Most drivers are concerned about other distracted drivers who may be texting on their phones, but it turns out most of them are guilty of the same thing.

The top two concerns of people when driving are distracted drivers on the road (70%) and drunk drivers (45%), according to a new study.

However, the majority (58%) of drivers say they check their mobile device while driving.

The study comprised an online survey of 1,800 U.S. adult drivers conducted by Wakefield Research for Root Insurance.

Another study from earlier this month found that the number of drivers distracted by smartphones increased over the last year, as I wrote about here at the time  (Heavy Phone Users Found More Dangerous Than Drunk Drivers). That study, by Zendrive, found that the majority (85%) of drivers acknowledge that distracted driving is a problem but nearly half (47%) say they use their phones 10% or more of their time while driving.

The Wakefield Research study found that the majority (52%) of drivers who check their mobile device while driving would most likely turn their attention away from the road and to their mobile device for a group chat, such as a text or email chain with multiple people.

Phone use in cars seems relatively high, with 59% saying they have talked on the phone while driving, 51% have used maps or navigation and 39% have texted.

Of drivers who check their mobile device while driving, 63% are most distracted by text messages and 33% by GPS, such as Google Maps or Waze. The average amount of time these drivers spend looking at their phone while driving is 13 minutes.

Drivers also seem aware that using their phone while driving could get them into trouble, as 83% usually put down their phone when they see law enforcement.

An interesting tidbit in the study is that 90% of drivers consider themselves better drivers that those who drive for Uber or Lyft.

Of parents, more than a third (38%) have had their child ask them to stop using their phone while driving.

Add another debacle to the long list of Facebook's privacy snafus: The company reportedly obtained and uploaded email contacts of 1.5 million users -- without asking them first.

The company says it used the information to improve ads and suggest friends. News of the uploads was first reported Wednesday by Business Insider.

Facebook says the contact-scraping -- which began in May of 2016 -- was unintentional. “These contacts were not shared with anyone and we're deleting them,” the company stated Thursday. “We've fixed the underlying issue and are notifying people whose contacts were imported.”

The company obtained the information about email contacts when it asked some new users to provide an email password, in order to verify their identities. (In the past, that was one of the verification options offered by Facebook.)

Facebook adds that it previously told people how it would use their email contacts, but removed that language after redesigning a sign-up procedure in May of 2016.

Intentional or not, the news shows that for Facebook -- already facing the prospect of billions in fines from the Federal Trade Commission over privacy violations -- privacy remains an afterthought, at best.

The news is especially striking given that Facebook itself was previously involved in litigation over address-book uploads. Back in 2012, security researchers accused a host of developers -- including mobile network Path (subsequently acquired by Kong Technologies), Foodspotting, Foursquare Labs, Gowalla (acquired by Facebook in 2011), Instagram (acquired by Facebook in 2012), Kik Interactive, Twitter and Yelp -- of uploading and storing users' address books.

Most of those developers reportedly asked people for permission to access their address books, but didn't say they would keep the data in their servers.

A class-action lawsuit against the developers resulted in a $5 million settlement agreement in 2017.

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A new form of malvertising only impacts ads served via programmatic exchanges, and 87% of those attacks appeared in header bidding in the past few months, according to an ad security provider.

GeoEdge’s security team uncovered the malvertising that affects WebRTC, a commonly used server-less communications protocol, based on internal data monitoring tens of billions of impressions. The team reverse-engineered several scripts and deobfuscate the code used by the attackers.

The company estimates the loss for publishers this year at $325 million. About 84% of the attacks occur on mobile devices and 16% on tablet.

The protocol, which is backed by Google, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, attempts to solve the complexities of managing browser-based real-time communication.  

But WebRTC malvertising attacks are complicated. They only can be identified through behavioral analysis because the communications protocol doesn’t run on a server, so there’s no domain to block.

Blocking domains is the most common way to stop malicious ads, according to the GeoEdge report.

The malvertising attack is launched through cloud services from companies like Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. That challenge becomes blocking the cloud service will block all of the ads originating from it, even though 99% of the ads are safe.

Amnon Siev, GeoEdge’s CEO, believes that WebRTC Malvertising highlights the industry’s need to add another layer of security and move beyond merely blocking offending domains. Brands need to rely on behavioral analysis technology that can uncover difficult to track malicious activities.

