Bluesky-Walter Graff Weblog

I caught this blog posted below. Sad! I worked on a number of syndicated programs that used this cheating technique to keep the ratings high. It only makes sense.

This is one reason why folks aren’t interested in television anymore. Instead of making better programming, they’ll just cheat ratings to make it seem like they are making better shows. Eventually like it did with much of syndicated talk, this will implode as you simply will not have enough people in the first place watching, even after you inflate the numbers. Once again money trumps integrity or anything else for that mater. Like newspapers, syndicators are more interested in advertising and do what they can with the ‘filler’ to keep the advertising coming. Even if it means unrealistic ratings. Most all daytime shows use a trick of offering their shows twice a day. And they are allowed to count both ratings as one to represent how many folks watch ‘the’ show. In other words they need double showings to make up for lackluster single airing ratings. But like our government the TV rating system is so dysfunctional as to be Simpson like in terms of ridiculous. Actually, come to think of it, the Simpson’s have joked about it quite well over the years.

Ratings Rant
Posted October 4th, 2007 by Shari Anne Brill

http://blogs.mediapost.com/tv_board/?p=176

Effective with the start of the 2007-08 broadcast TV season, Nielsen introduced a disturbing new calculation technique. Effective immediately, if a network rebroadcasts a given program during a single telecast week and the show contains identical national commercial and program content, it can choose to report a single rating that includes both the original airing and any other incremental unduplicated viewing from the rebroadcast. Only one rating will be produced and credited to the original date and time. No separate audience information will be reported for the secondary telecast.

As you may know, the season opener of “Heroes” contained a single advertiser, Nissan. You guessed it. NBC decided to invoke this option for the Sept. 24 premiere, which was rebroadcast this Saturday, Sept. 29, with Nissan’s ads running intact.

In other words, there are currently no national preliminary numbers for last Monday’s telecast, on the Sept. 24 prime overnight. You won’t see any numbers for “Heroes” on the Saturday night ratings file either.

The Monday Prime overnights for Sept. 24 will be re-released on Tuesday, Oct. 2. At that time, the reprocessed rating for “Heroes” will be reported, which will also include the un-duplicated audience from the second (Saturday) telecast. Interestingly, viewership for the Saturday night re-telecast will never be reported, period. The un-duplicated audience will always exist as part of the Monday number. While this practice has been done for years in syndication, keep in mind that these programs clear across multiple time periods — and network TV programming gets evaluated very differently.

That’s right, kids. We will never know how “Heroes” actually performed in its initial telecast, nor will we be able to relate the “Heroes” performance versus its time period competition. Season to date rankers for Heroes will be artificially inflated because it will include the combined Saturday audience, not to mention the impact to c3 ratings.

It looks as if I will have to start making up overnight numbers every week, because Nielsen has decided to make the wishes of one client take precedence over the needs of the many.

Needless to say I have already voiced my displeasure with Nielsen — and I can’t imagine that ABC and CBS, who also launched their new season lineup on 9/24 along with Fox and CW, would find this acceptable.

In an article about the +200% growth of the product Head On, AdvertisingAge used the phrase “arguably among the worst commercials ever from a creative standpoint” to describe the infamous TV commercials for the headache product. And in using that phrase it shows that most advertising types have lost their way. It validates what I say here and on many sites on the web, a creative ad is not necessarily an effective ad. But I also think AdAge (mirroring most of the industry), doesn’t understand the term ‘creative’. This is a creative ad. Yes it only says the same six word phrase over and over. Yes it is one single camera shot. Yes it is creative, unique, and effective. Those six words do more for sales than those million dollar campaigns with big football stars. Just because it doesn’t have a cinematic look, some sort of cool special effect, or humor driving it does not mean it’s not creative. What it does have is a call to action, and highlights a products purpose, without having to show some esoteric shot of the cliffs of Ireland from a helicopter while offering a tongue twisting voice over from a smooth voice such as Peter Coyote that has the viewer wondering what it was they just tried to advertise. No not every ad should mimic this ad but the fact that it stands out amongst the field of much more expensive ads, yet does so much more for the product, rather than the ad agencies award wall should once again be a wakeup call to most big agency advertising, that advertising is broke. As for annoying, try the Sprint ad with Peyton Manning that has a budget 100 times this, yet no one can make heads or tails of what it’s supposed to do, let alone what it’s trying to sell. Yet the agency for this Sprint spot made a behind the scenes video and posted it on YouTube so the world could see how a creative, high priced, award winning ad that does little for the product is done.  Now that’s annoying.

