From Tablet Magazine, May 1:
In 2009, I took a job as a copywriter with an ad agency in Minneapolis. After 10 years of academia and publishing in obscure literary magazines, I began writing copy for health care and medical device accounts. The work was boring but the salary was grand, and so I threw myself into learning about stents and dilatation balloons.
About a year into the job a large meeting was called. Suddenly my colleagues—those of the running shoe and vodka accounts—wanted in. Our flagship health care client was looking for a multimedia retail campaign for their pacemaker.
A pacemaker is a simple device that can be lifesaving, essentially a low-voltage clock used to speed up and regulate a slow or sloppy heart rate. It was developed in the late 1950s and patented in 1962. Since then, the technology has not changed much. The device got smaller and the surgery to insert it more streamlined, but as a mechanical object, the design was pretty perfect.
The problem for an ad agency is that there was nothing new to sell. So our strategy team came up with a new approach: chronotropic incompetence.
In younger people, chronotropic incompetence was defined as the inability to increase the heart rate adequately during exercise to match cardiac output. But that clinical condition, while a problem for younger people, was also understood as the normal baseline as people aged into their 70s and their heart rate became gradually less responsive to exertion.
But why should the elderly live with slower heart rates and ragged breathing? This was our clients’ epiphany—what we called a “shared belief.” There was nothing specific in the literature that said chronotropic incompetence couldn’t include the old. Pacemakers for every senior! We would establish this as the standard of care.
By 2010, people 65 and over made up 13.1% of the American population. But the surge in that demographic was clear and imminent. Just 10 years later, they were nearly 17% of the population and by 2030, it’s estimated they’ll be more than 20%. This campaign was worth billions to our client over 20 years.
What I was witnessing more than a decade ago was the new face of health care in America: an alliance between big pharmaceutical companies and marketing firms that replaced the old injunction to “do no harm” with a profit-driven mandate to leave no facet of life unmedicalized. American pharmaceuticals were spending $3.6 billion on direct-to-consumer ads in 2012; as of 2021 that number was at $6.8 billion. In 2021, the total spend for health care advertising in the U.S. was $32.76 billion, with projections that it will rise another 5.2% even over pandemic highs by 2029.
These multi-million-dollar campaigns have been a huge success. In the years leading up to the COVID-19 pandemic, I suddenly knew multiple people who were getting elective gastric bypass and dozens undergoing plastic surgery. Four older ladies I knew swore if they hadn’t had their eyelids lifted and tightened around age 60, they wouldn’t have been able to see. The husbands and children of several colleagues initiated surgical gender reassignment; others invested in bionic prosthetics to fix faulty joints and enhance athletic performance. Nearly everyone in my urban circle had multiple prescriptions for mood enhancing or stabilizing drugs. The vast majority took an SSRI (like Zoloft). Roughly half carried a bottle of something for anxiety—usually Valium or Klonopin—in their purse. A few years ago there was a wave of ADHD diagnoses among my over-40 female friends, who immediately started taking daily Adderall.
This is the new normal: fully medicalized living in America. But back in 2009, it wasn’t yet so. There were huge swathes of untapped audience for voluntary health care. After learning of the potential profits that pacemaker sales promised in a rapidly aging U.S. population, my agency set up a war room and plotted out a multimedia direct-to-consumer (DTC) campaign. Artful black-and-white photos of 70-year-olds finishing half-marathons, doing yoga on the beach, and chasing after their grandchildren. For the superelderly, our campaign showed them walking to get their own mail, climbing stairs, or strolling hand-in-hand....
....MUCH MORE
