Dangerous Advertising

by Alan Wallach

Once upon a time in 1953 there was a book, there still is, called The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard. It introduced the reader to the psychological approach to advertising. It described the customer's needs that advertising aimed at to sell products. In the 70 years since, this psychological and subliminal approach to advertising, compounded by the sophistication of television and the addition of social media has exploded, giving us a range of approaches, good, bad, false and dangerous. The one that interests me is the dangerous.
TV advertising, in particular gets away with murder. They satisfy the law with small print that stays on the screen long enough to read about three words, hardly enough to be wary. Then there's the voice that reads a disclaimer so fast it's unintelligible. There is one TV ad that, in my view, is blatantly but quietly dangerous. As a cancer patient, diagnosed later than I should have been, this is particularly pertinent. I refer to the ad for ColoGuard, an easy, less troubling means to diagnose colon cancer. People generally don't like thinking about a colonoscopy. This product tries to eliminate the discomfort.
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Why is it dangerous? As an afterthought, the ad says there can be both false negatives and positives. Ok, that's reasonable, you might think. Nothing is perfect. But it's not reasonable. Let me analyze it for you. You take a ColoGuard test, the results are positive. What do you do? You see a doctor who will insist on a colonoscopy to verify the results. So far so good. You get a positive result, the doctor treats you. You get a negative, you go home happy. If you get a negative result, what do you do? You can't trust it, it may be false. If you accept the result, you may die. So, to be sure, you have to get a colonoscopy. The ColoGuard test was, dare I say it, useless and dangerous.