Fraud remains the scourge of the mobile app marketplace.

In fact, mobile app sophisticated invalid traffic” (SIVT) impressions have doubled year-on-year since 2017, according to DoubleVerify.

The total number of fraudulent apps has increased by 159% from 2017 to 2018, while more than 160% new fraudulent apps were identified during the same period.

Of note, 57% of those fraudulent apps are categorized as “Games” and “Tools & Utilities.”

“With ad spend increasingly concentrated in mobile -- and particularly mobile app -- fraudsters are redoubling their efforts to take advantage,” Roy Rosenfeld, head of DoubleVerify’s Fraud Lab, notes in the new report.

“It’s critical that brands understand these risks, in order to allocate spend accordingly and install appropriate safeguards for their digital investments,” Rosenfeld added.

Brands are spending loads of money on mobile channels. At $87 billion, mobile ad spend will account for more than two-thirds of overall domestic ad spend this year, according to eMarketer.

This growth has been driven by large investments in mobile app advertising, which is expected to reach $201 billion in spend globally by 2021.

As to whether in-app advertising is more susceptible to fraud than other forms of mobile marketing, the jury remains out.

Recent research from Protected Media found that in-app advertising is actually subject to far fewer fraudulent attempts than mobile Web advertising.

Still, many ad buyers believe in-app advertising and fraud go hand in hand.

Indeed, Forrester Consulting recently found that brand advertisers cited fraud as their No. 1 concern.

From mobile OBGYN care to personalized vitamins, the direct-to-consumer model has taken off in pharmaceutical healthcare retail.  In fact, the global ePharmacy market is expected to reach $109.2 billion by 2025, growing at a CAGR of 14.8%. Technology is elevating the healthcare retail experience, and it’s only set to grow. Thanks in part to successful marketing campaigns aimed at destigmatizing certain areas of healthcare, brands like hims and hers have successfully pioneered the telemedicine industry, while digital pharmacies like Capsule have taken off in New York City.

Operating behind the scenes of all these telehealth brands is an emerging powerhouse from San Fransisco, the business-to-business ePharmacy infrastructure Truepill.  PSFK caught up with founders Sid Viswanathan and Umar Afridi to learn more about Truepill’s sophisticated technology, including automation and robust APIs, and why functioning as the man behind the curtain for the DTC pharmacy industry was the perfect strategy:

PSFK: What are some of the broader trends you see impacting healthcare retail today, and that you’re leveraging in your work?

Sid Viswanathan: The pharmacy industry is a really large category. It’s about a 350 to 400‑billion dollar category. In many ways, a lot of what’s being done in pharmacy hasn’t changed for several decades.

It’s the same retail pharmacies that we’ve all become familiar with. It’s the same insurance players that have really dominated the market.

In the last three years or so since we came onto the scene, there’s been a massive shift in healthcare where patients can go online, consult with a physician around a range of clinical and therapeutic topics and receive a prescription for a specific condition.

The missing piece in all this has always been how to get the medications to the patients. How can we do it reliably and in a scaleable way across all 50 states in the country?

Similar to companies like Nurx in the birth control space or Hims in the hair loss space, we are the pharmacy partner behind the scenes that’s actually bringing the medication to the patients’ doors.

What we’ve seen in the last few years is a huge emergence of a number of other brands, like Hims and Roman, that are actually getting the product sent out. We’ve done this, too, at scale through a combination of our APIs, our software dashboards and our fulfillment centers.

PSFK: Why did you decide to focus on pharmacy healthcare? What gaps did you notice in the industry, and how did that lead you to found Truepill?

Umar Afridi: My background is in pharmacy. I was a retail pharmacist for 10 years before starting this company. During my time working as a retail pharmacist, I was basically taking note of all the manual processes that we do in pharmacy that result in the terrible experience our patients have.

From the outside, customers see lines in the pharmacy. Behind the scenes, there are things happening causing these kinds of problems. For example, as a pharmacist, if I have a question about a prescription, the way that I would contact the doctor is print the prescription off, scribble a note on it and then fax it to the doctor. It’s like this black hole. We never know if we’re ever going to get a response, or when.

The patient, however, will turn up expecting the prescription to be ready. No one can find it, because we haven’t received a response on it. There’s like a $600 copay or something. Then the customer is stuck. They have to wait another day for the doctor to reply. All of these types of elements created a really bad experience for both patients and everyone else working in that environment.

