{"id":1192,"date":"2016-03-06T10:30:00","date_gmt":"2016-03-06T18:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/?p=1192"},"modified":"2016-03-06T10:30:00","modified_gmt":"2016-03-06T18:30:00","slug":"puzzling-advertising-who-is-the-audience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/2016\/03\/06\/puzzling-advertising-who-is-the-audience\/","title":{"rendered":"Puzzling Advertising: Who is the intended audience?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"sleep\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This advertisement by Vanda Pharmaceuticals<\/a><\/span>\u00a0(shown a dozen times a day, it seems, on MSNBC)\u00a0is for a drug\u00a0called Hetlioz<\/a>. (It’s very expensive<\/a>.) Vanda\u00a0says Hetlioz\u00a0helps\u00a0blind people who have a rare condition called Non-24.<\/a>\u00a0These folk have trouble sleeping through the night and staying awake during the day. <\/span><\/p>\n

It made me wonder: Who is the audience for these ads? Blind people, who can’t actually watch<\/em> TV? Their doctors, who might prescribe this drug?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

My favourite new theory is that the pharmaceutical company’s strategy is three-fold: To create awareness of an essentially unheard-of disorder; to make the millions and millions of people who are not<\/i> blind but who can’t sleep at night and who fall asleep during the day believe that Hetlioz\u00a0could help them<\/i> out, too; and to promote this medication\u00a0to these people, to their friends and family, and to their doctors – without doing so explicitly. (In the United States “Pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to promote their medications for an off-label use, which has led to several large settlements for illegal marketing<\/a>.”) We all\u00a0know how utterly awful sleep problems are, so imagine how enticing the hope engendered by these ads is.<\/span><\/p>\n

Great tidbit: “How obscure is Non-24? There are only 146 citations for the disorder in the\u00a0entire US National Library of Medicine<\/i>. By comparison, there are 8,463 citations for the plague<\/a>.”<\/span><\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Addendum: My NoContest co-founder\u00a0Tierney<\/a>\u00a0and I had a good back-and-forth after she read this post.<\/p>\n

\"screencap\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here’s the link to the “Sandy’s View” post Tierney mentions.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This advertisement by Vanda Pharmaceuticals\u00a0(shown a dozen times a day, it seems, on MSNBC)\u00a0is for a drug\u00a0called Hetlioz. (It’s very expensive.) Vanda\u00a0says Hetlioz\u00a0helps\u00a0blind people who have a rare condition called Non-24.\u00a0These folk have trouble sleeping through the night and staying … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[11,22],"class_list":["post-1192","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-roberts-posts","tag-advertising","tag-communications"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1192"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1192\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1192"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1192"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nocontest.ca\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1192"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}