I promise this will be my last post (for now, at least) about drug commercials! And it won't even be very long...I just wanted to add one last thing that I love about drug commercials, and that is the action that happens in them. Specifically I'm referring to the drug commercials that spend 85% of their time listing all of the side effects and warnings regarding the drugs. The producers of these commercials are left with a quandary: what are they to do onscreen while the narrator lists all of those terrible side effects. You don't want to show a person puking while the narrator describes nausea. That's not going to sell any pharmaceuticals. And you wouldn't want to see a bewildered old geezer walking around with a woody while the narrator intones him to see a doctor if his erection lasts too long. So what do the producers do?
There's no single answer, and I enjoy seeing all of the different solutions. Should we show Sally Field gardening or exercising with a yoga ball? Or maybe we should show a bunch of people who, when dressed properly, look just like a plate of fattening food. Or maybe we should have two commercials that are exactly the same except one is live action and one is a sort of cartoonized version of that same live action?* The possibilities are endless.
And with that said, I will get off of drug commercials for a while.
*Sorry, I forget what those commercials were even selling. I just found them fascinating, and not just because they showed some women in bathing suits walking around.
No comments:
Post a Comment