Monthly Archives: November 2018

Lies, Damn Lies, and Advertising

etc.

I think by now most of us view TV commercials with a certain degree of skepticism. Does anyone still actually believe that wearing a certain cologne will make us irresistible to the opposite sex? That drinking a certain beer will make us young, fit, and surrounded by responsibly drinking yet hard-partying friends?

And we all know that the fine print at the bottom of the ads is essentially meaningless. Is “Please drink responsibly” really likely to increase the number of designated drivers at bars and nonalcoholic beverages at holiday parties? We can hope so, and a fraction of drinkers may practice these sensible precautions.

But do we really believe that beer and liquor ads contribute to that? Or is social responsibility more likely the result of campaigns by M.A.D.D. and the tightening of drunk driving laws and limits?

Then there are the ads for products. I don’t have the best eyesight but I’ve made a habit of trying to read the tiny disclosures. I think we all know that “Dramatization” and “Professional driver on closed course” and “Do not attempt” actually indicate that whatever is being portrayed in the car and trucks commercials should not be taken seriously. They either defy the laws of physics or fall into the “Here, hold my beer” category.

But lately the ad agencies have gotten even sneakier, if slightly more truthful in their disclaimers. Mascara commercials now often include tiny type that says that the results pictured were produced not by the make-up alone, but by the cosmetic being used at the same time as “lash inserts,” (aka fake lashes) which are not mentioned by the voice-over that promises long, lush lashes. In other words, the commercial is essentially a lie.

(I understand that in England advertisers are not permitted to do this, with or without disclaimers. I wonder if they sell less mascara as a result.)

But lately, commercials are starting to let us know who the people in the commercials really are. I think most of us know that “paid endorsement” means that Alex Trebek doesn’t really buy the brand of insurance that he hawks.

And I applaud ads for drugs that tell us that the person is a real patient, if for nothing else (https://wp.me/p4e9Hv-Ev). But now they’re telling us when the “patient” isn’t a real one. “Actor portrayal” it says in the fine print. Don’t we assume that the people in all commercials are actors? Why do they feel compelled to tell us something we already know?

There are even sneakier versions of this particular kind of bait-and-switch. Lately I’ve noticed ads that say, in essence, “We took a letter from a real customer and turned it into a commercial with a better-looking, professional actor.” It’s a bizarre blending of the real and the fake.

Yet more puzzling are ads that I’ve seen lately for a certain brand of candy. The ads look typical. A person faces the camera, dressed like a firefighter or a farmer, and says, “I’m Misha and I like this candy because it satisfies my cravings” (or whatever). So far so normal.

But once again there’s the fine print. In the commercial I’m talking about, the little tiny letters don’t just say “Actor portrayal.” They say that the person doesn’t exist, the name is made up, and it’s just an actor claiming to like the product. In other words, the entire advertisement is a lie.

I don’t read Advertising Week anymore, as I no longer work for an advertising agency. (The fact that I once did is one of my deep, dark secrets.) So I don’t know for certain that some regulatory agency isn’t cracking down on what fine print is required to say. Maybe the “Do not attempt” and “Paid endorsement” announcements are legally mandated. Maybe even “actor portrayal” when it comes to pharmaceuticals.

But I have the sneaking suspicion that some of these exercises in unreadable typography have been put there by the ad agencies just to see if we’re paying attention and what they can get away with.

How stupid do they think we really are? (Don’t answer that.) Or are they just counting on the poor eyesight of the aging population?

Personally, I assume that every advertisement I see is a lie of one sort or another. It’s just disconcerting as well as depressing when they make it so blatant.

 

 

The Grinch-Hating Grinch

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Don’t get me wrong. I love Dr. Seuss. But I think the latest adaptation of the Grinch makes two too many.

I used to check out his works from the Bookmobile until my mother insisted that I get at least one book by another author at every visit. Although my all-time favorite was Green Eggs and Ham, I had a soft spot in my heart for How the Grinch Stole Christmas.

I was young enough to be thrilled when the book was made into a cartoon that was shown every Christmas from 1966 on. Who could possibly be better than Boris Karloff to narrate and voice the Grinch? And the uncredited Thurl Ravenscroft to sing “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” (Trivia note: You may know Ravenscroft as the voice of Tony the Tiger in all those cereal commercials.) It was perfect just the way it was.

Since then there have been two other versions, both big-screen adaptations, a live-action version in 2000 starring Jim Carrey, and the other this year, a CGI animated movie with the main character voiced by Benedict Cumberbatch. I have not been to see either one and have no intention of seeing them when they are shown on TV. I am a total Grinch about any version except the real Grinch.

