How Did A Bizarre Headache Advert Change Medical Marketing?
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Marketing medical products specifically and in life sciences more broadly, is built around trust, regulations and ensuring that the right people are informed the right way about the right products for the right reasons.
The Advertising Standards Agency and Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency have strict guidelines surrounding advertising medical products, ones that have been used to sanction Novo Nordisk for some unacceptable articles and publications about their diabetes and weight management prescription products Ozempic and Wegovy.
The rules are quite lengthy, but the two most important ones are that prescription medicines cannot be advertised directly to customers and that any medical claim has to be backed up with empirical evidence.
The latter issue led to one of the most bizarre adverts for one of the most bizarre products in the entire field.
In 2005, the Florida-based company Miralus Healthcare released HeadOn, an applicator stick similar to a deodorant that primarily consisted of wax, with extremely diluted trace elements of white bryony, potassium dichromate and iris versicolor.
It claimed to work through homoeopathy, which a Consumer Reports article suggested meant it did not work at all.
Regardless, an advert in 2005 suggested it “really works”, was safe and implied that it provided quick headache relief.
The problem was that none of these claims were proven and were unlikely to be true, so the National Advertising Department of the Better Business Bureau (the American counterpart to the ASA) objected to the claims and threatened to escalate it to the Food and Drug Administration.
Miralus removed everything potentially legally actionable, which left the name of the product and the instruction to “apply directly to forehead”, leading to one of the worst and most surreal advertising campaigns ever.
Its most lasting legacy, besides being one of the first adverts to become a viral punching bag online, was that its loudness and annoyance led to the creation of the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act (CALM Act), designed to stop adverts from being louder than the programmes they are shown alongside.