Scare Tactics

A new trend in commercial advertising lately has been to scare the crap out of the viewer.

My first example are the Jetta commercials, and more recently the Allstate insurance commercials. The Jetta commercials start with a bunch of friends in a car talking about a movie, then they get into a car accident. We are seeing the commercial from inside of the car, as if we are in the accident as well. Then we see that everyone in the car is fine, because Jetta had a 5 star side crash rating or whatever. So basically, Jetta is saying, if you don't buy our car, this will happen to you and you'll probably get hurt or die.

The new Allstate commercials are like this too. The Are You In Good Hands guy talks to us as we watch a accident in slow motion.

Ok so these are bad, but what's even worse is the new Tell Someone campaign.

It starts with a few women saying, "a cancer that's caused by a virus? I didn't know that." "A CANCER that's caused by a VIRUS?? How is that possible?" This commercial is about how HPV can cause cervical cancer, so people should be getting tested. However, the commercial makes it seem like if you get HPV, you will automatically get cervical cancer, which is not the case at all. There are four strains of HPV out of over 100 that cause 70 percent of cervical cancers. If a woman were to contract HPV, it usually clears up on it's own. So really, there is more of a chance it will clear up on it's own than turning into cervical cancer.

A more important point to mention is that this campaign was started by Merck, a large pharmaceutical company that just got their HPV vaccine, Gardasil, approved by the FDA. Instead of saying this in the commercial, they instead scare the crap out of all women by telling them if they get HPV it will turn into cervical cancer. It is misleading and frightening, and has caused many girls I know to freak out, which is unnecessary before finding out all of the facts.

Don't believe everything you hear.