There were difficulties in making the 1966 version. The original Grinch was a poem of only 32 lines. To make it into a cartoon that would run 30 minutes (or however long it was without commercials) required some creative stretches. The Ravenscroft song was added, of course, plus a lot of comic bits featuring the dog Max, the Whos singing around the tree, and extended visualizations of the Grinch preparing his Santa suit and maneuvering down Mt. Crumpet. They all fit neatly into the narrative. Not one moment seemed out of place.

The Jim Carrey live-action version ran 105 minutes and Benedict Cumberbatch’s, 86 minutes. No matter how clever their additions to the basic plot, they could only serve to clutter Seuss’s simple plot and spot-on characterizations. At over an hour each, that’s a lot of stretching.

That’s the problem with remakes or reboots or reloads or whatever they want to call them. They almost never live up to the original. Bedazzled, for example, was a perfect little gem starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore. I didn’t mind the gender-swapping of having Elizabeth Hurley as the Devil (with Brendan Fraser as her hapless foil), but the broader style of humor, including throwing away one of the best gags in the original, was in no way better.

There are other examples. Think of The Thomas Crown Affair, The War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, or any of the Inspector Clouseau movies. None of those were necessary. The movies were just fine the way they were. (The only really good update – and it was an adaptation, not a straight remake – was when the ultra-serious Zero Hour was morphed into the uber-comic classic Airplane!)

I do understand the motivations behind these remakes, primarily money. Proven classics should be proven box office hits the second or third or fourth time around, and the producers, directors, and writers don’t even have to think up new plots and characters.

Then there’s the excuse of “introducing a new generation of young people to a classic film using stars they’re familiar with.” Jimmy Stewart and Gene Tierney stand the test of time and so do many others. It’s too bad that most people only see their work if they take a film class in college.

At any rate, I boycotted the Jim Carrey Grinch and will do the same for Benedict Cumberbatch’s. If that makes me a Grinch, so be it. I realize that my singular protest will affect them and their box office prospects not in the slightest. I shall do it anyway.

For the memory of Dr. Seuss, if nothing else.

The Tender-Hearted Carnivore

cooking, etc., family, food, funny things, humor, television, , , , , , ,

gray steel cooking pan near orange lobster

My husband is a carnivore, or actually an omnivore, like the bear that he resembles. But if he tried to live like a bear, he would never survive. He’s just too sensitive about what he eats.

He’s not a member of PETA, but he has certain qualities in common with them. He won’t eat veal or goose liver because he objects to the conditions in which the animals are raised – closely confined and force-fed. It’s no life for an animal, he says. Neither is being slaughtered, sauteed, and served for supper, for that matter, but let’s leave that aside for the moment. I can sympathize with his position.

When he’s forced to participate in said slaughter, he’s even more uncomfortable. My mother was raised in the country and delighted in fishing. She also delighted in frying and eating her catch. Dan can tolerate fishing if it’s catch-and-release (though just barely). And he would refrain from commenting when my mother served up her self-caught delights. But on the way home, he would look positively morose.

He had an even more extreme reaction when we were on a sailing vacation off the coast of Maine. We anchored at a tiny, uninhabited island and the ship’s cook started a fire.  A huge pot of seawater and seaweed sat ominously nearby. So did a container of live lobsters.

Now, Dan doesn’t even like to watch live lobsters being prepared on television. He began referring to Emeril Lagasse as “the Evil Cook” when he saw the TV chef throw live crayfish into a hot skillet and laugh about it.  If I’m watching a cooking show, I have to tell him to cover his eyes whenever a live crustacean is going to be sacrificed.

Anyway, when the cook in Maine got ready to drop the lobsters in the pot, Dan took a melancholy walk around the island. Mind you, when he returned and found the lobsters bright red and safely dead, he devoured three of them, banging their bodies against rocks to get them open, proper lobster-cracking tools not having been provided. Lobster juice ran down his face into his beard. He wasn’t squeamish about that.

I began to think he was carrying his sensitivity too far, however, when he started objecting to barbecue restaurants whose signs featured happy pigs serving up platters of ribs. “They’re showing smiling pigs serving themselves up to be devoured,” he asserted. No amount of reassurance that the signs were merely illustrations could suppress his uneasiness. It was the principle of the thing.

When I totally lost sympathy for his obsession, though, was when he started objecting to TV commercials that showed cereal squares eating other cereal squares (and licking their nonexistent lips). He objected to the cannibalistic element, which he found offensive.

