The breakdown: How do you write a paid search ad for a pharma client that delicately balances FDA requirements, online space restrictions, drug benefits and adverse effects? Not an easy pill to swallow, but Jared Kelleher shows us one unique approach below.

I’ve been watching MadMen, and it seems to me that advertising was simpler then, than it is today; and that they used to drink a lot at work, though maybe there’s no correlation.

Then, you just whipped up wild ads like this over a couple martinis at lunch. Today, there are rules and regulations, general counsels, and protective bodies like the Consumer Protection Agency and the Food & Drug Administration, and we’re charged with knowing all the ins, outs and what have yous of the industry’s laws, bills, bylaws and amendments.  I feel cheated, though not nearly as much as the pharmaceutical companies must feel.

Under an FDA rule called fair balance, if we’re promoting a drug’s benefits, we need to fairly balance those benefits with content about its risks. Pharma advertising evolved to adhere to the new ground rules; while watching the pretty people in the TV spots, we hear dozens of deleterious side effects as background voice-overs.  In print, half or more of a drug ad contains the important safety information and adverse effects copy about sweaty hands, dry mouths, erections lasting longer than four hours, or in the case of black box warning drugs, thoughts or attempts of suicide.

Last spring, many pharmaceutical companies received letters from the FDA noting that their paid search ads were touting drug benefits, without equally messaging the drug’s risks. In paid search, fair balance rules are harder to play by. Try equally extolling the marvelous benefits and mysteriously unusual adverse effects of a drug in an ad the size of a matchbook.

Many drug companies responded by rewriting their paid search ads with benign, benefit-free, unbranded copy, or they pulled their paid search ads altogether.  I’m no expert in pharma, but let’s consider a crazy idea: what if, instead of pulling our ads or rewriting them so feebly that neither the FDA nor our own customers know who’s running the ads, our paid search ads were explicitly about side effect and risks – no benefits.

Imagine, for example, Henny Penny Labs, a fictitious maker of the world’s leading worry and anxiety medications, most notably, WillyNilliex® – the #1 drug for nervous, jittery, cat-like behavior. Let’s say we’re charged with a keyword buy. Research shows we need a buy on symptoms such as: jitters, jittery, jumpy, goofy, tight, uptight, mad, mad as hell, angst, agita, and interestingly, verklempt.

Instead of getting upside down about what we can’t say about the tremendous benefits of WillyNilliex, we’ll run paid search solely on the drug’s rare-but-bizarre adverse effects, which incidentally, are likely the precise content many of our customers are looking for. Patients know what WillyNilliex is supposed to do. They want to know what it might inadvertently do – like possibly cause thoughts of suicide – good to know. Since there isn’t room in a paid search ad to balance benefits content with risks content, we’ll focus our test ad almost wholly on risks and side effects while mindfully communicating the drug’s indication:

WillyNilliex® Beats the Jitters
Side effects include hot dog fingers
evil eye, clown fear and more….

http://www.willynilliex.com/risksandsideeffects

This sample is a bit out there, but it demonstrates how this transparent approach would benefit the user by being honest and forward with the side effects. Maybe it’s not quite a drug marketer’s dream, but the ad provides brand impression, piques interest and gives users access to content they supposedly want to see, all while seemingly coloring within the FDA’s lines.

OK, who wants a martini?

RYT Hospital

I have a friend who owns a small design agency. We were recently chatting about his clients, and he said, “Well, mostly these days I’m doing fake sites.”

Ummm, what? I got crazy excited. I love fake sites and have been compiling a list of them, like the ones that LOST has for Ajira Airways and the Dharma Initiative. The idea that I can both create fake content and strategize it is like CS nirvana.

Apparently, my friend has been doing fake sites for domain squatters. Say back in 1998, you bought scattergather.com for no reason other than it sounded cool. Now, let’s say Microsoft comes knocking and wants to buy it from you for their corporate blog. Apparently, your powers of negotiation are quite a bit higher if you have a somewhat believable site live.

So imagine then if Microsoft came to the former owners of scattergather.com, and instead of getting a squatter page, they owners could, in all seriousness, say, “Well, we are serious experts regarding fine confetti and its scattering” (or something like that) and had a site to prove this. They could have demanded a price that reflects the fact that they have to give up their serious business site.

I want this job, immediately. I want to make crazy, fantastic, innovative sites with ridiculous domain names, and try to come up with content to match it. For example, when the UX team was creating the Ajira Airways site, they must have had a serious conversation about the error message you get when you search for a flight—as if it were a real, serious error message.

Imagine the taxonomy and content modules I could do for a Hogwarts site! Or for the Rambaldi artifacts! Or what if we did a site for something that made no sense at all, but had an amazing name, like bloodsugarsexmagik.com? So much CS/UX potential… and then someday, someone famous just might want that domain name.

I’ve found my dream job.

Lifeless, shiny, efficient: Astroturf, the hoax which fools no one. (via)

Here’s the situation: You’re sitting in a meeting with your client when they ask you to write up some glowing reviews of their wonderful new widget. Let’s be clear: they want you to make stuff up. Do you accept your mission? Or do you graciously turn the creative writing exercise down? Before you make that choice, consider a couple of instances where this practice – what might loosely be described as astroturfing – went terribly awry.

Just last month, The Daily Background caught computer hardware manufacturer Belkin in the act of hiring people to write flattering reviews about their products. Belkin utilized Amazon’s site Mechanical Turk, where users complete micro-jobs for micro-payments, to solicit for folks both to write reviews of and to vote negative reviews down on Amazon.com and NewEgg. Needless to say, when these job postings were discovered, Belkin had to engage in some serious damage control. Belkin’s president posted an apologetic note to the company’s website, but critics were further perplexed when it appeared that Belkin’s Business Development Rep, who created the job postings, had not been fired.

Similarly, Australian marketing agency Naked Communications ran into trouble when they launched a viral video campaign last year. Presented not as an ad, but as a user-generated YouTube clip, it featured a pretty girl trying to track down her crush, some handsome guy she met in a café. Fortunately, the young stud had left his jacket behind, which she described in some detail as “beautiful.” “It’s got a silk lining,” she continued, “It’s got beautiful striped interior. Smells good, like him.” She then offered an email address to which the jacketless gent could reply. As the video began to circulate, social networking commentators caught on pretty quickly that the clip was not a true confession, but an engineered campaign for Witchery, an Aussie clothing company. Problem is Witchery denied any link to the video and controversy quickly ensued. The resulting backlash spiraled so intensely that Naked’s CEO eventually quit as a result of the exposure.

Individual consumers might have markedly different reactions to these two incidents. Some might consider the former more deceptive, the latter a harmless marketing stunt. That the problem was how Naked handled the controversy, once it erupted. Nonetheless, the end result of these incidents is that many people felt deceived by and disenfranchised from all of the companies involved.

Suffice to say, even if you don’t have a problem with these practices, you should consider your brand. It may come out a little tattered if your fictitious romps are ever uncovered.