Think a rat’s bad, wait until you see what’s in Viagra.

Loyal MTLB loyalists know my love for pharmaseutra—advertising’s orgy of medaphors. Marc Brownstein on Ad Age recently asked why most of it is so embarassing. Long and short, the creativity that people want pharma advertising to have ain’t happening here in America, simply because the FDA has too many guidelines in place to prevent it. While the Taxi work for Viagra up in Canada is stuff people wouldn’t mind seeing, good luck trying it here.

Problem is, the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries allowing DTC advertising, (direct to consumer), along with strict guidelines that the rest of advertising doesn’t have to follow. You can’t just show a product, someone using it, then they’re cured.

Best you can hope for is to imply said product might get the person back to a reasonable facsimile of the person they were before said condition—which you have to mention carefully—took hold.

This isn’t like saying brand x of paper towel picks up 50% more spills and hilarious ad scenario ensues! Not even close. If that were pharma, you’d need to warn about possible side effects of wet paper towel not making it to the garbage before it tore. Or how the paper towel should never be used as a tourniquet. Or that it should never be used to plug holes in tires.

No, see, Canada doen’t have the same restrictions, plus, they don’t mention a specific medical condition that would require the ton of disclaimers we need here. (Antiquing is not a medical condition. Well, for most anyway.)

They simply poke fun at the limitations American advertising has on it in the spot. It’s stuff any creative would like on their reel.

So while the rat spot above passed muster over in the UK, and while several people give it props for being effective, it wouldn’t run here. (The point about rats, while dramatic, is a little unclear. Just where in the life cycle of the med is the rat and the rat poison getting in, the factory? They’re literal about everything else in the spot, why not say it in the voiceover then.)

Regardless, it talks about a category as a whole and not any specific product. No advertiser here though will waste money buying air time to talk about the general idea of heart attacks unless they’re also showing off their new heart drug.

(They will do this online though in what they call unbranded ads and sites. This is where they create a pseudo site about headaches called, um, helpmymigraine.com, which then leads you into the back door of the main product from said manufacturer, thus avoiding the required fair balance which cripples most creative effort.)

That aside, loosen the guidelines here and I guarantee more creative work would be done along these lines.