3 ways to sell pharmaceuticals, none of which you'll like

Plus - no more tokes over any of the lines

Hello Gobbledeers,

Happy new year! If your new year’s resolution was to fix your company’s messaging because nobody understands it, MY new year’s resolution was to get more people to hire me to fix their messaging. A win/win! Let’s talk.

In today’s newsletter:

• How am I supposed to get THAT in the box? (Answer: Scraping)

• For some reason poetry was an effective way to market abortion services in the 1800s.

• Don’t blame mom because you stood in line.

• One final toke over the line.

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Oh, (C)rap…

If you write a moderately humorous weekly newsletter about marketing, you live in a golden era, because the pharmaceutical industry gives you a never-ending deluge of fodder to write about.

Longtime readers may remember when we discussed the musical for a diabetes drug, as well as the anthropomorphized box (that I named P.F. Crappington) that you poop in for colon screening (while singing My Way).

You’re about to be pretty sad that I brought this up again.

We discussed how those were actually pretty clever, since they were the first to use each method to market the product. The diabetes drug didn’t just use a jingle (like O-O-Ozempic), they created a whole weird little musical. P.F. Crappington wasn’t just a mascot, he (?) was a spokesperson (spokesbox?) for a product that required talking about something people aren’t comfortable talking about.

Let’s say, though, that you saw the ads for the box that you poop in so you can get screened for colon cancer, but you were still confused about how this worked. The people at Cologuard apparently heard that feedback as well during what must have been the world’s most uncomfortable focus groups.

Which is why they have broken another marketing barrier by being the first pharma company to have a rapper explain to you how - I mean EXACTLY how - you use the product.

Side note: Back in the day it was common to have, for example, a doctor tell you that a product was good for you. That sure made sense - the doctor is looking out for your health, and you should trust your doctor. That’s why the fine people at Camel cigarettes used to advertise that “more doctors choose Camels than any other cigarette.” Obviously, because unfiltered Camels are good for you:

So I’m not 100% sure why you’d listen to a rapper tell you about colon cancer screening (except for Juvenile, because he put out the song “Back That Azz Up,” which are pretty much the instructions for using Cologuard). But what do I know?

Behold, Lil Jon’s 2 minute ad for Cologuard. Also, I’m very, very, very sorry.

If you thought I would let you avoid Lil Jon rapping about how to use the Cologuard box, you’re reading the wrong newsletter.

But first…

A friend of mine in college took a poetry course where the professor would ask the class, “What is the money word in this poem?” Meaning, which word will help you unlock the meaning of the poem, and does much of the emotional heavy lifting?

So I ask you, Gobbledy reader, which is the money word in Lil Jon’s lyrics for his song about Cologuard?

Let me see you get low
Drop that ass to the bowl
Now set, set, set it up.
Scrape, scrape, scrape it up.
Box, box, box it up.
Ship, ship, ship it out.

If you said, “scrape” you win! Also, you very, very much lose.

Amazingly, this isn’t even what I wanted to talk about today! All that stuff about rapping and scraping the box - that was just a bonus!

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Plan B(oston)

Over the break I went to visit my parents (“visit” seems like the wrong word. My parents live less than an hour away. Let’s see - I went to see my parents. Yes, that’s it). Over the break I went to see my parents and for reasons that will best be explained by my father, when I walked in he showed me that he had acquired back issues of the Boston Herald newspaper. And those back issues were from 1861.

If you have a father, you know that it’s just easier to say, “sure I’d like to read that newspaper from 1861” than to say, “why do you have a newspaper from 1861?” so that’s what I did.

And because when you look for weird marketing stuff, you’ll find weird marketing stuff everywhere.

If you were a pharmaceutical manufacturer in 1861, you could not hire a rapper to explain how to use your product. That is because, despite what you may have inferred from Hamilton, rapping had not yet been invented in the 1800s. Rapping about the 1800s was invented in the 2000s.

