Physician, Heal Thyself

The waiting room at the doctor’s office has long been fertile advertising ground. You can be sure that the dizzying array of magazine subscriptions is not just for your reading pleasure, but also for the delight of those magazines’ advertisers, who love nothing more than a captive audience.

But this morning, as my wife and I anxiously awaited our first appointment with our obstetrician, we experienced waiting room advertising in a whole new way, namely a television monitor. Now, tv’s are hardly new to the waiting room. But this was no ordinary tv. This was a flat-panel monitor mounted high on the wall and emlazoned with the brand logo, “Healthy Advice.”

Not only was the advice healthy (did you know that your heart is about the size of your fist and that you have a better chance of sticking to your fitness routine if your partner shares your goals?), but it was purely market-driven. Ads for foods and prescription drugs flashed continually across the screen, interspersed with the practice’s own ads for its cosmetic surgery services. We were pitched a pill for overactive bladder, some microderm abrasion, and a laxative yogurt–all in the space of half an hour.

The company behind it all is Healthy Advice Networks.

In what’s known by advertisers as “narrowcasting,” the network pitches products to a narrowly defined demographic (pregnant women waiting to see their OB.). A 2004 feature article in Cincinnati’s “Business Courier” described Healthy Advice Network’s strategy like this:

The idea behind the network is to provide digital screens that patients can read while waiting to see the doctor. Sprinkled between screens in a 25-minute loop are pharmaceutical advertisements, designed to get patients to ask their doctors for a particular drug.

The pharmaceutical drug pitch, “Ask your doctor about . . .” is a lot more effective when you’re only a few minutes from seeing your doctor face-to-face.

Add seeing the doctor to the already long list of activities now permeated with advertising messages.