With delivery, it’s more convenient. You can even consolidate all of the volume and have low cost. You can increase access to medication to areas where certain ones might not be available. You don’t need 10 retail pharmacies within a square mile. You might need one or two and can move everything else over to home delivery.

This is essentially the direction that things are going to move in. By building the infrastructure as well as the technology, we’re positioning ourselves to be the entity that powers that transition.

We started talking to founders in the space who were producing these kind of direct‑to‑consumer physician experiences where patients can go through this magical experience of having a consultation with the physician and having a prescription written at the end of it.

The idea formed that if there was a super‑efficient fulfillment center connected via API to these existing direct‑to‑consumer companies, we could make it one seamless service. From start to finish, patients would just have this super convenient, easy‑to‑use system.

In 2016, we set out to open the pharmacy. We went through the whole regulatory compliance process to set up our fulfillment center. We continued to talk to customers, figuring out more pain points around the software to solve those issues.

We have a facility in New York that should be live in the next few months. We just got our pharmacy license approval for our facility in Manchester in the U.K. We are expanding our capacity internationally as well as combining that with automation, with the aim to be able to fill 100,000 prescriptions a day in the U.S.

PSFK: Truepill is a business‑to‑business company. Who is the Truepill consumer? Who is reaching out, and what is the process for when they do?

Sid: When we refer to our customers, we’re talking about the brands like a Nurx, or a Hims. In many ways, the way we position ourselves in the market is we go to our partners and say, “We are effectively your pharmacy infrastructure component. We are your white label pharmacy. We are here to represent your brand.”

If you went online and shopped at Nurx for a product and received medication at your door in the following days, the existence of Truepill is actually obfuscated from the whole experience.

We quietly operate behind the scenes to get all of the infrastructure, the heavy lifting of securing the medication, the supply chain for the medication, the delivery, the packaging. It comes to consumers in a neatly packaged design in a box that represents the brand. Really, we are the white label pharmacy that operates behind the scenes.

If you asked a consumer or the end patient, they might not even know who Truepill is. And that’s fine, because we’re here to power these existing businesses who are trying to build their own brands.

This is the key piece that differentiates us from every other pharmacy on the market. We’re allowed to stay very clear in our value prop that we’re not doing anything direct‑to‑consumer.

We’re not like a retail pharmacy that’s trying to get in front of customers and build our brand presence. We’re not like some of the other newer direct‑to‑consumer pharmacies that are also trying to build a brand presence. We actually are happy and excited to be in our world where we think it’s a much larger opportunity to power these existing brands with large patient populations. We’re only just scratching the surface with some of the initial customers that we’re working with.

PSFK: Truepill uses a technology-first approach, an important strategy in the digital age. Could you speak to how this serves current consumer expectations?

Sid: I think about what we experience every single day in our ecommerce lives in terms of our experience shopping on Amazon, dealing with subscribing, saving and Prime. Those ideas haven’t been translated over to the experience in the pharmacy world.

If you are a mail order customer of an existing insurance network, we can point to a number of examples online where you would go to their website, you would download a form, you would fill out that form and you would fax it back to get onboarded into the mail order program.

That gap is where we see the biggest opportunity of growth for our business. Coming from a software angle, we know how to build this experience. We have already built them, and we know how to translate this to a legacy industry.

To us its a huge miss when customers are dealing with chronic-illness and life‑saving medications. The experience is just so poor. We think that a technology-first approach is what will solve that.

PSFK: Looking to the future, where do you see Truepill in 3-5 years?

Umar: Right now, we’ve been focused on the direct‑to‑consumer customers. We’re talking to drug manufacturers about powering their DTC, helping them get more distribution when they come out with new medications. We’re talking to smaller PBMs, the Pharmacy Benefit Managers, powering their mail order so that they can compete against some of these other big PBMs. It’s clear that they want to assume mail order, but they’ve never come across a service  that their patients actually want to use. It’s always a terrible experience, and they never get anyone using it.

It’s a clear benefit that if we come in, we can fill that gap and provide an amazing ecommerce‑like experience for their patients. It’ll cost their employers and sponsors a lot less money versus having patients pick up at retail. It’s also massively more convenient. You’ll see massive improvements in adherence when the patients are getting their medications every month delivered directly to them.

