Adland_ Searching for the Meaning of Life on a Branded Planet - James P. Othmer [68]
They tell us during graphic portions of the news that we may want to look away, or have the children leave the room, but they should really be telling children—no, all of us—to leave the room when the civics lesson ends and the more-information-than-anyone-needs-to-know biology lessons begin. Relying on network news pharma ads as her teacher, my daughter would think that when we are young, our legs can’t stop moving, we menstruate four times a year, we are ravaged by genital herpes despite taking great measures to not get pregnant, and we are extremely depressed; when we are middle-aged, we desperately want to get pregnant but can’t, perhaps because most men can’t achieve an erection (yet others are afflicted with interminable boners), and we are also bald, overweight, and extremely depressed; and when we’re older, we are arthritic, forgetful, still depressed, riddled with cancer, and either can’t pee at all or pee so much we have to wear diapers.
Lately, whenever my daughter approaches when the news is on, I encourage her to go to another room to watch something less offensive, like South Park.
What about this as a side effect of watching too many pharmaceutical ads: you tune in to a show feeling great and leave convinced that forces beyond your control are conspiring against you, physiological time bombs are rampaging through your veins, and you have no fewer than seven potential syndromes pillaging your body? And if you happen to be a person of a certain psychological ilk, with Munchausen’s syndrome, for instance, the nightly network news is nothing less than must-see TV, a program filled with a constant stream of new and FDA-approved syndromes and conditions to cherry-pick for your own pleasure/misery.
Consider my all-time favorite, Mirapex, which treats something called RLS (restless legs syndrome), a condition whose degree of absurdity is topped only by its potential side effects: “Tell your doctor if you experience increased gambling, sexual, or other urges.”
Kind of makes one wonder how many evenings that began in front of the TV with a little bit of cappuccino-induced leg bouncing—something as innocent as, say, keeping time to the Mirapex jingle—ended in a Vegas hotel room with a bankrupt RLS sufferer snorting coke off a transsexual stripper’s breasts. “Well, I lost every cent of my 401(k) nest egg, and my marriage, and I caught a rare strain of syphilis. But at least I no longer have that irritating leg-bounce-up-and-down thingy.”
The Side-Effect Channel
In only two developed countries, the United States (which expanded and legalized drug advertising in 1997) and, for some reason, New Zealand, is it legal to broadcast this kind of unabashed, deceptive, dangerous bullshit.
I recently shared some of my opinions on pharma marketing with an acquaintance who worked at an agency that specializes in it. She agreed that much of it was intrusive and over-the-top and occasionally entered a gray ethical space. But, she countered, without pharma companies, who would fund the research grants and facilities, the scholarships, the university libraries? Without pharma ads, thousands of people might live with an undiagnosed, untreated illness. Plus, she said, most of this stuff actually works, saving and improving millions of lives.
Cancer drugs, yes. Restless legs? Please.
After my brief foray into pharmaceutical advertising, I came to the conclusion that it (the ads, not the drugs) should be banned. If you don’t feel well, ask your doctor. Don’t wait for a commercial to tell you that you don’t feel well and then ask your doctor, who may or may not have recently returned from a junket to a Costa Rican eco-lodge paid for by the very makers of the commercial that brought you to him in the first place.
And if pharmaceutical ads aren’t banned, how about this: ads paid for by a co-op that basically and only says, “If you don’t feel well, see your doctor”?
Or this, which I thought of during my stint on the DVT account: the Side-Effect Channel. The Side-Effect Channel is based on the premise that