The HAVIDOL® project was presented in the Second City part of the Ars Electronica, the hub where virtual life meet to coexist in an ironical and frightening way for one week. Main sites of the Second City included a designed interactive square both in reality and in Second Life platform to mess up with our physical reality and the Marienstrasse, a whole street were our digital and analog confusion can deepen.
The HAVIDOL® location looked as a shop, a clinical shop which made me wonder if it is part of the Ars Electronica at all. But as curiosity pushes I entered shyly under the kindly stare of a lady behind a even more clinical desk. And the I started watching the testimonials over the HAVIDOL drug, the glamourous commercial brought me at the edge of believing that is a cure for all your social anxieties, drops of energy and cultural misfit. And I want to, I want to grab the blue pill that the kind lady offers me so smiley, and even sign the life contract and all my future never to exist siblings for it.
"HAVIDOL is for the treatment of Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder (DSACDAD). It is the only known medication available for this newly recognized disorder."
As I had worked many years with pharma guidelines, motivational videos and I got to fully understand some of their marketing strategies. Upon remembering some of the claims cancer marketing expression this project was for me a personal ironical relief.
Justine Cooper (the kind lady behind the desk with the blue pills) had design a flawless fictional marketing campaign to launch a new fictional wonder drug. Not only she invented the campaign and the drug but she also developed a fictional "disease" to be treated.
The irony stops at the point when you realize that, even as a joke, we are so desperately logging to improve our lives even if there is no reason to do. So, maybe we should give the biggest credit to Justine for tagging our social and personal anxieties. "When all is not enough"
For futher info visit:
www.havidol.com
www.justinecooper.com
1 comment:
wow! I know marketing from being together with a man for 7 years who worked for a company selling people razorblades. And they made it, to make people believe three is not enough- so it is five now and vibrating. four is the other company...huhuhu it is getting a quiz here or what?! Hugs from brussel
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