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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...
...reviewed a 2005 version of the Nasonex ad and found that test subjects had difficulty recalling the side effects mentioned in the commercial. (Here's a link to an early version of the ad, not the specific commercial Day studied - drug-makers continuously tweak ads after they're launched.) When Day studied the 2005 ad, she found several visual distractions that influenced viewer comprehension. During a voiceover about side effects, the bee flew from side to side, its wings flashing and flapping nearly four times per second. At the end of the commercial, when a voiceover talked about the benefits...
...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...