I don’t think it’s any great secret among the people who know me that I don’t watch television. I have a Sony TV in my storage room; I haven’t turned it on in several years now so I can’t say for sure whether it even works or not. I also have an ElGato TV tuner-thingie plugged into my main computer, which is the only thing I ever use for watching TV — on those rare occasions that I do.
So not too long ago I sat down and watched part of the ABC Evening News, or perhaps more precisely, the ABC Evening Gossip. There wasn’t much in the way of news, just a lot of “features” that come right out of supermarket tabloids. What a bunch of dreck.
However, the commercials were absolutely fascinating. Obviously the target audience is precisely my age group; a lot of the ads are for various medicenes, none of them for terribly important things. Just the sort of stuff that aging baby boomers such as myself usually have to deal with — hair loss, gas, etc. What made the commercials fascinating had to do with the (obviously legally mandated) inclusion of all of the side effects that a particular medication is known to have. Inevitably these would be read by some incredibly smooth-voiced person while tinkly or whooshy music played in the background. But, heavens: those side effects! “This medication may cause nausea, double vision, uncontrollable vomiting, excessive water loss, loss of muscle tone, fainting or vertigo, the growth of an extra arm, the loss of a foot, or in some cases the skin may turn bright purple.”
You can just imagine how much the drug companies absolutely hate that law. It reminds me of a wonderful feature from Mad Magazine when I was a kid: what if George (I Cannot Tell a Lie) Washington ran an advertising agency? It was delightful as ol’ honest George had to tell the truth about the products he was hawking, no matter what. Of course he lost all of his accounts shortly thereafter.
Let’s face it: most of these prescription and non-prescription drugs are solutions looking for a problem. There were some ‘real’ drugs in the mix, but even then I rather wondered what on earth these people were doing advertising the stuff. Plavix, for example. I’m quite familiar with it; I took it daily for three months following my angioplasty. Plavix is a super-aspirin, a blood thinner, that makes it much less likely for blood clots to form. That’s a very good idea when you have a metallic cylinder sitting inside one of your coronary arteries. Plavix is something that a cardiologist will prescribe if you need it. So why are they advertising on TV? Do they really think you’re going to see your cardiologist and ask him/her if you ‘can try some Plavix’? Especially not in this day and age of HMOs.
Ah, well. I can’t pretend to understand much about how the TV advertising world works. I hardly ever have anything to do with it, after all.