Before we start with The Distillery’s usual focus, let us ask if this page at Roche is fully secured? Or, might we be hearing and reading about another information security breech? Let’s hope those default Apache passwords have been changed.
Moving along to the business at hand, we find the Roche Health Kiosk. (Clicking on Garden of Eden in the lower left of your screen leads to the Apache page mentioned above.) It looks promising given users are instructed to have Flash and Quicktime installed on their computers, but we’ve been fooled before by that before. Will we be this time?
Clicking our way inside via Influenza, definitely a hot topic these days, we find ourselves presented with what appears to be static information offered via a menu listing. And, in a font size no elderly person could ever possibly read. Although fewer older persons use computers than younger generations, it would still be very nice to see some obvious means by which the text could be made larger such that one of the most susceptible groups could more easily access the information.
That noted, click on Definition and look for the all-but-invisible shadow of a video camera graphic below the larger color image. Clicking on either it or the green arrow at the bottom of the screen opens a Quicktime video defining influenza. We find that to be the mode of presentation down the entire list, with the exception of Facts worth knowing [sic]. Even more, we find that to be the mode throughout the site with all the listed conditions and diseases.
However, The Distillery wonders who might be the target audience for this material. As previously noted, the site is definitely not user-friendly for anyone over a certain age when one’s eyesight becomes poorer. There is far too little guidance to the multimedia content, the sort of content most easily accessed and comprehended by those with less than perfect vision and even most in need of the information. Maybe it’s just me, but I expect a global health care entity to be a bit more aware than that. Again, what age demographic is most likely to die from influenza or several of the other conditions? And, Roche does use the word kiosk which typically implies easy access.
Also, should a person come to the Roche’s primary site looking for information, they do not find clear and obvious pointers to the Roche Health Kiosk, which is almost the only portion of Roche’s online presence that the general public will either want to see or can understand. Therefore, might not the Roche Health Kiosk be viewed more as an afterthought by Roche marketing and management than a direct and effective communications channel to the firm’s end users? So it seems.
Home page: Roche Health Kiosk
Home page: Roche

Save The Tiger Fund
Thursday, 6 July 2006; 12:29PR is as important to a firm’s image, profits, and longevity as any other component of the marketing/promotional mix. That is why The Distillery is perplexed to learn that the Save The Tiger Fund is largely sponsored by Exxon Mobil. There was no mention of it at the Exxon Mobil site when it was reviewed. Or, maybe it was just very well hidden.
Either way, someone is missing the boat on this one in not making it more visible. Exxon Mobil needs all the good press it can muster. Are some large companies so disjointed that all too frequently the left hand does not know what the right hand is doing? Apparently so.
For more information about the Save The Tiger Fund, visit SaveTheTigerFund.org. After all, tigers are very cool cats and all that jive.
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