Heinz recently sponsored a search for consumer content. They were looking for a new TV ad and wanted an ordinary consumer to come up with it. I took a look at most of the entries last night on their website. Some were clearly imitations of what advertising seems to be to consumers as presented by ad agencies: either a tongue in cheek joke, some slick animation, or some abstract spot. And in the end, they choose a spot so simple, with a message that relates to our lives. If you visit the site you’ll understand why it won. Those ads that mimic most of today’s advertising are often visually stimulating, but after it ends, I say to myself, “who cares?” I would imagine the agency that helped put the spot together simply wanted to forget about this adventure in consumer generated ads. It doesn’t look like it’s an award winner. Doesn’t have cool camera cranes, and fast pace cutting, or that special humor that makes most of today’s advertising so forgettable. No it’s simple, to the point, and makes one smile, while putting Heinz in a good light. Too bad most ad agencies can’t learn from this. They are often too busy trying too hard to be creative.

The site to view the other entries is http://www.topthistv.com/

Revenue Science, Inc. announced the results of a study on consumer receptivity to online advertising, conducted by JupiterResearch, that found that more online consumers are consistently more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual advertising, outperforming contextual by as much as 22 percent in some categories.

Marla R. Schimke, vice president of marketing at Revenue Science, said : “This study… reaffirms our belief that Internet users favor advertising relevant to them personally…”

Schimke concludes that the research shows behavioral targeting is the solution to maximize a limited opportunity to move consumers through the purchase funnel.

For advertisers, the study shows that behavioral targeting outperforms contextual advertising in terms of consumer attention by at least 10 percent across 14 major product categories, from Financial Services to Consumer Electronics to Pharmaceuticals to Fashion and Style.

Specifically:

* 17 percent more online purchasers of computing products are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads
* 18 percent more online auto purchasers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads
* 20 percent more online telecom purchasers are more receptive to behaviorally targeted ads than to contextual ads

“With behavioral targeting, marketers will be more effective in reaching both a higher value audience and the overall audience of online shoppers,” added Schimke.

I believe the same rule applies in television advertising. If you’re watching TV and see a bunch of ads, but none relates to you or to what you are looking for, then they are like web ads that have little to do with your life, useless. If an ad doesn’t relate to peoples lives and make some pertinent emotional connection, all the humor, cool themes, and cool music will not get your point across as easily and as simply as making a connection to peoples lives. It’s no wonder why folks scan through commercials in some instances. Like visiting a website, it’s just a bunch of pictures that don’t ring a bell, or make a connection and so you’d rather block ads than see them, or in the case of television, skip through them. Could it be that folks skip through ads that mean little to them because the ads are presented in a away that doesn’t relate to them, their life, or their lifestyle? I know I skip for exactly that reason.

http://www.revenuescience.com/site/media/press-releases/2007/20070912.asp

Congratulations Walmart and your agency Martin Agency for making a campaign that relates to peoples lives and as a result sells Walmart rather than spending 30 seconds on an ‘award winning’ ad that has little relevance to peoples lives.

The ad campaign’s creative director, Steve Bassett said it best:

“By saving on a lot of the little things we buy every day, the savings can add up to some pretty big things — like a car for your son, a wedding for your daughter, or a trip to Orlando for the whole family,”

There is hope for advertising.

See the spots here: http://www.savemoneylivebetter.com/

Goodby, Silverstein & Partners created a TV spot for Sprint. It’s part of Sprints recent ad campaign which seems to have no direction. Rather it seems more like someone threw a bunch of sticks in the air and then simply picked up one ‘idea’ and tried it, even though it has nothing to do with anything else, and more importantly, has little relevance to the consumer. But it certainly will be able to be added to an award show and garnish some sort of “creative” award. But as I say, award winning ads are not necessarily good ads. This is a perfect example.
If it completely confuses you as it does most everyone who watches it, your seeing a commercial that features NFL quarterback Peyton Manning. I’ll help you to figure it out since no one I showed it to can. What you are seeing is that Sprint offers many options for consumers to help them make precise and accurate decisions and they are trying to use a famous NFL player to help the brand. In other words, Sprint offers services outside of just making a call such as checking sports scores. But this attempt is so off-base that only the very few who adore Payton will like seeing him and even then all they will do is see him and not get the cryptic message. In fact, some of the responses to the video show the NFL fanatics discussing the players but none seem to care about the message.