Across the whole ecosystem, it’s basically lacking in technology. We are approaching all of these problems in a technology first way, combining all of that with automation to make it a lot more efficient, and figuring out ways so that we can add more value.

Truepill

Truepill is improving the pharmacy experience by making ecommerce possible for telehealth brands. For more from similar inspiring services, see PSFK’s reports and newsletters. 

The influence of wellness continues to bleed into other categories beyond supplements, fitness and health food, reaching particular resonance in skincare and beauty categories. Meanwhile, consumers are becoming more educated and empowered, demanding to know what’s in their products and why.

Billing its product range as “dynamic skincare,” Vancouver-based brand Vitruvi is quickly establishing itself within an increasingly crowded market for natural and organic beauty products. Key to Vitruvi’s retail strategy is an element of customization, allowing shoppers to tailor their own blend based on specific needs. The brand provides education when necessary, encouraging self-care above simply seeing physical results. On shelves and ecommerce storefronts with retail partners including Sephora, Anthropologie and Goop, Vitruvi is building its brand by simply being in the places its core demographic might already be shopping for skincare and personal care items.

PSFK spoke to Virtruvi co-founder Sara Panton about how she uses knowledge gained from medical work around the world to inspire a new kind of wellness brand, and how she keeps in touch with a customer base as it grows.

PSFK: Could you describe your background and how you came to found Vitruvi?

Sara Panton: Vitruvi was really a passion project. My co‑founder and brother, Sean, and I grew up in a really small farming community that didn’t even have a traffic light and was right on the water, with lots of farms and apples and fruit stands. Our parents were early adopters of the organic movement, way before it was cool, which we really took for granted.

It instilled in me an interest in wellness and different cultures. I went on to do a degree in Global Health with a focus on immunology and infectious disease, and took a lot of courses in medical anthropology, working abroad in Kenya and Morocco.

I was so fascinated by cultural practices from different places in the world and what we could learn from them. From there, I went on to medical school. My hope was to specialize in women’s wellness and preventative medicine, and work abroad. I helped set up a safe birthing center in Kenya.

I thought I was going to be working in a tiny town in the middle of east Africa. What ended up happening is that, in my first year, we were learning about the cranium and the olfactory nerve. It’s how you smell.

I became so fascinated by the senses. It’s so powerful how smell affects the brain, and so underutilized. Fast forward, I came home one day, and Sean had moved to Vancouver to go to business school. I had created a scent blend that helped me during studying, because I was having test anxiety. From there, we started creating our own product line.

It began as a blog. It was a website where I would write articles from my bathtub about different health and wellness practices in different cultures. I would interview people about their daily wellness rituals.

We created a super‑simple line of products, really just for our friends and family. Then we started getting interest, right around the time that the wellness movement was starting. We quickly got inbound interest from stores like Urban Outfitters and Anthropologie. It all compounded from there.

I never finished medical school. By my second year it was all that we were doing on our lunch hours. We were bottling products there by hand and mixing them. I still have dents in my left hand from assembling roller balls.

How do you see the wellness industry evolving?

I definitely see it evolving towards incorporating different practices—everything from acupuncture to scent and botanicals.

At Vitruvi, we think about taking traditional botanicals from around the world and repurposing them in a modern way. I think that our current North American society has lost a sense of ritual and ceremony, which is the basis for a lot of cultures around the world.

Whether that’s drinking chai together or making rice and having dinner as a family, or different bathing practices in Morocco with block soap and scrubbing, it’s really important for the brain and body to have ceremonies that help establish a sense of consistency.

We have such a frenetic life with alerts and our phones and travel schedules and time zones. What I’m seeing is an exploration of modern ceremonies that people are looking to create throughout their day that add smaller wellness moments. The former wellness movement was really focused on fitness and sweat and intensity. I’m seeing that softening in my experience.

How do you see wellness crossing into the beauty space? What was behind your decision to move into that category with skincare?

Look at some of the larger retailers, like Sephora launching wellness and bringing on some vitamin companies, and companies like us that talk more about managing stress and different ways to take care of yourself, as opposed to topical treatments with instant results.

People are applying that understanding of wellness, understanding that stress shows up on your face, and that there are ways to get to the root of some of those issues like blemishes or breakouts or that could be tied to diet, or weather.

