#PuppyMonkeyBaby was not the most disturbing ad of #SuperBowl50. This was.
Something unsettling occurred during this year’s Super Bowl, and I’m not talking about the alarming appearance of Coldplay. It was the unusually large presence of pharmaceutical ads tucked in among the usual festival of beer, cars, energy drinks and extreme tacos.
There was the one featuring an animated intestine trotting through a stadium with a nasty case of diarrhea. Any plans I had for a second bowl of chili were stopped cold.
Commercial mascot or soon-to-be chicken nugget? You be the judge.
Then there was the one with the aging football greats talking about toenail fungus. Few things will throw water on a pleasant evening like the thought of Howie Long’s cracked, yellowing ingrowns.
But those two were chicken feed compared to the commercial promoting awareness of a condition known as O.I.C., or Opioid Induced Constipation.
Forget the concept of the ad itself, which revolves around a plugged up middle-aged guy jealously watching as the world moves its collective bowels. Had it been an ad for Dulcalax, I might’ve smiled.
Instead, this ad, paid for by drugmaker AstraZeneca, may go down as the most disturbing commercial in Super Bowl history.
Yes, it’s even more disturbing than Mountain Dew’s Puppy Monkey Baby.
Opioid Induced Constipation is exactly what it sounds like — constipation brought on by the use of opioids. Remember Renton from Trainspotting when he goes clean and desperately needs a toilet? He had been suffering from it.
But here’s the thing. Renton was a heroin addict. So who the heck is AstraZeneca talking to?
They’re talking to the users of prescription painkillers like Oxycontin and Percocet. Which might make you wonder, “Are there really enough people using opioid painkillers in this country to warrant a Super Bowl ad?”
Actually, yes. Back in 2013, drugmakers produced enough to hand out a full bottle to every man, woman and child in America. Or, in cold demographic terms, the viewers of the Super Bowl.
There’s no question that many people in this country deal with serious pain issues, and that opioids are effective at managing them. There’s also no question that they are insanely addictive, with over 2 million Americans unable to control their use of them, and an average of 44 people dying from overdoses every day.
Often, when a patient’s prescription runs out and they can’t get it refilled, they’re so hooked that they turn to actual heroin. Quite a topic of conversation, right? But addiction isn’t the side effect AstraZeneca wants to discuss. AstraZeneca wants to talk about how to free these people from their poop.
As reported in this story from Vice, “AstraZeneca came up with an extremely lucrative solution: a pill to solve a problem caused by other pills.” Indeed. Social media rightly lit up in protest, and even the White House weighed in.
In a particularly shitty move (pun intended), they didn’t even include the name of the miracle drug they’re hawking, which is called Movantik. Instead, they politely suggested that users (another pun intended) just click over to a helpful website to learn more. This is a nifty way drugmakers can advertise drugs without having to list the side effects.
That’s right. AstraZeneca is advertising a drug to deal with the side effects of another drug, but they won’t tell you what the side effects of the new drug are.
Well, here’s one: Movantik can cause your abdominal wall to tear open.
Neat.
Just toodle over to the Movantik website to see that and the other side effects for yourself. (Another is diarrhea. But not to worry, I know a cuddly intestine with just the thing for that.)
So here we are. AstraZeneca spent $5 million to tell the largest audience in the world that if you take an incredibly dangerous drug that kills dozens of people each day, your next course of action is to take a second dangerous drug that might rip your stomach apart.
Let that wash over you.
Imagine for a moment if they had taken that $5 million and spent it to make Super Bowl viewers aware of just how goddamn dangerous opioids are. Imagine the surprise and goodwill that would come from that. A drug company with unlimited resources using the world’s biggest stage to help deal with a problem they had a massive role in creating? That would be impressive. That would be game-changing.
#Budweiser, by contrast, spent the same amount of money telling drunk drivers how stupid they are. Well played.
But not AstraZeneca. They opted to use the Super Bowl to live up to the low expectations we already have of them. They sold drugs.
I’m an ad guy, so I’d rather be doing what I usually do this time of year, which is mock bad Super Bowl ads. But this one isn’t bad. It’s wrong. I’d take a million Puppy Monkey Baby commercials over it any day.