Many of you have told me it’s a stupid spot, sells nothing and doesn’t even make you remember Sprint. And if you are female, odds are good you will really care less. That’s big advertising for you. So out of touch. How they sucker these clients with ‘creative’ presentations like this is beyond me. They even have a “behind the scenes” video on you tube of the making of this nightmare. They must be proud of it.

This spot is a fumble with 2 yards to go and :10 seconds on the clock. What a waste of money! Is it any wonder that spots like this are numbing consumers to the point that they all want to fast forward though commercials.

This ad can be summed up by the only comment about it’s content on You Tube where a poster says;

“weird - who is that freaky kid at the end”.

Yep!

Nielsen recently discovered something. It’s not new if you read my blog, just keeps saying the same thing, of the nearly 1,000 consumers Nielsen has interviewed to date, only a third could recall any TV commercials they had seen. Of course if you follow what I write, you know I often say how Madison Ave. doesn’t work, how misdirected advertising is, and how millions of dollars are wasted on advertising that sells little, but wins agencies plenty of awards. And don’t think what I say doesn’t hurt me, it does. I have been passed over for work because of what I think, and have had jobs pulled from me midstream, all because I believe that most major advertising does little to engage a consumer. Now Nielsen puts another nail in Madison Avenue, and another feather in my cap.

Of course the answer to Nielsen’s recent discovery, if you asked Madison Ave. is that consumers attention spans are getting smaller and with all the diversions like the web, etc, it’s tougher to get your message across. Hey did you ever have a nail that you just trimmed that you didn’t quite trim smoothly and you could feel it in your sock. It just snags whatever it touches. Even if the foot is bare, you know that nail is not correct and it drives you crazy. So annoying is it that you must immediately stop what you are doing and fix it, whether you have to use that clipper again, or if you can’t find it, you’ll even go as far as to bend your leg so as to bite it off with your teeth if you have to.

Wait!!! How did I get here? It was a demonstration. A demonstration of how I engaged you. If you’ve ever been in this situation you know how that improperly clipped nail can stop your life. I could have continued the story relating experiences and you probably would have continued reading because of the simple fact that I found a connection between most people and shared something that we can all relate to. Some of you didn’t relate to my story and that is OK. If you didn’t, I didn’t fail, just didn’t relate a story that worked for you. Advertising can’t find 100% of an audience all the time, rather can only engage as many folks as are interested. And the rest simply aren’t interested. Madison Ave. doesn’t use that way of thinking. Rather they use the term clutter, breaking through, and creative to try to explain the same thing.

Here’s how a major Madison Ave ad would have tried to engage you about that same foot problem. A man standing on a subway platform, looking uncomfortable. Images of people all standing around, well dressed, with plenty of color and camera movement. We see eyes looking at him, noticing he has a problem. He shakes his leg, squeezes the foot through the shoe and eventually when the train comes, is forced on it by the multitude of people all waiting for the train.

And there is how Madison Ave. would try to engage you; with an ad that might make you laugh, an ad that would definitely be entered in as many awards as it could be to falsely give the agency security as if they must be doing something right, and basically an ad that you can’t remember. You’d forget it, because the agency’s goal probably started out the same way most big ads do, an idea is hatched by some former graduate of a Fine Arts institute. Nothing wrong with that. What is wrong is that this person has two goals; to make something creative, and he does it within a system that is about being creative. In other words Madison Ave thinks that if something isn’t creative and doesn’t win ten of those awards anyone can pay to win, then it isn’t good. They forgot that they are in existence to sell products and services and to do it in a way that benefits the client, not themselves.

The way I see it, advertising is mostly broke because it has a method for operation that is mostly broke. No one wants to engage people based on some sort of emotional connection, rather they want to engage folks by being creative. There is nothing wrong with being creative, but I look at most advertising as a person painting a picture. In this case, they don’t choose to paint because they actually want to end up with a clear image. Rather they want to paint something that catches your eye. It might mean they want to use the brightest colors possible. Perhaps they want to shock you with an image. Or they might want to even use a canvas that isn’t conventional. And what they end up doing is painting something that might catch your eye but doesn’t touch your heart. No not everything you see touches your heart, it shouldn’t. But I can say that my success in advertising has always been by trying to find meanings that folks can say, I know that feeling, or I’ve been in that situation, or I know someone like that. And with those examples, people can relate to what you sell. Madison Ave? They’d rather be creative and simply make a joke, shock you with an image, or have an elephant sitting in a room that is only 8 feet wide. And when your done watching Madison Avenues version, you might laugh, but odds are good that like the Nielsen folks found, you’ll have no idea what was you saw other than that funny image of a guy trying to share an eight foot office with an elephant.

