Week 5

Like many others who have already posted their blogs, I also enjoyed the video on the research that goes on behind the scenes as commercials/advertisements are created. I very rarely devote my full attention to commercials, but my tv is almost always on when I am home, so unless the advertisers use a catchy auditory message, they will not be reaching me! I am amazed at how many do use good songs, funny jokes, etc., but do not bother to say the name of the product auditorily in the commercial. That tactic is probably used to get viewers to look at the screen out of curiosity and pay attention, but that doesn't work for me, so it probably doesn't work for others, either. The few commercials that I do see drive me crazy because they usually have NOTHING to do with the product they are advertising - kind of like the 7up commercial with the butterfly girl we saw in the in-class video. Maybe it's just me, and most people are able to connect flying insects with carbonated beverages...
Anyway, another thing that I have been thinking about related to advertisting health messages is something that we discussed in my Behavioral Medicine Seminar a couple of weeks ago, when the topic was obesity. We were talking about ways to get people to exercise - joining and going to the gym being one of the most automatic types of exercise we wanted to promote. Most commercials/advertisements for gyms are for the big chain ones like 24-Hour Fitness, and they definitely use the sex appeal (back-door or wrong way approach). Although they are appealing to younger, hipper crowds, they are missing a much larger segment of the population - namely, middle-aged and older people who are comparatively "average" and probably overweight, etc. If 24-Hour Fitness is happy with their membership numbers and "types" of members, that's fine for them. But no one is reaching out to the majority of the population - the people who REALLY NEED to go to the gym because of potential or existing health problems. When these people see the commercials of thin and/or buff, young individuals, they assume that all gym-goers (at all gyms) look like those people. As a result, they are intimidated, insecure, and ashamed of their bodies, so they don't even want to reveal their bodies in public by taking a walk in their neighborhood, let alone at the gym. So, in my opinion, the public health realm has gone too far with the "wrong-way" approach in this case, and perhaps they should attempt a "right-way" message for joining a gym (e.g., YMCA, Curves, etc.). How about a commercial with people of average weight (read: overweight or obese in America, where that's the average) working out and talking about how much better they feel and healthier they are, without even talking about the side effect of losing weight along the way? I think I'll get started on that...tomorrow.