Weight-loss pitch cuts the fat

By DITA DE BONI

When the first ads for obesity drug Xenical hit television screens in this country in April 1998, they marked a radical change in the promotion of pharmaceutical drugs and the way obesity is portrayed in mass media advertising.

New Zealand had never seen anything like it: in beautifully constructed vignettes from Auckland agency Meares Taine, people told stories about how miserable they were being overweight, how they had been introduced to Xenical, how they had found a new lease of life after taking the drug.

The catchphrase was "Lose weight, gain life".

The ads were phenomenally successful in giving overweight Kiwis the chance to pin their hopes on a medically sanctioned, seemingly miraculous cure for unwanted lard.

But the campaign also garnered attention for its blatant appeal to the insecurities of the overweight.

In short, the commercials hit their mark and caused a storm of controversy.

Critics pointed out that, in fact, Xenical is not a miracle drug: it works only in conjunction with a healthy lifestyle and a thoughtfully executed, low-fat diet.

Furthermore, personal testimonials are not legal in medicines advertising.

The campaign came before the Advertising Standards Complaints Board, firstly on the basis of containing personal testimonies - a charge Roche avoided by not including any "before and after" portrayals in the ads.

The second charge, that the ads did not include enough information about side-effects, was upheld by the board and Roche agreed to modify the ads to include more information and tone down the bombastic claims (ie, the drug could help "many" New Zealanders rather than "countless").

But that did not stop Roche's attack on fat. The second wave of the Xenical campaign - also from Meares Taine - took the emotionality of weight and added an extra dimension: shame.

The pitch was that people are ashamed of their bodies if they are overweight; that children can potentially be ashamed of their parents and vice versa; and that a passionate, fulfilling love life can only be achieved after you are capable of tying your shoelaces.

Again, the ads were a triumph of production values and won a slew of awards for Meares Taine, Roche and Melanie Bridge, the Silverscreen director who worked on the most exotic execution within the campaign (the wispy, romantic "I'd like" ad).

But again, the campaign drew scorn from people convinced that shaming people into losing weight is a cruel and unusual advertising tactic.

At the end of last year, Roche and its in-house marketing team decided on a new approach to promoting the drug.

Meares Taine was taken off the account. It went instead to an outside marketing unit consisting of Virginia Clayton (who was the original product manager) and Josh Taylor - a partnership called the Fuse Collective - and Ponsonby agency Radiation.

Naturally, Roche has pulled the blinds down on the old campaign, the whys and wherefores of choosing a new agency and any other reasonable explanation for its change of tack. But we do know the original campaign, while lauded by artists and advertising aficionados, was also resented by many in the wider medical and consumer community.

All the new team will say is that the first campaigns were generic: they introduced and established the product in the minds of the public, and it is time for Xenical to "grow up" in an advertising sense and set itself apart from a plethora of weight-loss products on the market.

Radiation's Jill Brinsdon says Xenical should stand for something other than obesity.

"The team wanted something fresh, different and positive.

"We started by sitting down and talking about the changes in the pharmaceutical marketplace, and chucking around ideas about where the brand would go.

"We found the public had a lot of 'ownership' of the brand and wanted to convert that awareness into a point of difference."

This year's television campaign for Xenical is a singular ad (in 45 and 60-second versions) featuring obese people burning their armchairs, blowing up desserts, and in the case of Tai Paul - one of the characters from a past Xenical ad - setting fire to the trousers he owned when he was 210kg (he is now almost half the size).

The commercial is supported by a print campaign aiming to debunk the idea that weight loss can come from a potion or pill, taking as much of a "cards on the table" approach as possible in pharmaceutical advertising to the public.

The overall look is quite simple and its makers say there is a "spotlight on the facts".

Importantly, the ad transmits the message that "if you don't commit yourself to healthy eating, it's not going to work," says Ms Brinsdon.

"It's not a magic pill."

The latest campaign also aims to celebrate people who have taken the first step to losing excess weight, says the team, staying within the voluntary guidelines to pharmaceutical advertising.

Ms Clayton says it is important to avoid boxing Xenical into being just for severely obese people. The drug can help anyone with a BMI (body mass index - weight times height in metres squared) of 30, which is considered to be significantly overweight.

The 13 per cent of New Zealanders who qualify as "obese" (having a BMI of 40 or over) number 300,000.

With Roche suggesting that some of the 54 per cent of Kiwis in the "overweight" category - such as those at risk of developing age-onset diabetes and the like - are also serious contenders for a course of Xenical, the number of potential consumers rises sharply.

(Doctors remain divided on whether merely overweight people should take Xenical. Northland GP Dave Jennings, for example, pasted a sign in his surgery telling patients not to bother asking for the product unless they are grossly overweight, says New Zealand Doctor).

While the Radiation/Fuse team say they "put the flag up straight away" about weight loss not being easy - something the first few campaigns appeared to gloss over - they are adamant that critics over-emphasise the side-effects of Xenical and that is why the present ad has no warnings about nasty things like leaky bowels.

They perhaps are mindful of what happened in the United States, where Xenical was caught out by more stringent laws about publicising side-effects in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.

A mandated warning that the drug could cause "increased bowel movements - an urgent need to have them and an inability to control them" forced Roche to run unbranded ads about obesity to avoid mentioning this unsavoury aspect.

But Ms Clayton says the downside of Xenical has been "amazingly misunderstood - the side-effects are related to how much fat is eaten while the patient takes the product".

"It's non-systemic - it's a fat blocker. But you have to change the way you do things as well."

Roche hopes to have 12,000 to 15,000 people using the drug by next year (about 10,000 take it now), and also wants to sign up many more users to the support programme that runs alongside a course of the drug.

Xenical costs $169-$179 a month.

Says Ms Brinsdon: "What we've done is create a call for people to get off the couch, giving people a clap for doing something for themselves and not making them objects of pity or anything.

"We want to say to people, 'Ready when you are!"'