“They’re cereal,” I pointed out. “And they’re animated. No grain suffered in the production of the cereal. Nothing alive was harmed in the production of the commercial.” It didn’t matter.

“They’re presented as sentient,” he said, “and they’re eating their own kind.”

Well, there’s really no way to argue with that, so I just roll my eyes and don’t even try.

Oddly, Dan loves movies and shows about mountain men who hunt and forage for their food under harsh, primitive conditions. He doesn’t like it when the animals get their paws caught in traps and suffer because of it, but he suddenly doesn’t object to the killing of a sentient being and the subsequent devouring of it.

Despite his affinity with mountain men, I try to point out that he would be lousy at it. “Not if I was hungry enough,” he replies. “Then I could do it.” He’s eaten venison, but personally, I can’t picture him shooting, skinning, and butchering a deer. He might have to become a vegetarian at that point and his career as a mountain man would be over.

Until a moose was magically transformed into moose steaks and presented to him wrapped in styrofoam and plastic at the local grocery, I doubt he’d survive.

We’re All Working for Big Pharma

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bunch of white oval medication tablets and white medication capsules
Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

You may not know it, but you’re likely working for Big Pharma. And you have been since the 1980s.

That was when drug companies decided to begin direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising. Until then pharmaceutical companies had limited themselves to advertising to the medical community. There was no law that prevented them from taking their message to the streets. It was just the common practice.

Since the ’80s we have been increasingly bombarded with ads for drugs that are supposed to cure or “help alleviate” certain conditions, from the well-known ones such as diabetes to the obscure ones such as Peyronie’s disease. And since that time, ordinary people with no medical education – like you and me – have been shilling for Big Pharma.

The drugs ads all exhort you to “ask your doctor if Drug X is right for you.” Sounds simple enough. What it means, though, is that you, the consumer, are advertising the drug to your physician. In 2017, drug companies spent over $6.1 billion on DTC drug ads and you can bet that they are receiving much more than that in sales, or they wouldn’t do it.

There are FDA regulations that say that the advertising must not be false or misleading. That’s why you see in magazines one page of a smiling family, the name of a drug, and perhaps a slogan. The other page is black and white and features at least three columns of tiny type that no one ever reads, even if their eyesight is good enough. It’s the reason that the voice-over announcer on TV ads recites the list of possible side effects, which many consumers joke are worse than the disease.

One result is that consumers may pressure their doctors to prescribe the newest, most expensive drugs, even if the medication isn’t right for the patient’s condition. In the Journal of Clinical Oncology, oncology nurse practitioners were surveyed on the topic. A full 94% said a patient had requested an advertised drug; in 74% of cases, the request was for an inappropriate drug. And 43% felt pressured to prescribe the inappropriate drug.

But can’t medical people ignore the patients’ inappropriate requests? Maybe. But at least half of patients’ requested drugs are then prescribed. Patients don’t like being told that a drug is too expensive, or not thoroughly tested, or that there are other, older drugs and treatments that work just fine. Americans want the newest, the best, and the most expensive, whether it be sportscars or drugs.

You may notice that ads for brand-name drugs pop up and then hold on for a few years. Then you rarely see them again. Drug companies don’t make as much money when generic drugs become available, so they scale back the advertising. It’s much more profitable to tweak the formula and come out with a newer, even better version of the more expensive drug that consumers can sell to their doctors.

Don’t think that DTC advertising brings health care costs down, either. First, there’s that $6.1 billion dollars in advertising that must be recouped. A study reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine that the cost of Plavix increased due to the need to recoup the high costs of DTC drug advertising.  So did the Medicaid funds spent for Plavix in pharmacies.

Brand-name drugs, the only kinds you see advertised, cost more than the equivalent, just-as-good generics. If you have insurance, the company may have to pay Big Pharma more for the designer drugs, and you can bet the costs are passed along to you in the form of higher premiums.

And insurance companies have lists of drugs they will and won’t pay for, called formularies. If the drug you requested and the doctor prescribed isn’t on the right list, you’re stuck with accepting a different drug or paying exorbitant costs for the shiny new one that caught your eye while you were watching Game of Thrones or the Today Show.

Drug companies used to send employees known as drug reps to doctors’ offices and convention, often spreading dollars, free samples, and certain perks around to influence the sale of their drugs. Now they’ve got a whole new sales force – the American people.

A more thorough discussion of the situation can be found at https://prescriptiondrugs.procon.org/.