Broadcast Pharmaceutical Advertising in the United States by Applequist Janelle;

Author:Applequist, Janelle;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic

Chapter 4

DTC Advertisements

A Triangulated Approach

The previous chapter showed, via quantitative approaches and content analysis, how many of the problematic characteristics associated with previous DTCA research have increased, finding that pharmaceutical advertisements relied more on emotional than informational appeals when trying to sell consumers prescription drugs. This was illustrated through such variables as ad length, story structure, and length of side effect information narrated; factual claims about a target condition; appeals; lifestyle portrayals; and medication portrayals. However, no single approach may completely offer an understanding of complex cultural artifacts such as DTCA. It is instructive to apply a more critical lens at the content of these advertisements in order to determine how cultural meaning is being signified. By first offering a quantitative, empirical foundation for more critical variables included in this study, a qualitative framework can then permit the results of the analysis to be contextualized and nuanced. This chapter, therefore, highlights the textual themes offered in pharmaceutical advertisements while relying on a more critical trajectory, thereby laying the groundwork for the following chapter to discuss how pharmaceutical fetishism is promoted via a consumerist lens of the pharmaceutical industry.

The goal of this chapter is to critically evaluate and understand pharmaceutical advertisements as commercial and ideological texts, in order to more fully understand the degree to which these promotional forms reinforce or perhaps question social trends of commercialized health care. The majority of DTCA research has emphasized its use of emotional appeals and increased cases of prescribing by doctors. This text is aiming to more directly interpret the meanings of the most popular ads themselves, in an effort to describe and comprehend the ways in which the pharmaceutical industry is framing conceptions of health in the United States. This chapter relies on quantitative and qualitative research, although the focus is on the cultural elements of DTC advertisements themselves. The quantitative portion of this chapter utilizes content analyses of the more critical variables added to Frosch et al.’s (2007) original sample, with subsequent qualitative, textual analyses used to deconstruct issues of representation and the construction of personhood seen in these advertisements. For the purposes of this book, it is important to identify what makes something a critical variable. I argue that a variable is critical if it consists of cultural elements that represent issues of power. When framed this way, cultural representations can be identified via textual deconstruction, as texts inherently contain multiple modalities from which meaning is inferred. In the case of DTC advertisements, the power is the celebration of the commodity, which leads to pharmaceutical fetishism. Pharmaceutical advertisements are not only signifying a product for sale to audiences, but they are also signifying cultural meaning in terms of how health care should operate and what cultural norms should be re-appropriated within society in regards to social elements such as gender, age, and relationships.

CRITICAL FOUNDATIONS

As discussed in chapter two, the majority of DTCA research has utilized quantitative approaches to advertising content, including content analysis and experimental design. In the case of content analysis, such methods are effective at summarizing content trends of manifest content.

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