• by Katy Thorbahn , September 24, 2010

Like many of you, we are in the midst of strategic planning for our clients' 2011 efforts. Ah, planning season ... a time of goal setting, cross-agency discussions, brainstorming of innovative solutions and bringing it all together into one cohesive story for the brand team. In other words, we're thinking a lot right now about our clients' brands in particular and healthcare marketing in general and working to create programs that reach our audiences and motivate them to take action.

All of this planning reminded me of a play my son's fifth grade class presented last June at the end of the school year. That's a bit of a leap, so allow me to explain how these things are connected.

First, some background. Each year our elementary school chooses a theme that helps color the curriculum for all the students, and then the fifth grade uses that theme as the basis for the creation of an original play. This year's theme was about time travel, so the class put together a performance that was the story of a group of students traveling through time, obviously learning things along the way.

Throughout the 2+-hour play, the students wrote in commercials for products that would be relevant to the era they represented. In prehistoric times, it was for rocks. During the Revolutionary War era, it was for lightning rods. Other products included Post It notes, Crayola crayons, hairspray and the iHuman, a robot from the skit set in the future.

As you can imagine, the sales pitch used for each of these products was very different depending upon the era and the item itself. There was, however, one unifying element to each of the commercials -- fair balance.

The class wrote six different commercials and every single one of them ended with one of the actors reciting a litany of side effects, most lifted directly from pharma ads. Considering the authors, I suppose it is not a surprise that diarrhea was a particular favorite.

One skit that got a good laugh was for the hairspray that warned of facial hair on girls -- at which point one of the girls in the skit turned around with a big, bushy gray moustache. What struck me as I watched the play is how lists of unpleasant side effects from DTC ads have become such a part of our cultural vernacular that a bunch of 11 year olds working in separate teams would each agree that their commercials needed to include some.

Why does this remind me of planning? Because it also occurred to me what a horrible job the industry is doing at targeting audiences with their marketing if my son and his peers know enough about pharma ads to write a credible list of side effects. I mean, really ... why should a group of 10 and 11 year olds even know that there is such a thing as fair balance?

Let's take a kids play as a wakeup call and really use our planning season to think deeply about where to spend our money to engage the right audience, effectively and efficiently. And to save more parents from having to hear about diarrhea (over and over) at their children's plays.

(Postscript: Two more highlights from the play: 1) the skit from the '80s which was set in a mall because "anything of importance from the '80s happened in a mall." I must say it brought back some pretty fond memories while also reminding me just what a cultural wasteland my formative years were. 2) The entire class singing a revised version of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab" where the opening line was, "They want me to go to the past and I say, no, no, no." Priceless.)