How do you fix Madison Ave? That is tough. Tough because most of Madison Ave is like an alcoholic that you just saw leaving one bar and heading to another, they are in denial. Recently I was relating a story of an agency job I did to a 15 year veteran art director. To sum up the story a story board was created by an art director who never spoke creatively to the person who wrote the copy so the words didn’t work with the pictures. Most folks would shake their head to this kind of ineptness. And he did. But he then defended it saying, “That’s the way advertising works!” And that’s why it doesn’t work and that’s why making it work again is going to be difficult.

Ad Age recently published an article about a conference for advertising where as the author put it, the three folks on the panel really wouldn’t say anything because they were all afraid of giving away too many secrets. So everyone did double-talk and skirted any questions. But there was one glimmer of hope. One of the panelists admitted that most advertising doesn’t work and it would probably take an influx of people from outside of advertising to fix it. That’s one of the first steps in recovery for the ‘alcoholic’ ad industry. At least someone can admit there is a problem. Now getting Madison Avenue to do something about it is going to require more intervention than we might be capable of. So, most of advertising will blame the consumer instead of themselves. And like alcoholics, Madison Ave. will use excuses not to see their own problem. It’s always everything and everyone but me when your spiraling down and can’t face the truth.

I’d like to start out with a link:

http://adage.com/century/campaigns.html

That link leads you to Ad Ages top 100 advertising campaigns of all time. Look at it and you’ll notice something interesting; very few of the top 10 are dated past 1984. Only three make it to near today with Got Milk (’93), Coke Always (’93), and ESPN Sports Center (’95) being the only three recent campaigns to make it close today’s date. And even then they are still more than ten year old campaigns. What happened? What about all these award-winning ads I see and read about every week? Why is Creativity magazine like a clearing house for awards? Each week the magazine is filled with all sorts of ads that win all sorts of awards. Yet with all those awards you’d think that we’d have more of today’s ads in the top 100, but we don’t. The answer is simple, an award winning ad has nothing to do with an effective ad. And that is where most of the industry went wrong.

I was posting a comment on an advertising blog recently. The blog is filled with example after example of award winning, cute looking, and interesting ads. As I looked at them I saw lots of flash and color but little in the way of effectiveness. So I commented on how ads today are more about style than substance. And the blogs owner responded with one of my favorite lines. It’s a line that no one can attribute to any author. It’s one of those line that “everyone just knows is true”. It comes in all sorts of forms. His form was in the words:

“sounds like you want advertising to look like advertising, you know, the stuff people ignore. A good ad comes about when you actually respect the customer enough to try to create something that will actually be of interest to them. I find your comments several decades outdated.”

I really got a chuckle out of it. Especially the first line which is what I was referring to as the myth that every knows is true but no one can find the author of. I laugh at that line because advertising is about what connects you customers to the product, not some silly mural on a wall where you’d have to look awfully hard to figure out what the product is. And even if you do, does it do more than catch your attention, do you remember it?

I work with a great guy who has a great saying:

“For an ad to work you need four things. It has to be:

Noticed
Liked
Believed
Remembered”

I agree with him but I take his list and make it a single phrase - emotional connection.
If you have an emotional connection you notice the ad, you like the ad, you believe the ad and you remember it. But most advertising these days is about only noticing. And most advertisers think that if they make an ad that is flashy and stands out from the crowd, then somehow that qualifies it as an ad that works. I know that syndrome. Someone tells me about some funny ad they saw where they can describe not only the content but what color shirt the actors wore. Yet ask them what it was for and they say, “Um, it had something to do with cars, but I don’t know what it was for.”

