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Hospitals use advertising to reach the masses

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School nurses monitoring children with ADHD

Pluses and minuses Mandatory HIV testing of pregnant women

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Helping home caregivers to be mindful of their own health

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Editor's Notes

Take Our Sons:
Health care needs a different approach
to equalizing the sexes

Lobbying for Better Waiting Rooms

Let Us Manage Chronic Care

May 10, 1999

You’re watching a television commercial and you see a 64-year-old entertainment attorney, Don Biederman, talking about the risks of skin cancer and the long summers he spent in the sun on Long Island. As the spot ends, he turns and removes a nose and cheek prosthetic that was covering the dark cavity where his nose and part of his face once were. It’s shocking.

When the American Academy of Dermatology asked its advertising agency, Campbell Mithun Esty in Minneapolis, to create a meaningful public service television ad, they were looking for something that would get viewers’ attention and provoke a big behavior change. The agency was inspired by a National Geographic photo that showed an Australian man who had lost his nose to skin cancer, they say.

The ad has created controversy because television stations are rejecting it as too graphic. And we’re back to the age-old public health question that takes on new meaning in the wake of Columbine High and Kosovo. What does it take to get attention? And does a gross image motivate you to stop lying out in the sun?

One of the concerns with these scary ads is that the shock will overwhelm viewers and that their fear will decrease their interest in getting a checkup. It is unclear whether the picture of a deep, dark nasal cavity increases your interest in getting that sore on your cheek checked out. It may just reinforce your fatalism and make you want to ignore any potential problem even longer.

Some say the ads are fine for adults, but they’re too scary for kids. Yet it keeps taking more and more just to grab attention. We have to compete with all the special effects of the movie industry, video games, and MTV, not to mention the sensationalism of the nightly news. Kids would probably just turn off to a simple message about the long-term risks of sun exposure, or smoking, or some other serious health risk.

The line between good taste and necessary shock value is getting tougher and tougher to define. But in the interest of public health, we need to get our point across in a society that is harder and harder to shock, so I say the risk is worth it. The images are sometimes hard to take, but so are the realities of the diseases we are trying to prevent. At least, if the public sees the risks clearly, they’re making fully informed choices.

What do you think?

Barbara Bronson Gray, MN, RN
Editor in Chief