Anti Adderall Campaign : Drugs For Life

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Within my group’s pro-Adderall campaign, we promoted adderall use among high school students who were struggling with a relatively poor attention span, inability to focus, and were thus unproductive in their schoolwork. We created a video commercial that follows the same tactics pharmaceutical advertisements used, described in Dumit’s Drugs for Life. Dumit emphasized how ambiguous pharmaceutical ads were in order to reach a broader audience, and reinforced that all people experienced the stated symptoms to some extent. The companies only needed a small fraction of the viewers to self-diagnose themselves and purchase the product. Likewise, we targeted students that were experiencing heavier workloads coming into high school, and understood that the majority would struggle in maintaining attention throughout long hours of lectures and worksheets. We used this strategy and targeted all students, both a male and female, in the video since in this period in history it would be offensive if we directed the ad specifically towards males, following the stereotype of the “problematic boy”.
Another persuasive technique we used was appealing to dramatic benefits of the post-treatment of adderall by having a student imitate exaggerated behaviors of short attention span and impulsive nature that resulted in poor grades. Then after the same student takes adderall, he portrays a completely different character and becomes very attentive and productive in his studies, which results to an A in his next assignment. This is critical in Singh’s “Not Just Naughty: 50 years of stimulant drug advertising”, as he emphasizes how drug advertisements commonly present a post-treatment normal reality of highly idealized “portrait of an ideal family—bright, at...

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...r”. This is very similar to our persuasion techniques in that we created a scenario and presented symptoms that would be relatable to a majority. The difference is that this ad appeals to a specific but common type of relationship in an attempt to create a stronger association between the viewer who would most likely be interested in the drug, which in this case, would be “problem boys and problematic mothers” (Singh). The ad draws more similarities to our group’s ad by depicting the pre- and post-treatment that results in a more engaged student, and in this campaign, a young boy who is raising his hand in class. The narrator is the mother whose vocal tone assumes satisfaction with the drug and its efficacy with her son’s ADHD disorder. Therefore it would be most appealing to the parents, while our advertisement appeals directly to the high school student.

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