WOW! That was an effective advertisement [sarcasm]. I see it a lot. I see a lot of ads that grab your attention but do little to make an emotional connection. And then again I see some that do make the connection. The Geico Cavemen campaign is an example of a good ad. There is one simple underlying truth that makes it work so well, that they are actually turning it into a TV series. It’s that we can connect to these people. These people suffer the same ills and feelings of abandonment that we all do, consciously or subconsciously we relate to their feelings. Like working through the pain of your mother, getting back with an old girlfriend, feeling victimized, or very simply not fitting in. And the juxtaposition of a caveman in our world makes it appealing in some way because we all like to watch other groups suffer. It makes us feel ok to know others have it worse than us. That is the crux of what reality television is and why it is so popular. Do we like Donald Trump because he’s some billionaire that we respect? No we like him because he oozes with dysfunction, and all the people they wrangle on that show do also.

So going back to this fellas comment about me [sic] liking advertising that looks like advertising, that myth that everyone thinks is true but no one knows who said it. I want to say he got it wrong. He got it wrong because I’m about advertising that works. And what is that? Very simply advertising that has something your viewers connect to emotionally, whether it be a person behavior, a song, a feeling you portray visually, or an overall look. No one cares unless you give them a reason to. Hence why so many ads don’t stand out in the crowd, they don’t give anyone a reason to pay attention. So to see an ad that is a huge mural on a wall that looks like some artist simply had a fun day rather than something that was created to give the viewer an idea of what you are selling is not a good form of advertising to me. Oh they’ll enter it into Cannes and wait with bated breath for an award, but they disservice their client, and most importantly the customer with gibberish like this. Do people notice it, sure. Do they care, not really. Does it increase brand awareness? No, because most everyone that sees it has no idea it is actually an ad and even if they did, it’s so out there, that it doesn’t have any emotional connection to them so it does nothing even though visually it stands out. The ad spent so much time catching your attention that it forgot it was trying to sell something.

Sorry to say that most large campaigns these days do little to make a connection, rather they make ads that are more designed so that the agency can win an award because the myth that drives advertising today is that for an ad to work it has to stand out from the clutter. People who are successful in business will tell you not to worry about the competition, just do what you do well. But most advertising today is about standing out in the field rather than simply making a message that by itself ‘cuts through the clutter’. Perhaps that is why most ads are not successful.

And that is what is wrong with most of today’s advertising world. An award winning ad should not be confused with a good ad. They are not one in the same.

I find it interesting how the ad/marketing community plays “follow the leader,” shifting their thinking towards what the “industry thinks” rather than realistic planning. Has anyone thought about the end user and asked if consumers really care, or is the idea of “virgin marketing” more important? Are marketers falling for their own marketing? I’m reading story after story
about how the “entire industry” is making moves towards web content, but as of yet, no one has seen any real and definable ROI, and I wonder if they will. Sure there are some isolated successes which drive the hype machine, but can the money being spent on web migration make it viable? Is it the future, or just more hype being swallowed by a confused industry? Because one company wasted 1.6 billion, does that justify everyone else in following with the false hope of what the future brings? This all reminds me of how everyone quit their job in the nineties to become website designers because the “industry” said that was the future too. We were all going to have a website and that would become the “future of how business is done.” Those folks have since found real jobs again after that hype-bubble burst.

YouTube gets plenty of visits, but are those visits something that we can turn into a viable market or are those “youtubers” just looking for the outrageous and “different” on a site that does what conventional TV can not and should not do?

YouTube is not unique. Ebaumsworld.com did the same thing a few years ago, offering all sorts of video posted by anyone who had the time, and it grew to millions of hits a month. The only difference between the two was that YouTube caught the hype wave. A visit to YouTube shows lots of visitors, primarily to any clip that has the word “sexy” in the title or any clip that shows someone getting injured or worse. Let’s not confuse 30 second video clips with television programming. It is not!

I will not deny that some of the promotional postings by the TV networks get sometimes thousands of hits on YouTube. Why shouldn’t they? It’s a novel idea. But with viewer comments to these postings such as, “Thanks for posting this clip, now I know not to watch the TV program,” it seems to me marketers are selling nothing more than the same ideas in a freshly painted room. YouTube works the way it is, but once the pop-ups, ad banners, and
conventional TV appear, will the ‘viewers’ still come? The industry may be moving with full steam to find their place on the web, but I actually see it as the second time they are trying this. The last time, it failed too. I think the industry needs to figure out how to invest in quality products and stop substituting marketing for their lack of viable content. That’s why we
called television the BoobTube in the first place. And now we are just going
to call it YouTube.

