Hot MedFax

It's a  compelling question.  Must women be seen to be heard? A new study has found that consumers respond differently to male voices selling things than female voices.  That's probably why 80% of all voice-overs are done by men. Another interesting fact: any female voice-overs are predominantly embodied by an attractive woman, whereas male voices are often disembodied or represented by both ugly and attractive men. Think of some recent commercials.  The new one for Samsung phones comes to mind, a beautiful blonde woman who's pregnant (another stereotype) who cries over seeing a cat and dog cuddle, or sits by the pool with a drink (hopefully, non-alcoholic) watching someone doing Pilates on TV.  When her husband comments, she says, "Eyes are muscles, too." There have been some very interesting commercials on lately, where more and more of the actors are overweight.  Have you seen the one for some pizza chain with an overweight man listening to mu...

Quick.  Gorgeous man. Eating yogurt. What do you think of? If you didn't think of John Stamos, they're right.  A new study says we tend to remember products when the celebrities endorsing them are clearly associated with the item. But if I'd said, Novak Djokovic and Wilson or Dunlop, chances are you'd remember the racquets. The Web site reports that Katie Kelting, a marketing researcher at the University of Arkansas, found that when consumers are shown two ads featuring the same celebrity, they are more likely to forget information when the celebrity is endorsing a product that is only moderately associated with the celebrity’s fame. When a product is either a really good -- or really bad -- fit with the reason for the celebrity’s fame, consumers are more likely to remember the information. But what happens when there is a low fit or match, such as LeBron James starring in a fast-food commercial? James is one of the world’s premier athletes. This woul...

You've seen the commercials.  The people talking about their complex cancer and how a certain healthcare organization worked with them to get healthy again, with soft, soothing music, muted colors and grateful families crowded around. They're interesting, yes, but not if they force you to make bad treatment decisions , based on the advertising. For that's what it is, pure advertising.  I've read that this self-same cancer hospital only treats certain cases with a high chance of success, to make their stats look better than other similar organizations. "Medical testimonials on the Internet and elsewhere present powerful personal stories and useful information, but they can also be dangerous to your health if distracting, irrelevant information leads to inappropriate treatment decisions, say researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as reported by medicalnewstoday.com. "We grow up learning from stories and we often identify with th...

You've seen them. The commercials that make you blink back a tear.  There's one now on for Cheerios that does it every time.  A little girl asks her mom if she ate cheerios when she was little and the mom says yes.  Then the little girl says it's like eating breakfast with Nana, and the mom is jolted, then teary, then smiles and tells the little one it is. This one hit home for me.  Having lost my mom two years ago, I, too, was unprepared for the little girl to say what she said.  I admit I teared up, too.  Now smartplanet.com is saying that companies that produce these types of commercials sell, well, more product. "The ability to tell a compelling story, in human terms, isn’t just marketing happy talk. It actually increases the value of products, and ultimately, the price at which they can be sold," Joe McKendrick reports.. He quotes   Ty Montague in an HBR Blog Network post, who says “In a world of abundance, what your product does for y...

We knew it all along.  Ads do lead people to do things and now a new study has proved that cigarette ads do, indeed, lead teens to smoke. Movies feature fewer people smoking these days than in the past, and while you still don't see an actor walk into a party or restaurant and the first thing they do is light up a cigarette, but the cigarettes are still there, and they're still considered cool. My own mom began smoking when she was 11 (and this was back in the 1930s) because her best friend did, and while my mom was able to quit in her 70s, her friend went on smoking -- and hacking, even through emphysema -- until she died in her mid-80's. I was lucky.  The smell of smoke always filled our house and I couldn't stand it, or the sight of all those ashtrays (though my mom was a clean smoker, and emptied them almost as quickly as they were filled).  As a result, I've chosen never to smoke and am probably the only living person the planet who has never held a ci...

Who knew?  Trying to be hip and edgy could get you into so much trouble. The advertising world, that's who didn't.  In this cutthroat industry where it's become so hard to slash through all the stuff that comes our way online and on TV, advertisers have resorted to ads that open our eyes wide, and mouths to complain, according to The New York Times' Stuart Elliott and Tanzina Vega. Take the commercial for Mountain Dew that showed a battered white woman trying to pick her assailant from a lineup that included black men and a goat.  Sounds offensive to me.  (Full disclosure: I haven't seen it.)  Or the one from GM for its sport utility Trax, set in the 1930's and sold in countries including Canada, that uses a "modern remix of a song from that era that included references to Chinese people, using phrases like 'ching ching, chop suey.'" The companies have all done mea culpas and yanked the ads, with their defense being it was the only way ...

Bet you're going to find this as hard to believe as I did, but a new study has supposedly found that teens respond more to food ads than to ones for cellphones.  You heard it here first.  (Well, not really -- it was a story that ran today at a blog called Futurity, authored by Jared Wadley-Michigan.) Wadley-Michigan writes that "watching TV commercials of people munching on French fries or cereal resonates more with teens than advertisements about cellphones or the latest car." Apparently brain activity is higher when teens watch food commercials than when they watch non-food ads. "It appears that food advertising is better at getting into the mind and memory of kids," Ashely Gearhardt, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan told Wadley-Michigan. "This makes sense because our brains are hard-wired to get excited in response to delicious foods." Teens watched a video of 20 food and 20 non-food commercials, including thos...