Ads of the Weird : Health care

Mommy, where did your head go?

Allison Linn — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:00:00 GMT

A new commercial for the migraine medicine Treximet starts out in relatively humdrum fashion, with a close-up shot of a woman’s face as she discusses the gripping pain of a headache.

Then the ad cuts away to its surreal horror movie moment – the woman in question is actually literally holding her head in her hand, and her body is decapitated.

Or, at least it would seem at face value to be a horror movie moment. But instead, the commercial treats this development as if it is nothing special. Creepiest of all, the woman in question is standing in front of a school bus, one arm cradling her head and another arm draped over the shoulders of her young son.

treximet.com

The boy, meanwhile, doesn’t look at all perturbed that his mother is beheaded – instead, he seems kind of annoyed that he has to stand there with her.

The commercial goes on to show two other people who are holding their heads in their hands while everyday life swirls around them. We’re thankful that we didn’t have to see any special effects blood spewing from these beheaded women’s necks, but we were still disturbed by the image of a decapitated head chatting away in the produce aisle while everyone around her appears to ignore the aberration.

We’re guessing the nonchalance with which the ad presents these headless bodies and talking craniums is meant to be a reference to how people with migraines must feel, quietly suffering in such agony that they would like to take their own head off, while everyone else continues with their regular lives, oblivious to the pain.

It’s actually a powerful idea that could have made for a dramatic commercial. But instead of coming off as subtle and sympathetic, this ad risks feeling ham-handed and corny.

Click here to watch the Treximet ad.

Dr. Scholl's gets way too sexy for itself

Allison Linn — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 20:30:00 GMT

Say the name Dr. Scholl’s and most people think of sensible shoes, somewhat embarrassing foot ailments and other not-so-sexy connotations. That’s a hard reputation to beat, but evoking table dancing may be taking things too far.

A recent ad for the foot comfort company shows model Yaya DaCosta, a contestant from "America’s Next Top Model," doing what appears to be some sort of sexy dance (although it may be the chicken dance gone awry) on something that looks like a cross between a desk and a stage.

Dr. Scholl’s

After performing in bare feet, she jumps off -- and right into a pair of sky-high red heels, then breaks into the dance again. Apparently, this is an effort to show that using Dr. Scholl’s For Her makes dancing in towering heels more comfortable.

The ad is so wrong in so many ways that it’s hard to know where to begin. First of all, if this is a commercial aiming to tout how much more comfortable heels are thanks to Dr. Scholl’s products, why does it show a woman dancing barefoot for so much longer than it shows her dancing with the shoes on?

Second, why didn’t they bother to hire a woman who could actually dance well?

DaCosta is beautiful, but her moves are jerky and inconsistent. More to the point, she often looks strained and uncomfortable, although that may be because her movement is limited by those skin-tight leather pants. Still, we’re guessing the shoes get so little air time because she just couldn’t dance well in them.

The entire effect is unappealing, made worse by the fact that the whole concept -- dancing on a platform in bright red heels -- is more crass than cute.

We’re all for foot products that make walking, and dancing, in high heels more comfortable, but please spare us the table-dancing subtext.

Click here to watch the ad.

The truth will set you humming

Allison Linn — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 07:00:00 GMT

In an age when teens are inundated with images of sex and violence, one has to wonder, is anything shocking anymore?

The makers of the “truth” anti-smoking ads, who for years have been trying to scare would-be smokers straight with startling images such as masses of body bags and people posing as “dead” smokers, think they have hit on something: shocking the kids by not being so shocking at all.

The American Legacy Foundation’s latest anti-smoking campaign juxtaposes joyful cartoon characters and upbeat musical numbers with troubling anecdotes about smoking, in the hopes that a little sardonic humor will keep the attention of famously fickle 12- to 17-year-olds.

American Legacy Foundation

In the most recent installment, an announcer informs us that a tobacco executive once remarked, after being told that smoking can lead to underweight babies, that some people might prefer small babies. At that, the announcer breaks into a banjo ditty, sharing the stage with a cartoon stork and cartoon babies.

In keeping with the campaign’s trademark format, the ad is filmed in a public place, and it frequently cuts to flummoxed bystanders looking on. (In this case, they may be most puzzled because they can’t see the cartoon characters that are integral to the final product.)

The lyrics (“healthy babies are just no fun/eat too much and they weigh a ton”) are catchy but could be wittier. Still, The Disney musical-esque entreaty is so unlike anything viewers are used to seeing in a public service announcement that it just might capture the attention of the target teen demographic.

However, that also could be the campaign’s biggest drawback: The goofy song and characters are cute, but one wonders whether young viewers will be too distracted by cartoon babies and the like to understand the irony, and hear the anti-smoking message in the lyrics.

Also, let’s hope that most people between the ages of 12 and 17 don’t yet have to worry about whether their babies will be normal birth weight, but perhaps that’s an issue for the groups trying to stop teen pregnancy to tackle.

