Word: adding
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...seems the inquiries are coming just in time. A commentary in the May 22 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine highlights a potentially risky shift in direct-to-consumer (DTC) ads - from drugs to devices. Last Thanksgiving, Johnson & Johnson launched its new TV commercial for Cypher, a drug-coated coronary stent, designed to prop open narrowed arteries. "To many consumers, the stent ad may not have seemed surprising or out of place," write the authors of the NEJM article. "But in making the leap from pharmaceuticals to medical devices, the ad campaign raises important questions regarding...
That's a feature common to most drug ads: they leave you confused about the information. The FDA states that DTC commercials must present a "fair balance" of the benefits and side effects of a drug, but it's obvious most don't. Drug ads are, not surprisingly, meant to sell products, not scare consumers off, so they're notorious for careening quickly through the obligatory list of the medication's risks. Even Saturday Night Live has mocked this technique, with its own commercial for a fake birth control pill, Annuale - a spoof of a real drug ad for Seasonale...
...commonly understood by psychologists - and ad makers - that if a person is presented with a list of things, he or she is more likely to remember items at the beginning and at the end of the list than items just past the middle. For example, if you are asked to hear, then recall, a list of 10 foods, chances are best that you'll forget the sixth, seventh and eighth foods. So, while drug makers abide by the law and present important side effect information, it's no surprise that they nearly all follow the same format: putting benefit information...
Merck/Schering-Plough's one-minute ad for the cholesterol-lowering drug Vytorin is a standard example: it repeats the drug's benefits over and over, but squeezes in risk information only once and just after the halfway mark. You won't see it on TV anymore - the drug maker pulled the ad in January after releasing results of a two-year trial that showed Vytorin was no better than a cheaper generic statin drug at preventing heart disease - but you can watch our dissection of it below...
Among DTC ad makers and drug companies, the Nasonex bee, created by ad giant BBDO, is something of a celebrity. (A version of the Nasonex bee ad was the most remembered new drug ad of 2007, according to IAG Research, a subsidiary of Nielsen.) In one version of the ad for the prescription allergy nasal spray, a cartoon bee - sometimes voiced by Antonio Banderas - flies around the screen discussing his own allergy problems, then, after a spray of Nasonex, the bee returns to a flower, saying he is "a changed...