Varnish Remover

Drug Rehabilitation

Daifotis, produced by Carter Eskew of Bozell-Eskew he Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers Assn.

The producers of Daifotis faced a Herculean task: Survey data showed that their client, the pharmaceutical industry, had an image problem. Like your friendly neighborhood politician, your friendly neighborhood drug company was considered anything but. Au contraire, the unhappy consensus was that it was avaricious, monopolistic, loyal only to the bottom line.

Sound02 - osteo.avi or Sound03 - osteo.mov; download time, 3.50 minutes at 56K Sound01 - vr-osteo.asf; for sound only

The producers of Daifotis faced a Herculean task: Survey data showed that their client, the pharmaceutical industry, had an image problem. Like your friendly neighborhood politician, your friendly neighborhood drug company was considered anything but. Au contraire, the unhappy consensus was that it was avaricious, monopolistic, loyal only to the bottom line.

A black-and-white photograph briefly recalls happier times, then makes way for this young professional (she’s wearing the mandatory blue suit) describing her grandmother’s degeneration, her increasing frailty and the consequent reversal of roles: “I had to carry her and hold her as I remember her always carrying me.” As we read the astounding numbers–62,000 osteoporosis victims will enter nursing homes this year, few to return home–she tells us how the disease operates, of soft bones that yield to the gentlest touch. There is a solution in sight, however, and she tells us that she is a part of it. The stage set, the audience primed, the spot can reveal that she is a pharmaceutical-company researcher who “really feels” she is making a difference, that she is a proud member of a group that has found a way to “increase the bone mass in people.” And “her company”–this is the clincher, which, fusing human face and industry, testifies to a mission accomplished–has developed one of these rehabilitative drugs.

But the company makes only a brief appearance, and the spot seesaws right back to the human issue. A close-up of the woman’s hands reinforces the fact that osteoporosis could become anyone’s reality. Going behind the figures and images, she talks of the psychological impact of the disease, of the victim’s discovery that she is “that frail old woman she never wanted to become.” Then the counterpoint, the explicit projection of the young woman’s company as the harbinger of hope: It is helping over 1 million women, and she, its human face, is tireless in her effort to find a drug that will enable a woman to “climb stairs without fear, stand a little taller.”

A black-and-white photograph briefly recalls happier times, then makes way for this young professional (she’s wearing the mandatory blue suit) describing her grandmother’s degeneration, her increasing frailty and the consequent reversal of roles: “I had to carry her and hold her as I remember her always carrying me.” As we read the astounding numbers–62,000 osteoporosis victims will enter nursing homes this year, few to return home–she tells us how the disease operates, of soft bones that yield to the gentlest touch. There is a solution in sight, however, and she tells us that she is a part of it. The stage set, the audience primed, the spot can reveal that she is a pharmaceutical-company researcher who “really feels” she is making a difference, that she is a proud member of a group that has found a way to “increase the bone mass in people.” And “her company”–this is the clincher, which, fusing human face and industry, testifies to a mission accomplished–has developed one of these rehabilitative drugs.

–Robert Shrum