BUT ADVERTISING HELPS, OR DOES IT?

In my old age I watch a lot of television. The arthritis I have experienced lately has certainly hampered my ability to get out and move about. Ergo, I spend more time sitting and watching TV. I have developed some opinions of what television has become. 

To show you how old I am, I can remember when commercials were shown once at the top of the hour. Then the networks decided they needed more revenue so they started running commercials at the half hour also. That turned out okay so, lo and behold, we now have commercials every ten minutes. Now, in a one-hour television show, we have six commercial breaks leaving us with forty minutes of programming. Oh, and by the way, Public Broadcasting stations also run the same commercial breaks.

Well, I am a capitalist, so I understand the need to increase revenue when you can so I expect commercials to pay for the programming I watch even though it seems quite excessive.

Another example of the evidence of my advancing age is the preponderance of commercials offered by attorneys and doctors. Just a few years back, that was considered unethical. So, what changed? Ethics or the need for ethical conduct? The only people who seem to run more ads than lawyers and doctors are auto insurance companies. 

One cannot turn on a television program without being inundated with car insurance commercials. We have the famous lizard, excuse me, the gecko, busy selling insurance using an Australian accent. Not to be outdone, we have a group of people dressed as bakers or meat packers, I can’t figure it out or understand the correlation between auto insurance and whatever it is they are pretending to be, but there they are acting as if insurance was a tangible item that comes in a box. I cannot imagine who would be moved to buy insurance from them because of their ads. Have you ever wondered as have I, how much would car insurance cost if the companies didn’t spend so much money on television commercials?

But the ones that really frost me are the prescription only pharmaceutical ads.  I’m talking about the hundreds of commercials which attempt to sell drugs to people with any of a number of conditions from erectile dysfunction to Aids to heart disease. I am especially interested in the ads which say, be sure to tell your doctor if you are allergic to this medicine, or if you have any of a number of other reasons you shouldn’t be taking it. Seriously now, would you go to any doctor who would prescribe a drug to you if he didn’t already know you could take it? 

The drug manufacturers tell us the reason they run these ads is that they experience increase sales when they do. What does that tell you about your doctor if he waits for you to tell him what drug he should prescribe? Pretty scary if you ask me.

It still gets back to the real problem for me and that is the cost of these medicines and these insurance products because of the money they spend on advertisement. I’ve heard it said that even if you live in a wilderness, if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. But advertising helps. Or does it? 

Simply put, car insurance and prescription medicine are too expensive and the cost of advertising has to be a factor in that cost. I have never suggested a medication to my doctor and would be leery of any doctor who would wait for me to ask for a medicine. That’s his job to know, not mine.

Ron Scarbro

December 4, 2019