden back onto them in a roll-back of the major coverage expansion the company made just a few years ago.

Citing rising costs, the nation's largest employer stated, according to the New York Times, that all future part-time employees who work less than 24 hours a week on average will no longer qualify for any of the company's health-insurance plans. Related moves include a significant health-insurance premium boost for full-time staff.Continue reading...

U.S. ad spending has been losing momentum along with the general economy. Of course it's a giant chicken-or-egg question to some extent, but it's axiomatic: As consumers continue to lose confidence in the present and future course of the economy, brand marketers are more apt to go along with their more cautious mood by cutting ad spending — rather than trying to talk consumers out of their funk with more marketing.

So it doesn't come as a huge surprise that WPP's Kantar Media unit finds that ad spending expanded only 2.8 percent in the second quarter compared with 4.4 percent in the first quarter, when there was more hope among advertisers and consumers that a genuine U.S. economic recovery was underway.

Some of the biggest brand advertisers and categories have led the way in slowing growth of outlays, Kantar said, and they may not be finished retrenching yet. "The whole world is nervous — and nervousness usually leads to contraction, both for consumers and advertisers," Bob Jeffrey, chief executive of WPP-owned JWT, told the Wall Street Journal.Continue reading...

Maybe it's the simplicity, the single take, the jarringly good-humored tragedy of the young girl. Whatever it is, this Johnson & Johnson spot highlighting pediatric nurses produced by the Johnson & Johnson Campaign for Nursing's Future is tremendously moving.

In the month since it was posted on YouTube, the video has received nearly 50,000 views, hundreds of votes, of which not a single one, not one (a rarity for the crankiness that is YouTube's comments stream), is a "dislike." As one YouTuber put it: "Dammit. Now I am crying."

Of the ad, a J&J spokesperson told us, "We recognize that nurses have a unique quality beyond their medical skills and knowledge — they also bring the necessary care and compassion that helps the patient through whatever the situation might be. These spots focus on the important role nurses truly play for their patients, both physically and emotionally."Continue reading...

The former chief executives who engineered the ill-fated AOL-Time Warner merger in 2000, Jerry Levin and Steve Case, are back in business together again.

This time around, they're partnering around a health and wellness venture, StartUp Health.

Levin, a board member for the health information startup OrganizedWisdom, is partnering with Startup America Partnership, a White House initiative chaired by Case to boost innovation and entrepreneurship in the US.

They're launching StartUp Health as a resource for healthcare entrepreneurs to access funding, information and education — and because health and wellness are topics near and dear to both their hearts.Continue reading...

Sick of shelling out big bucks for your Lipitor and other brand-name drugs? Well, it doesn’t appear that you’ll need to do it for a whole lot longer. But you will have to memorize the actual medical name of your medicine rather than such catchy brand names as Zyprexa, Plavix, and Singulair.

They're just a few of the brand-name drugs that will go on the market in a cheaper, generic form in the next two years.

Why? Because the patents on these and other brands will run out and allow for other companies to offer those generics at lower prices since the patent royalties and marketing costs will disappear, creating a boon for consumers and a headache for Big Pharma.Continue reading...