So rapping was out. But you know what was in? Placing ads in the newspaper.

The fine folks at 1800s pharmaceutical manufacturer Dr. Briscoe’s Female Drops advertised in Boston Herald newspaper, because that was the most effective way to get your message in front of a lot of people. But they were probably also reading the Gobbledy of their day and knew that doing what everyone else is doing is a poor way to differentiate yourself. Instead, as we talk about here, they should use a different medium to get the message across.

In this case, they decided to use poetry. Here is that ad:

Like today’s pharmaceutical advertisements, back in 1861 they also had some regulations about what you could say in a family newspaper like the Herald. For example, if you were the marketers for Dr. Briscoe’s Female Drops, you kinda had to dance around what those drops actually did. They say that they are unsurpassed “in removing all complaints of whatever nature, incident to females.” Hm…I wonder what could be “incident to females?”

And why is the ad talking about the communication being confidential.

And why might a female require “room and board, if desired, and secrecy observed in every case”?

Then the poem:

But married ladies should beware,
If they are pregnant, of its use;
For though the health ‘twill not impair,
A sure effect it will produce.

Indeed.

tl;dr: If you wanted to advertise your abortion concoction in 1861*, you had to write a poem and put it in the newspaper.

(*Or Arkansas in 2025)

3 points for rhyming, 0 points for “unfortunate females” headline.

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Speaking of Mom’s Drugs…

If you work in marketing one good rule of thumb is “don’t make fun of moms.”

My least favorite example is one we talked about last year where LinkedIn created an ad that suggested your mom was too stupid to understand sales:

Ha ha, LinkedIn, mom’s a doofus. That’s hilarious. Yeah, mom’s too busy inconspicuously dragging her ass to 23 Endicott Street in Boston for Dr. Briscoe’s Female Drops to understand sales.

Though, Amazon Pharmacy also thinks your mom is an idiot. In this commercial, they’re trying to make the point that instead of inconspicuously dragging her ass to 23 Endicott Street for Dr. Briscoe’s Female Drops, she could’ve just gotten the drugs she needed online:

In the commercial a son stands in a line at a pharmacy to pick up his mom’s prescription. He is perturbed because of the amount of time he is standing in line. His mother, who, obviously, is sick, ruined his day by, get this, having her prescription sent to the pharmacy instead of using Amazon Pharmacy.

As the commercial’s script says, “All mom had to do was use Amazon Pharmacy, and her meds would get delivered right to her door.”

So while mom is home, I dunno, waiting to take her Female Drops, or get the pain meds for the bunion she had removed, this guy has to stand in line BECAUSE HIS MOM ASKED HIM TO RUN AN ERRAND. The nerve! I mean, he has stuff to do, like, I don’t know. I don’t know what the stuff is. But now he can’t do it because his elderly mother will die without her medicine (or have some foot pain, I’m not sure ), and really, no good deed goes unpunished, and if that 83 year old woman would just learn how to use the Internet, he would have 7 - maybe 8! - minutes back in his day.

Anyway, I guess my point is - even if your product is good, don’t make mom the bad guy. Or gal.

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Before we say goodbye, one quick follow up on a story from last year:

I was annoyed with every one of you for never sending me the clip from the Lawrence Welk show where they perform a wholesome version of the marijuana anthem One Toke Over the Line, which Mr. Welk (and literally everyone who worked there, apparently), thought was a religious ditty because the lyrics say, “One toke over the line, sweet Jesus.”

In any case, Michael Brewer, a member of the group Brewer & Shipley, and the writer of that song, passed away in December. Normally this newsletter doesn’t talk much about the deaths of obscure musicians, but it gave me one more opportunity to watch the Lawrence Welk singers performing their ode to getting high, and also about praising Jesus.

OK, enough. Thanks for reading to the end. As I always mention, I’m very happy to chat with readers any time, even if it’s not about sketchy medicine advertisements from the 1800s. Here’s my Calendly link.