Advertising - Some of Sharecare.com’s Health Advice Will Be From Advertisers

Starting on Thursday, theWeb siteSharecare.comis to arrive, offering what its proprietors call an interactive social Q.&A. platform to provide consumers with what they want to know on health and wellness subjects— with the A’s being contributed by, among others, marketers.

Those behind Sharecare, a company formed last year to operate Sharecare.com, hope its features will enable the new Web site to thrive in a crowded field. Others in the online health care category includeAbout.com,AOL, CNN, eHow, Everyday Health,Health.com, MSN,WebMDandYahoo.

Sharecare.com will begin with content contributed by organizations likeAARP, theAmerican Cancer Society, theAmerican Heart Association, theAmerican Red Cross, theCleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins and the National Academy of Sports Medicine, along with medical professionals like Dr.Mehmet Oz.

Those contributors are to be known as experts on the site. There is another label, knowledge partners, for marketers that are paying an estimated $1 million to $7 million to become sponsors of Sharecare.com. The initial roster is composed ofColgate-Palmolive, for Colgate oral care products; the Ortho-McNeil-Janssen Pharmaceuticals division ofJohnson&Johnson; theMedicines Company, a drug maker;Pfizer;Unilever, for Dove skin-care products; UnitedHealthcare, the health insurer; andWalgreen, for its Walgreens drug stores.

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Plans call for the content provided by the sponsors to be labeled, bearing their names and logos, so that visitors to Sharecare.com can distinguish their contributions from those of other sources.

Still, some visitors looking for objective answers to questions on health matters may raise their eyebrows at the presence of marketers. For instance, in a demonstration of the Web site on Wednesday, a reporter saw that among the questions being answered by Dove, on topics like treatingvaricose veinsand the effects of tanning beds, was one asking why good skin care is important.

“I’m sure there will be people who do that,” Jeff Arnold, chairman and chief architect at Sharecare in Atlanta, said of potential eyebrow-lifters. But in tests of the Web site in the last year,“the brand answers were read as much as the expert answers,” he added.

“It’s interesting to see how seriously the brands are taking their answers,” Mr. Arnold said, because they know their replies will not be far from those of the experts. There are more than 100,000 answers to questions on Sharecare.com, he added, with a goal of“a million by the end of the year.”

Paul Ewing, senior director for patient marketing at the United States primary-care business unit of Pfizer in New York, said his company would provide answers to questions“in the areas offibromyalgiaandsmoking cessation” but“not around any products we offer” in those areas, which are, respectively, the prescription drugs Lyrica and Chantix.

Anyone who reads content on Sharecare.com, whatever the source, will“have to work with their health care providers to make sure they’re making the best decisions about what the next steps would be” for any condition they want treated, Mr. Ewing said.

Pfizer’s interest in taking part in the Web site stems from a belief that“informed people make better decisions about their health,” he added,“and have better interactions with their health care providers.”

Christine Kubisztal, director for media services at Walgreen in Deerfield, Ill., said she would“be curious to see if” users of Sharecare.com perceived the answers from sponsors differently from the others.

“Yes, we are a retail place to go to,” she said of the Walgreens stores,“but we are also a brand trusted for 109 years.”

People are looking to“consume health care online in a much more user-friendly way,” Ms. Kubisztal said, and the“very individualized, very localized” answers to be provided by Sharecare.com are part of how Walgreen wants to demonstrate that its pharmacists“can be experts, providing answers and advice beyond 30 pills in a bottle.”

Sharecare was formed by a consortium that includes Mr. Arnold, who founded WebMD and later was chief executive ofHowStuffWorks.comwhen it was sold toDiscovery Communications; Dr. Oz, whose career as a health care arbiter was made byOprah Winfrey; Harpo Productions, Ms. Winfrey’s company;SonyPictures Television, a unit of the Sony Corporation that co-owns“The Dr. Oz Show” with Ms. Winfrey; and Discovery, a partner with Ms. Winfrey in OWN: the Oprah Winfrey Network, a cable channel to be introduced in January.

In a sort of soft debut for Sharecare.com, the Q.&A. section of Dr. Oz’sWeb site(doctoroz.com) bears the words“powered by Sharecare.”

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Sony Pictures Television is handling the search for sponsors for Sharecare.com.“Their answers are never‘This dental floss brand is better than that dental floss brand,’ ” said Amy Carney, president for advertising sales at Sony Pictures Television in New York.

“When the answers are as high quality as they will be,” she added,“if there is an initial skepticism on the part of the consumer it will quickly go away.”

According tocomScore, the top health information Web site in the United States in August wasEverydayhealth.com, with 25.7 million unique visitors, followed by WebMD, with 23.3 million. Of the total American Internet audience that month of 212.6 million, comScore reported, 96.6 million, or 45.4 percent, sought health information.

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