October 1997
s m u g
target audience
by Leslie Harpold

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How To Sell Drugs

The premise of advertising is generally one of two things: to sell product or to increase brand awareness. So it stands to reason that all negative advertising works often for that which it is seeking to undo. It's a delicate construct. The wicket gets stickier when you are talking about arrestive measures like advertising that seeks to not sell something, in this case drugs.

Drugs, and I'm talking about so called "street" drugs don't require advertising. Dealers don't have to be good salesmen. The sales pitch is unnecessary: the drugs sell themselves. Dealers are never begging for buyers. Quite likely the reverse is the case. As the adage goes: "There's no such thing as bad PR: any press is good press."

Glenn O'Brien said it best "Any time you tell kids to not take drugs, you are saying the word 'drugs'."

So, let's get trendy for a moment. Heroin chic has spent a couple years at the top of fashionable ways to make you look like you really hate yourself. Grunge may be dead, but the legacy lives on. There are radio ads featuring the voice of David Spade in his patented Hollywood Minute ultra sarcastic tone, tossing off clever messages like:

"Violent fits of vomiting are commonplace. Keep a bucket handy."

"To cope with gut-wrenching constipation, focus on how itchy and achy you are everywhere else."

"You'll never have a high as good as your first. But feel free to die trying."

and close with the tag line:

"Heroin. Dying's the Easy Part."

Immediately, I started trying to think of ways to bring that ad to you here. Then, in a nightclub bathroom, I found the sticker mentioned above - the flower with the cautionary statement. There were about 20 of them plastered all over the stall walls. I had fantasies of the supreme irony of some waif chick coming in for a fix and laughing all the way to her next nod. But then my common sense kicked in and I nicked one.

So, this is the answer to the whole frying pan/brain on drugs thing? Unadvertising as it was. If I didn't know better, I'd swear somewhere some ad exec is patting himself on the back thinking he's the Beck of the ad game. Look, I appreciate that the whole Partnership for a Drug Free America has good intentions, and I'm certainly not advocating the use of heroin, but I don't think that young minds are going to get the intended message from these radio spots and stickers. What these ads will accomplish is to reinforce for parents, and people who would never go near the stuff anyway, that they are playing on the right team. The Drug Free team.

I'm going to tell you something you might not believe: That's who the ads are for anyway. They're not there to save the lives of kids, to help some wayward 20something get off dope and get high on life. They're to reinforce the do-gooder, look how much I care about the youth of today - I listen and am moved by poignant advertising crowd. Those are the people who have the money and social clout anyway. At least the money they use to purchase both durable and perishable products suggested to them by - advertising.

Smack fiends pretty much use their money to buy more junk. Advertising ideally would love to convert them, but since that's highly unlikely, the target audience is the people who live securely in the drugs are bad category. It allows them to feel better not only about themselves, but to further strengthen the bond between advertising and them. As long as all advertising doesn't feel like it's selling them something, then they are more likely to trust it and pay attention. There's my Happy Heroin Hint for you.

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leslie@smug.com

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