How One Of The Most Famous Health Campaigns Ever Fell Fowl

Given the restrictions on life science marketing directly to patients, the most famous pieces of marketing material tend to take the form of public information films (PIFs) or public service announcements (PSAs).

As far as PSAs go, arguably the most famous PSA in history because of its surreality, bluntness and repetition was “Frying Pan”, often known simply as “Your Brain On Drugs”.

It was created by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America (now Partnership to End Addiction), a collection of advertising professionals who made a coordinated effort to try and unsell street drugs during the era of the War on Drugs, Drugwatch and Just Say No.

All of these different campaigns used different tactics. Some used celebrity endorsements such as a young pre-Space Jam Michael Jordan. Some campaigns were “very special episodes” of popular television shows, and some campaigns attempted to use surreal metaphors.

Frying Pan’s approach was through the use of a blunt metaphor. The frying pan was drugs, the egg was your brain, and so the implication was that your brain on drugs was fried and destroyed.

This upset the American Egg Board, which claimed that it unfairly connected eggs, which during that time were having issues with a widespread salmonella outbreak, with dangerous substances.

It was repeated and syndicated extensively to the point that 90 per cent of American children were aware of the advert, 88 per cent believed occasional use of cocaine was dangerous (up 10 per cent) and even drug dealers were using the term “let’s fry an egg” as a term for using.

However, ultimately the programme succeeded in every marketing metric going but arguably was not successful at stopping people from using drugs.

Part of the problem is that the connection between recreational drugs, addiction and the horrific side effects is both blunt and surreal, with an aggressive tone to its rhetorical question that invites a lot of questions.

Some people saw the advert and noticed people who took drugs that were not immediately harmed, which created a dissonance that damaged the power the advert could have.

More recent campaigns, such as FRANK’s Pablo the Mule Dog, focused more on the facts about drugs, allowing young adults to learn about their effects and why certain drugs are dangerous.