Pharmaceutical advertisements hold a special place in advertising for being among the most ridiculous commercials out there--healthy, fit, lively adults "celebrate life" or "experience nature" while a soothing, calm voice lists terrible side effects and other warnings for using the medication. At least some people, if not most people, must find them completely frustrating--they are the perfect examples of advertising that seek to gloss over the difficulties of the real world and sell an emotionally charged fantasy of "the good life," when what is really being sold is product that is not depicted in the advertisement at all. Television is the medium to reach the infamous "lowest common denominator;" to sell to the largest and what corporations assume is the least sophisticated demographic. With this point of view it's not hard to see why pharma companies dumb down their ads--they're meant to communicate to a very large, undifferentiated mass of consumers who don't understand medicine. I think that this approach to advertising creates the problems that drug ads run into in Milt Freudenheim's article. When the message is dumbed down, superlative, even hyperbolic statements are far easier to make.

I found it interesting that in the article, the FDA and members of Congress sought to amend the misinformation advertised in drug ads by, in one sense, further limiting the flow of information to the consumer. Government officials in the article ask for a delay in the initiation of drug advertising campaigns--12 months, 15 months, etc. At first it seemed reasonable--How can pharmaceutical companies really advertise a sophisticated chemical formula that treats a complicated disorder to the proverbial lowest common denominator? The government's demands are somewhat sensible--delay the touchy-feely, dumbed down, emotional advertisements until the smart people can really figure out what's going on, and then unleash it on the public. It struck me, though, that this is a very undemocratic way of viewing information. Is there not some way for drug companies to advertise effectively and intelligently? To communicate a nuanced message to a "lowest common denominator" that, due to poverty or lack of education, may have more real-world experience with sickness and/or death than the creators of the ads?

It may have something to do with the connotations with television--actually, I think it is entirely because of the type of medium television is percieved as. Nuanced, "real" advertisements are not expected on television. Perhaps in an upscale magazine or The New York Times, perhaps on certain radio stations or on billboards in elite urban areas--but television remains a medium whose viewers are thought to be incredibly simple and slow. I have no way of knowing how intelligent the average swath of humanity is, but I wonder what would happen to the pharmaceuticals market if advertisements came out and honestly said, we know that sometimes these things don't work, but we spent millions of dollars making this chemical formula, and though it might make you throw up in the mornings, it might actually help. If the sugar coating was stripped away, maybe the pills would go down a little easier.