Advertitis™

“When my eyes don’t know where to go, my mind knows they’re headed nowhere.” The Creative Clinicians

Advertitis is by no means a bona fide medical term. In fact, until the conception of this book, it didn’t even exist. However, you may be surprised to learn Advertitis is not only highly contagious – it’s worryingly widespread throughout the world of pharmaceutical advertising. What is Advertitis? And exactly why is it something we should be so concerned about?
One not so extraordinary day, a medical director was watching his creative director deliver a short, albeit pithy, presentation. The compelling demonstration showed how a powerful, single-minded advertisement could, through off-hand cursory remarks and ill thought-out opinions, quickly develop into a perplexing mess of tangled messages. The creative moral seemed simple enough. However, through the medical director’s eyes, a very different story was being told. The creative director’s few PowerPoint slides weren’t so much describing the gradual communication breakdown of a world-renowned advertisement but the gradual inflammation of extremely delicate tissue. To the physician the swelling was the result of an infiltration of a multitude of unrelated opinions that were infecting and beginning to tear the tissue beyond all recognition. The fact that an advertising concept is often called a tissue during the early stages of development made the medical director’s observation all the more astute. Further discussion exposed and then centered on a disturbing truth. Today’s pharmaceutical advertising is in the most fundamental sense an often-confusing mix of messages and claims with little priority in terms of importance. You only have to flip through the pages of JAMA to see how challenging many ads can be to decipher. It’s not uncommon to witness half a dozen messages screaming at you at once. A place where cliche´d happy smiling patients, animals on skateboards and the ubiquitous boxing gloves all scrap for attention. Few ads cleanly state in a memorable manner one single differentiating claim – a real life-and-death state of affairs in a highly competitive and crowded marketplace.
As the creative and medical partners began to debate the reasons for this fundamental communication breakdown, they also questioned how they could buck the negative trend in a consistent manner. Undoubtedly, in many cases, ever-stricter regulatory guidance, limitations and mandates often temper the creative solution and completely suffocate any compelling communication. Obviously these layers won’t disappear so the real challenge is to work within this complexity and penetrate the dense set of constrictions. The partners came to the conclusion that the conception and development of single-minded creative ideas rely on several critical factors: The creative has to be rooted and grounded in the medical and scientific rigor of the product and disease state. It has to be synthesized into a compelling, simple vision. To bring this into effect both creative and medical have to be joined at the hip every step of the way – not just by a cursory dialogue at the start of the project and then again at the end. Both concluded that without an innate connection between the two skills sets, truly compelling, medically relevant creative solutions would continue to be elusive. Without the insights into the minds of physicians, patients and customers, you can’t take full advantage.
In many cases it is, at best, a piecemeal process, fragmented with no real consistency. Perhaps if a definitive set of criteria were proposed and adhered to, then every tissue would have the opportunity to thrive into a powerful piece of communication. The authors clearly believe this is the case and to reflect this important alliance they propose new titles be given to all creative and medical directors. It’s the reason why the authors choose to call themselves Creative Clinicians.