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Ad Report Card: Mercky Message

By Rob WalkerPosted Wednesday, July 18, 2001, at 3:00 AM ET

The other day a reader sent me a note about a curious ad that, he said, popped up during a recent installment of Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? The spot seemed to be a generalized warning about chickenpox. At the end, the corporate logo for Merck appeared. The spot, in short, is another example of the Mysterious Pharmaceutical Company Ad, which has practically become a category unto itself. This particular ad directs the viewer to www.chickenpoxinfo.com, where among other things, you can view the commercial.

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The ad: It's a short and simple spot. The imagery is a series of toys, brought to life by special effects. First, a rubber duck creepily cries and twists his head in sorrow or perhaps pain. Maudlin piano music plinks in the background as a female narrator says: "Complications from chickenpox can send kids to the hospital, with serious problems, like severe skin infections and pneumonia." The image shifts to a teddy bear. "But there may be something you can do," the narrator continues, and again the image changes, to a stuffed monkey, who lifts his head and displays a big, happy smile (also a little creepy). "Talk to your doctor about chickenpox." We see the Web address and, discreetly, the Merck logo, and the ad ends.

So what's the product? Not only is the name of Merck's chickenpox vaccine not mentioned in the ad, but I can find no mention of it anywhere on chickenpoxinfo.com. It's not until you click on a green button that says "Things to discuss with your doctor" that you learn the vaccine's name as you're transported to another site: Varivax.com. Why so coy? Isn't the Merck logo sort of a giveaway that the company has some sort of chickenpox solution on offer?

I checked in with a Merck spokeswoman, who assured me that the point of the ad is to convince viewers that "chickenpox needs to be taken more seriously" and not to push Varivax. About an hour later her office sent me a fax reiterating this point: The ad is there to "increase awareness" of the disease and "motivate parents to talk to their doctors." (Such products are also marketed to doctors, of course, so that they will know all about the vaccine when their patients come around asking questions, and Merck has made a "promotional effort" with doctors on behalf of Varivax.)

The reader who e-mailed me about this Merck spot thought it seemed less like an ad trying to inform parents and more like one trying to scare the bejesus out of them. He has a point. When the FDA approved Varivax in 1995, it noted that "chickenpox is generally mild and not normally life-threatening" and estimated the number of related hospitalizations at about 9,300 a year. That's a small number—unless of course your kid is one of the 9,300.

The drug ad onslaught. There's been a great deal of energy spent chewing over the implications of pharmaceutical advertising and what rules ought to govern it. I won't rehash all of that here, but the upshot has been a peculiar ad landscape: ads for drugs in which no ailment is mentioned, ads like this one in which an ailment is discussed but no specific help offered, and of course the many weird commercials in which some good-looking actor pauses in the middle of his spiel about how this or that drug has changed his life to announce that "Potential side effects can include shingles, colorblindness, or uncontrollable vomiting; ask your doctor for details," or some such thing. To me the Merck ad seems relatively tame and responsible when seen against that backdrop.

But the backdrop itself is another story. It's a favorite conceit of advertisers of all sorts to say that they're merely out to educate the consumer, as opposed to peddle goods. But is the current slew of pharmaceutical ads making health care consumers more educated, or simply more frightened and confused? I'm not really sure of the answer to that one, so, um … ask your doctor for details.

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Rob Walker writes the Ad Report Card for Slate.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments From The Fray:

[Notes from the Fray Editor: Thrasymachus and Texwiz spar on the role of doctors in this thread, and Texwiz has more to say below. A-Z says Merck is selling through fear and asks "what does it say when corporations think that the best way to do so is to appeal to our most primitive character traits?" While Brian believes that Americans are not so dumb that they will believe the ad and panic. Texwiz got on his case too. It was a Texwiz kind of Fray. And no, he isn't a doctor, although he played one in High School, and watches ER.]

The weeping rubber ducky has been showing up in parenting magazines for quite some time. The caption reads: Sadly, about 7,400 kids end up in the hospital each year because of problems due to chickenpox. In the small print, it points out that this is out of 3.3 milltion cases of checkenpox per year in children under 15. That works out to about 0.2%. Despite the fact that most complications from chickenpox are in older children or children with immune systems that are compromised by other conditions, the push for vaccination seems to have had a lot of success. I just received a letter from the Missouri Department of Health telling me that as of July 30, I can't send my children to daycare unless they have been vaccinated against chickenpox.

I think this is a great example of corporate marketing trumping common sense. We could spare the expense and unknown long-term ramifications of vaccinating everybody and just target at-risk groups. But then, Merck wouldn't make much money off that, now would they. Better we should all pay up front

--Caitlin Cameron

(To reply, click here.)

The Merck ad…is one of the creepiest things I've seen on my TV set since Britney Spears and Steven Tyler traded a kiss during the Super Bowl half-time show. The worst part is that bizarre little chimp doll that pops up midway through the ad--smiling freakishly with its oversized scarlet lips, it seems more appropriate for a Stephen King tale than a publicity campaign.

--Ben Domenech

(To reply, click here.)

Is no one going to state the obvious, that we really need to ban the advertising of prescription drugs in anything other than professional medical journals? I am as big a free speech advocate as anyone, but if we can restrict tobacco and liquor advertising, doesn't it make sense to restrict the advertising of a substance considered dangerous enough that you have to get a doctor's permission to purchase it? Surely by now, doctors must be incredibly weary of people walking into their offices requesting some particular drug that they saw during a rerun of Frasier that is a sure cure for their self diagnosed problem. As much as doctors are demonized for playing God and dealing with patients in a condescending manner, the fact is that they are the ones with the training and specialized knowledge to properly diagnose and prescribe medicines. For god's sake, they go to school for 10 years to learn this crap, which is, incidentally, way too involved, complex and far-ranging for the typical layman to properly comprehend. Advertising to the layman (who may also be a raging hypochondriac) only muddies the waters, scares consumers and irritates health care professionals.

--Texwiz

(To reply, click here.)

(7/19)

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