Failure to Communicate

From time to time I’ll be wandering around on the Internet and run across a controversial issue where neither of the factions appears to be communicating with the other one. It’s very common to discover that the different sides of a polarizing issue aren’t listening to each other; if they could reach agreement there wouldn’t be a controversy in the first place, and humans are notorious for trying to shout down the other side rather than listen to them – and for refusing to listen to anyone who is so obviously wrong-headed that they would take the other side of this argument in the first place. But sometimes you encounter a situation where the two sides think they are arguing with each other but really aren’t – because their arguments aren’t actually connected. If one side is arguing that broccoli is better in soup than in a salad, and the other side is arguing that domestic broccoli should be subsidized in order to produce a favorable trade balance with broccoli-producing nations not party to the NAFTA agreements, the two sides aren’t actually fighting, no matter how much they think they are. A similar case exists, so far as I can tell, in the recent EpiPen advertising fracas…

You can pick up the story here if you want to, but the basic idea is that a company was advertising its pediatric version of the self-contained epinephrine injector known as an “EpiPen” in a happy, bouncy sort of television commercial with a spokesperson playing the role of the mother of a child with food allergies and gushing about how grand it is that her son can go to his friend’s birthday party and eat the cake, because if there’s something in it that might cause a severe reaction she can just use their EpiPen. This is, of course, nonsense; epinephrine injections are indeed used to keep the patient alive in the case of a severe reaction, but the first (and most important) line of defense is awareness – not allowing a child with a severe food allergy to come into contact with that food in the first place. Parents with such children saw the television ad and went ballistic, comparing it (correctly, I believe) to advocating unprotected sex because treatments for some STDs exist. The manufacturer listened to the objections, pulled the ads, and that should have been the end of the matter…

If you read any of the stories about these events online, or on any of the larger news-aggregation sites, you will see dozens of comments supporting the company’s use of the ad and disparaging the parents for complaining. Most of these posts accuse the parents in question of being afraid of being seen as bad parents; the logic seems to be that since EpiPen products are potential lifesavers, parents who are objecting to the ads must be embarrassed about having to be told about such things in a television ad, and would rather not purchase the EpiPen (or let anyone else know to do so) than admit their limited knowledge. It’s a silly idea to begin with, and it completely ignores the fact that none of the parents or advocacy groups protesting the original ad have ever complained about the company advertising its products – they’re objecting to the suicidally/homicidally stupid assumption that just because you have an EpiPen you (or your child) can swan around doing just as you please. It’s also worth noting that none of the people taking this position seems aware of just how stupid the behavior advocated in the television ad was – or just how infuriatingly condescending it is of them to assume that the parents in question didn’t find out about epinephrine injectors the moment their child was diagnosed with a life-threatening allergy…

From a business standpoint, it’s probably worth noting that if you’re going to create television advertising for a prescription that has lifestyle implications, it might be worthwhile to ask your customers how they use your product and how it affects their lifestyle in the first place. And as a blogger and citizen in good standing of the World Wide Web, I can only suggest to the parents and parent-advocates in this story: Don’t Feed the Trolls!