The other ads in the cartoon series include a song-and-dance number about “the magical amount” of nicotine needed to keep smokers addicted, and another that ponders whether the annual worldwide death toll from tobacco, put at 5 million, is a “typo.”

As with previous “truth” ads, the series does a good job of resisting the urge to talk down to kids. Let’s just hope the kids are paying attention.

Click here to see the campaign.

Update: Our colleague Gael Fashingbauer Cooper over at msnbc.com's Test Pattern has launched her annual summer TV Commercial Contest. Click here to help her choose the best and worst ads of the year.

TMI from Dove

Rob Neill — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 07:00:00 GMT

Dove’s “Campaign For Real Beauty” has been the source of good advertising with a good (if a tad bit Oprah-ized) message for a few years now.

The message: Women should be comfortable with their bodies and own beauty. Hopefully it has made some people feel better, more respected and respectful.

Certainly, though, women are still hit with contrary messages at every turn. The company’s new “short film” (or is that “long ad?”) is especially striking.

Unilever

“Onslaught,” created by the campaign by agency Ogilvy & Mather opens with a doe-eyed young girl staring into the camera, as if she’s waiting to be told something. What follows is about 50 seconds of rapid-fire edits and dissolves that show what the world, or at least the world of advertising, will be telling her throughout her life. And how she may live her life because of it.

Advertisements for lingerie dissolve into fashion magazines dissolve into diet pills dissolve into beauty creams dissolve into an emaciated woman piling on weight and back again dissolve to a bulimia sufferer dissolve into various plastic surgeries.

When the commotion dies down, the camera refocuses on the girl with the message “talk to your daughter before the beauty industry does.”

Show the evidence. Deliver a simple message. Very effective.

Of course Dove is owned by Unilever, which makes the really-it’s-a-magic-pheromone-and-not-cheap-drugstore-cologne spray Axe. And more importantly markets it like this. We’re far too polite to at this point bring up talking out of both sides of one’s mouth. So we won’t.

Apropos of nothing: We really liked this completely unrelated ad. Reminds us of when Tarantino made good movies.

Saving Lindsay ... just not that one

Rob Neill — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:00:00 GMT

From the “there is no such thing as bad publicity” file: The Canterbury Institute, a New Jersey-based business that offers “medical treatments for addiction” took out a full-page ad in the New York Post with the screaming headline “Don’t Die Lindsay.”

(At this point we’d interject that the type treatment makes us think of our younger days and “Frankie Says Relax” or “Choose Life” T-shirts, but that just makes us look old, and we’re not that old. No. Really.)

Before you wonder what part-time actress and full-time train wreck Lindsay Lohan has to say about this, the Institute’s Alan Traiger has some words of caution.

Canterbury Institute

“Just so you know, this is not about any one Lindsay. There are about 23 million Americans who suffer from drug and alcohol addiction. I realize that some people may reference that, may put a last name to it, but for us it’s about everyone,” Traiger told us, presumably with a straight face. (It was a phone interview, so we’re just guessing.)

Count us among the narrow-minded readers who put a last name to it immediately when we stumbled over it (thanks AdRANTS).

The whole thing poses the question: Is it tacky to piggyback on a young woman’s very public personal issues? Or is said young woman now a pop culture caricature ripe for use in an opportunistic, eye-catching ad?

Yes and yes.

Fun detail in this story: The name of the ad agency that came up with the idea is “Jugular.”

Hepatitis how-to’s

Rob Neill — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 07:00:00 GMT

In general, offers that begin with a “Have you ever wondered?” or “Have you ever wanted to?” make us immediately go “no” and move on.

But we were more than a little intrigued with an ad we stumbled over on the Web asking, “Trying to catch hepatitis C? Not sure where to start?” Not particularly. Wait -- what?

The animated spot features a little doodle of a guy, who evidently is named Dennis. An onscreen narrator asks the question (at the time Dennis -- obviously highly-motivated -- is licking the jagged rim of a tin can) and offers some ... er ... helpful information on ways he could have already caught it. These include, but are not limited to, sharing a razor, getting a tattoo and spending a holiday doing drugs and listening to techno music. (We pause at this point to remind all our readers that if you or someone you care about listens to techno, get help immediately.)

hepatitisday.info

The message, of course is, that seemingly mundane things you’ve done may put you at risk for the disease. And since there aren’t any symptoms, get tested. In the end Dennis does, and a buzzer turns red for his test results. He looks happy, then dejected. We couldn’t figure out whether that meant he was happy he was positive, unhappy he was negative, happy he was positive until he considered the ramifications … or … well, we’re just sure we don’t want hepatitis. In addition to the severe medical implications, it could possibly lead to this.

The cartoon (and a game on the site featuring Dennis that we were too lame to finish) calls attention to the more serious matter of World Hepatitis Awareness Day. It’s Oct. 1. What, not on your Outlook calendar? Ours neither, we just checked. It obviously targets a non-U.S. audience, since understanding that silliness can drive home a serious message isn’t really the strong suit of a country where Jim Carrey is so overwhelmingly popular. (Yes, we know he’s actually Canadian.).

