In the US we have legalized gambling commercials now
That’s nothing compared to the pharmaceuticals being pushed constantly in ads.
I don’t know how anyone watches live news with all the drug ads
Old people. Hence all the drug ads.
I got my parents set-top boxes with Netflix and cancelled their cable and they still mostly watch broadcast TV, with tons of ads. At this point, I dunno WTF is wrong with them – it’s as if they’re addicted to having the worst experience possible.
Hell, some have their own jingles
Oh Oh Ohhhhh Ozempic you know… 🤮
It’s always so weird because it’s not like you can go to your primary doctor and say “I want X drug” right? Like, if there was a reason to give you a drug for something the doctor would have prescribed it. Also not ask you how you felt about them, just that here is X drug for your Y problem. If that doesn’t work we try Z.
Or do people actually swap doctors over and over for months until they get one who says “ok dude”?
You absolutely can, unless it’s Adderall. For some fucking reason you tell a doctor that you’ve been on Adderall for years and it works better for you than the alternatives you’ve been prescribed in the past and they treat you like a drug seeker instead of someone who’s been treating her adhd for over two decades
The latter is called “doctor shopping” and it absolutely happens.
The goal of the advertisement is to have the patient be interested, not the doctor. Admittedly some doctors are not up to date on the latest obscure cutting edge treatments, so there is some possible benefit. However, most doctors are capable of performing cost benefit analyses and understanding side effects, but when a patient comes in asking for a medication, it definitely tips the scales towards the medication.
Well, also there are medical sales people / pharma sales reps, usually attractive women, that go to doctors offices, take them out to lunch, and give them a ton of shit like free samples and golf clubs and whatnot. Have the product name recognition out there from the commercial helps with all this.
I don’t think I’ve ever “asked my doctor about ___” because of something I saw in a commercial.
I rejected my medical care provider’s (I think it was a nurse practitioner) advice because of what I saw in an ad, and it did not go well. They were incredibly offended that I had an opinion and dismissive of the idea that IUDs could lead to scarring, which I got from the ad itself. I didn’t end up with any birth control that day, but the next month, planned parenthood gave me the ring instead of a first generation copper IUD.
I would have definitely gotten a second opinion via some internet searching on anything I saw in a commercial long before I talked to a doctor about it.
Oh, I did do that. I just wouldn’t have looked into it if it weren’t for the advertisement warning.
I think birth control is in a weird category here though, because it’s (generally) totally elective and there’s a bunch of different kinds that work differently for different people, so it’s probably pretty standard for people to have preferences about it in a way that they probably don’t for various types of, say, cholesterol medication.
Hey, I would want to know if a pill is gonna make my taint tear.
Finally. I was super annoyed every time I had to go to gamblingsite.net just to get me addicted to gambling with free money, just to trick me to going to gamblingsite.com where I had to spend real money.
All I see on what my wife watches is gambling and medication commercials that say nothing about what the medication does but that I should ask my doctor if I need it.
Must be Canada. They’re sort of threading the legal loopholes for drug advertising
They do the same in the US. Some of these commercials are super vague.
And still have prescription drug commercials.
Somehow businesses have managed to convince people it’s normal to waste countless hours of their life listening to someone else tell them what they need to buy so they can be happy and fulfilled. We’re bombarded by it. Radio, TV, internet, social media, busses, billboards, flyers, junk mail, email spam. It’s everywhere. It completely pervades our society and lives. It’s pervasive and it’s anything but normal.
It’s a sign of a seriously sick culture, and somehow we’ve all become brainwashed and numb to its harmful effects.
You might find Edward Bernays and his impact on advertising interesting.
One of the numerous problems for America’s magnates was the consumption of the average citizen. Many only purchased what they really needed, a behaviour which moguls wanted to change. The Wall Street banker Paul Mazur summarised this in a particularly straightforward manner: ‘We must shift America from a needs to a desires culture’, he wrote in 1927 in the Harvard Business Review. ‘People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumed.’
https://www.historytoday.com/miscellanies/original-influencer
https://www.npr.org/2005/04/22/4612464/freuds-nephew-and-the-origins-of-public-relations
Economy goes brrr. He needs a special circle of hell. And perhaps if not him it would have been someone else, but he was the one who brought upon consumerism, planned obsolescence, and the whole “keeping up with the Jones”.
Christ on a bike, imagine finding out Goebbels used your methods to murder millions, and you still didn’t realise that you’re a cunt 😬
With exceptions of few countries, I believe the modern society is closer to the novel Brave New World than 1984 story. People have been convinced to accept control by way of pleasure. To forget the mundane and realities of life in exchange for gratification by constant triggering of our own biochemistry that induces the feeling of pleasure. We are encouraged buy the things we don’t need to impress the people we don’t like, so that consumer spending will keep the all-mighty economy kept being fed. But if we complain that we don’t have enough left for essentials, then we are told it’s because we keep buying iPhone or avocado toast. The media will say that the economy is slowing down because of less consumer spending, but then chastise us for doing the exact same thing we are told to do: spend and spend.
Muffins?
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen an advert for a muffin
Just in case it’s not obvious, they mean an English muffin, a kind of flat bread roll. In the UK that’s what they sell for breakfast at McDonald’s (sausage and egg, bacon and egg etc).
You know, this is the first time I’ve witnessed a country refer to something we call [country] [thing] as just [thing]
A sausage and egg McMuffin does not look like a muffin. It actually does look like an English muffin because that’s what it is.
Oh course the McMuffin is served on a muffin. But when I just hear “muffin” by itself I don’t think of the sandwich including sausage and egg and cheese and whatnot. You have to actually say “McMuffin” to conjure that image. Otherwise I just think of a plain English muffin.
It would be like if they said they were banning advertisements for buns. While a hamburger is typically served on a bun, just saying bun alone doesn’t really include the entire sandwich. I could serve a hamburger in a lettuce wrap, or on sliced sourdough or something other than a bun. If McDonald’s served their sausage and egg on a lettuce wrap, would that circumvent this ad ban?
Oooh right of course. I’ve not had a maccies breakfast in a while and kinda forgot. Most breakfast places I’ve ever been to just sell “baps”, “rolls” or “butties” even if they end up serving it on a muffin roll
Like a mcdonalds mcmuffin maybe?
Finally. It always baffeed me that it’s legal to advertise bread covered sugar to children
This is probably for the best.
Let’s see if it helps the obesity problem.
You can’t advertise a burger during the day? To protect kids health? Weird