For me I’ve always thought that it’s really important for a woman to take time to check in with herself and think about how the things that are happening in her life might be showing up on her face. I would feel relatively confident in saying that a lot of women put other people before them.

When we went to launch into skincare, I couldn’t think of just creating one product that could keep up with our community. The women of Vitruvi are dynamic, discerning, interesting, full‑force women who are smart. I thought, “Let’s create a system, instead of creating a product.”

Our face oil collection is the first under our dynamic skincare umbrella, and the idea is that a woman should have skincare as dynamic as her life, changing by the day and the time of month and what’s going on in her life.

We launched it because there was an interest from our community. We’re always talking to our fan base on Instagram and through our blog. We wanted a way for people to use essential oils, which at our core is the foundation of what Vitruvi is, and create a home apothecary for their skin.

How does the skincare line fit into the larger brand strategy for Vitruvi?

That practice of being able to create your own products really will be the foundation of it, much like how we launched our essential oils.  The three‑step system that I designed is meant to be customized, but is also really simple. The first step is choosing a base oil, based on the moisture level that your skin needs. The second step is choosing complex oils. Those have a little more punch to them and have more targeted benefits, whether it be calming, or glowy skin. The third is adding one to three essential oils, for both the scent as well as the properties of those oils.

Was the customization aspect important for your consumers? What is your target market?

We know our customer really well because we talk to her every day. We ask questions and create two‑way conversations as often as we can. When we were building this line, we thought a lot about how much time our customer has. All of this should be able to be done in less than two minutes, and to happen in the palm of your hand.

It’s a Choose‑Your‑Own‑Adventure. We have products that customers can just buy and use if they want to start integrating essential oils and natural body products, and then we have things that are a little more customizable. It’s a two‑way conversation, with our influencers online and our customers. Having customers use and be curious, mixing our products in different ways, is really exciting for us.

Besides online, how else do you build engagement with customers?

It’s still early days for us. We do blending events and I’ll design a facial for someone. I think the customers are still used to being told what they should put on their face. We’ve seen that empowerment in the food movement with people being really discerning about what’s on the ingredient label and when to eat it. I haven’t seen that switch in beauty yet, and customers are still apprehensive if they’re using things correctly. They’re still looking for that guidance.

But if they’re using high-quality, pure, natural ingredients, they really can’t mess up. What’s exciting for us is people taking ownership of their skincare.

Our customer experience is incredibly unique. We’ve scaled it so that customers can call our team and have a conversation with them. We’re happy to help blend the oil on the phone with them or walk through the different set profiles of our essential oils.

It’s a digital first brand. Our website is our storefront. We interact with our customers as if they were just walking into our store. On social media, how we speak to them just like if we were talking face to face, and that extends to our customer experience and how we design products. We ask a lot of questions through our social channels as well as when we’re at an event. Then our customer experience team tracks data around things that are being asked for.

Finally, can you tell us about your partner strategy, and how it’s helping to build your future?

Because it was Sean and I just building it from the get‑go, it was really important for us to partner with retailers. We wanted to take a new approach that really understood our customers and what places she already shopped. We were discerning where Vitruvi would show up in real life. We thought about where she shopped for beauty, body and home, places that she’s already going to when she wants to try or smell a product.

We have partners at GOOP for over three years now. It’s exciting because they are willing to push the boundaries in terms of content and discovery, which is something that we feel passionately about. They’re an incredible team to work with. They’re outstanding at what they do and are some of the kindest people I work with professionally. They listen to their customer in a similar way that we do at Vitruvi.

Sephora had actually reached out to us about two and a half years ago for me to be part of the Sephora Accelerate program. They would invite 10 female CEOs and put them through a program where we were able to meet their whole executive team and learn from them.

Part of that was a lot of learning in focus groups and understanding how wellness is evolving for the Sephora customer. A lot of our products have been designed in talks with the Sephora team and understanding beauty trends on a North American and global scale.

We’ve been the first test kitchen and supplying a lot of information on our end as well around how the wellness and beauty space is evolving and even understanding projections and forecasts for how we plan accordingly for store experiences. It’s been definitely a two‑way learning experience.

Vitruvi

Vitruvi is applying consumer interest in wellness to beauty, empowering consumers to take personal care into their own hands while also offering expert guidance. For more from similar innovative brands, see PSFK’s reports and newsletters. 

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