There is good information on the site. It’s worth a quick spin, if not more.

See the ad here.

World Hepatitis Awareness Day site is here.

Potty humor for grown-ups

Allison Linn — Tue, 04 Sep 2007 08:03:00 GMT

Everyone knows that kids love potty humor, but how well does it go over with adults?

Kellogg Co. is testing that notion with a new ad for All-Bran, a cereal touted more for its fiber than its flavor.

The commercial, targeted at consumers ages 45 to 75, features a burly construction worker strolling around a job site boasting about how All-Bran has helped make him regular. Just like the recent ad featuring a group of men jamming about the wonders of Viagra, the first question that comes to mind is, “Do guys really hang around talking about this stuff?”

You don’t have to look far for the symbolism at the construction site. There’s that long, brown beam falling out of a hole in the wall, complete with grunting sound effects. Then there is the dump truck dropping a load of brownish bricks, not to mention a scene in which pellet-shaped barrels appear to roll out from the rear end of our affable narrator.

The tagline of the ad promotes the cereal’s “10-day challenge” with the slogan, “Do it. Feel it.”

Kellogg’s spokeswoman Kris Charles said the company hopes the ad will be “something that people would notice and might get a chuckle out of, but also think about as a solution for an issue that they might be experiencing.”

Everyone appreciates a little sly humor in an ad, but does it have to be literally dumped in our faces? This ad will likely make you giggle, or cringe, or both, while watching television or browsing the Web. But what about the next time you walk down the cereal aisle? Will you remember the ad and pick up the All-Bran, or blush and move on, not wanting to be the person with that cereal in your grocery cart?

Click here to watch the ad.

Viva Viagra?

Allison Linn — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 15:08:00 GMT

The setting is a folksy bar off a dusty highway. The scene: a group of guys who have gotten together for a jam session, to sing about ... the wonders of erectile dysfunction medication.

The new commercial for Pfizer Inc.’s Viagra is striking for a few reasons.

For one thing, there are no women in it -- this is a commercial all about guys bonding with other guys over the good times this medication has brought them, not sharing an intimate moment with their female partner. And secondly, some of the guys here strike the viewer as pretty young for erectile dysfunction.

Is Viagra taking things too far? The AIDS Healthcare Foundation thinks so. It alleges that the ad’s take on the celebratory ditty “Viva Las Vegas” -- in their version, it’s “Viva Viagra” -- helps encourage the use of Viagra as a party drug rather than a more serious medication.

Pfizer disagrees. Spokesman Francisco Gebauer said the ad is intended to help men get over the embarrassment of talking about erectile dysfunction with their physicians, and that the company is committed to safe and appropriate use of the drug.

He said all the men in the commercial are over age 40, and that the company’s research shows that 50 percent of men over age 40 struggle with erectile dysfunction to some degree.

We’ve certainly come a long way from the days of then 70something Bob Dole earnestly hawking Viagra. But then again, over the past few years plenty of pharmaceutical companies have started taking more humorous and daring approaches to promote their medications. Also, Viagra now faces much fiercer competition in the market, so it needs to do more to stand out.

Still, is it appropriate for prime-time television? When Ads of the Weird wrote about a commercial for Trojan condoms earlier this summer, plenty of readers wondered why major networks refused to show that commercial during peak television viewing hours, while they seem to have no problem with commercials for “E.D.” drugs.

“Viva Viagra” debuted during the “NBC Nightly News.” It will air on network and cable programming with more than 90 percent adult viewers, Gebauer said.

(MSNBC.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Click here to watch the ad online.

Update! MSNBC.com's television editor, Gael Fashingbauer Cooper, also weighs in on "Viva Viagra" in her recent blog post on ads that get a bit too personal. Click here to read about it.

Meth turnoff

Allison Linn — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 08:59:00 GMT

The image of a teenage boy beating up his own mother so he can steal money from her purse will not quickly fade from memory. Nor will the scene in which a young woman has sex in exchange for drugs -- which her boyfriend collects -- while she says, in a voiceover: “I love my boyfriend. We’ve been together since like eighth grade. He’s my best friend. He takes care of me.”

The Montana Meth Project isn’t aiming for subtle in the third wave of a TV, radio and print campaign designed to keep teens from even trying methamphetamines. After graphically showing kids what the addictive, destructive drug can do to their bodies, the campaign has turned its attention to how meth can lead you to abuse and exploit the people you care about.

Montana Meth Project

The ads, which are garnering interest from other states including Arizona, are not for the faint-hearted -- or weak-stomached. But Jeanne Cox, executive director of the Meth Project Foundation, said the project’s creators found the in-your-face approach was the only way to get the attention of kids who are used to violent video games, horror movies and graphic music videos.

They say the ads also are getting results, having already helped spur a steep drop in teen meth use and meth-related crime in the state. Force yourself to sit through them, and it’s not hard to see why. The ads may offend some, but they’re much more likely to make you think twice about doing drugs than a shopworn slogan like “just say no.”

See the ads here.