A few months ago Pfizer released an ad meant to discourage people from buying prescription drugs from unregulated sources like the ‘net.
In the moralistic, painfully allegorical tone cause spots sometimes adopt, it featured a man checking his mail, popping a pill and bemusedly pulling a dead rat out of his throat.
The ad naturally generated flak for the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), which regulates ads in the UK and has, based on X number of adamant letters, banned ads for a wide variety of reasons — from claims to increase eyelash length to, well, heresy.
The ASA ultimately decided Pfizer’s counterfeit medicine ad didn’t breach code, which means it can still run in the UK. But in some warped knee-jerk effort to clear the public mind of any wrongdoing on its part, the pharma decided to produce a making-of.
The piece explains why Pfizer went the direction it did, then rattles off handy statistics about the unregulated prescription drug trade and its dangers.
We also learned stuff we would’ve been just as happy not to — like that whole thing about how they used real dead rats? Not fucking cute, mate.