I often complain that the ad industry as a whole lost it’s way some time ago. “Someone” a long time ago complained that consumers were tuning out. Perhaps they were, or maybe they were not. No one really proved it, they merely made a guess, and the rest of the industry believed them. The advertising world got scared and ran. It ran hard and fast by dropping the most important part of advertising, and concentrating instead on fluff, creativity, cool visuals, lots of editing, in other words it joined the MTV generation. I often look at old commercial spots from the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s thanks to Ira Gallen. Spend an hour looking at those ads and you will see ads that give a clear message- they sell a product or service. Fast forward to what you see on TV today in the form of ads and it looks like Mel Brookes was given a job at an agency. Spots today are all about being funny, or being cool, or being the first to use some sort of special effect or other eye-stimulating gimmick. And what was given up for this? Selling the product. Basically most spots today are about anything but what has always effectively sold a product or service -a simple message. I know, you think I’m harsh. Of course not every commercial is bad, but many campaigns sure are. Examples are such as the latest Jeep campaign which has animals mistaking Jeeps for road kill, or a meal. Or how about Dr. Z. That campaign needs an ambulance. Or how about the Gap’s long term attitude of acting cool. Too bad the company hasn’t sold enough clothing to get it out of the stinker in ten years. Yet they pour tons of money into these campaigns because someone “thinks’ abstract branding is a guarantee for success.

How many times have I heard how history is the key to the future? Lot’s. Everyone says to see what the future holds, you have to look at the past. The advertising industry needs to learn this. Someone ought to buy one of Ira Gallen’s greatest hits commercial videos from the old days of advertising. Sure they will see old spots, mostly in black and white. Spots where women’s hair curls up at the end like Marlo Thomas in “That Girl”. And spots where men are white and wear wool suits and hats. Ok, the style is old. Fashion has changed, as has political correctness, but one thing they will see that has never changed, universal truth. What’s universal truth? It is a way of communicating an idea that anyone in any culture can understand, regardless of what language they speak. In simplest terms, like those universal signs for men and women that tell you which bathroom to go into. If you spent any time watching old TV spots you’ll notice you actually remember the message. You might even sign the jingle. Odds are good, you’d know what the product does. In fact watch one of Ira’s tapes, then watch TV from today and then tomorrow tell me which one you remember most?

And that brings me to what I realized is actually one of the most effective genres of advertising out there, pharmaceutical advertising. You think I’m kidding? Of course your response is how annoying those ads are. How could I possibly say they are effective? Ask your doctor! No that is not a joke. Ask! If you do, he will be mad. Mad because every patient that comes in says they saw some drug advertised on TV and want to know how to get it. Advertising doesn’t get any more effective than that. Those ads, which are regulated must follow a simple rule; tell us what the drug is and what it does. And that is what they do. If it wasn’t for regulations, some of those ads might end up like the rest of advertising, images, colors, music, but no clear message. It’s what the industry calls an “award winning ad”, but awards and success are two different animals in advertising. Advertising with a message is not a new idea. Watch any of the old commercials I told you about and you’ll see they do the same thing. They give a simple but effective message. They actually are effective like pharmaceutical ads.

WAIT A MINUTE!

The Kaiser Family Foundation in Menlo Park found that 70% of adults learn little or nothing from such ads about the health condition in question. In addition, almost 60 percent of adults say they learn little or nothing about the drug itself. But…here comes the important part. The same survey finds that one third of respondents have asked their doctor about prescription drugs they saw advertised, and 40% of those same respondents say they plan to talk with their doctor about the health condition cited in the ad.

WOW!!!!

Talk about ROI! Is there any better form of advertising.. a simple message and a call to action? But what about the fact that the survey above found that 70% of adults learn little or nothing from such ads and 60% of adults say they learn little or nothing about the drug itself? Who says you are going to be able to teach that much in 30 seconds. The message in those ads is clear. The idea of the spots is to get you to ask more. They introduce the drug, and say “ask your doctor”. It’s a simple message, and it works. PERIOD! Now if only much of the rest of the advertising world could figure out how to make a simple, but effective message too. It might justify the millions of dollars wasted on horrendous campaigns. People are more sophisticated you say? I say ask your doctor. He’ll tell you those spots work too well. Sophistication not necessary, just a good message.

Come to think of it, the fact that anyone you speak to will tell you those ads are annoying means they got through.