Help! Big Pharma Is After Me!

 

For months if not years, I have been complaining inwardly (and occasionally outwardly) about the number and frequency of ads on prime-time television for one after another high-priced medication that will help solve your high blood pressure problem or your urinary frequency problem or your eczema problem or your whatever problem.  Ordinary people cannot, of course, buy any of these drugs.  We OPs have to convince our doctors to prescribe those pricey meds in the hope that they'll be covered by our medical insurance.

Now, drug manufacturers have two ways of marketing their wares: they can advertise directly to doctors and hospitals (and they do), and they can advertise to the potential users of their product.  (That's you and me in case you didn't pick up on that right away.)  They can write off the advertising expense for the first route; that's perfectly normal, a typical business expense.  But they also can write off the cost to advertise to the user community.

Why?  And why would they bother?  Even the write-off costs them something; they're not paying taxes at 100%.  The answer is that by doing so, they have turned all of us consumers into their personal lobbying army.  Our task, whether we know it or not, is to convince our doctors to prescribe these drugs and generate income to the manufacturers.

There's a second benefit, however, that is much harder to discern: By sloshing ad money liberally upon this network or that one, they now hold a whip regarding broadcast content.  They can influence which content broadcasters broadcast and which they do not.  In that way, drug manufacturers can control the official opinions of broadcast and cable networks.

I'm thinking that's not such a good thing.

I'm thinking that it would be pretty easy to declare such expenditures to be non-deductible since the ads they fund are not directed at doctors — there are ways to target advertising much more precisely — and are thus not really a legitimate business expense.

I'm looking forward to having seen my last commercial for drugs I don't need and can't obtain without convincing my doctor that I do need them.

 

Anti-Woke backlash

 

First it was Bud Light getting boycotted because they decided to associate their brand with an attention-seeking cross-dresser, then Target put their 'June is Pride Month' merchandise front and center, featuring 'tuck-friendly' women's bathing suits aimed at those 'trans women' who haven't yet had their gender-reassignment surgeries.  Now Disney is facing the wrath of parents over a (sales)man in a dress helping little girls pick out their favorite Princess gown at the 'Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique' at Disney World Orlando.

Anheuser-Busch was certain the Bud Light brouhaha would blow over in weeks if not days, but they have been very disappointed thus far.  Target, apparently not prepared to become the next Bud Light, has made motions that look a lot like 'backing down', but their sales are off and their stock price is falling — not like ABInbev's, but showing signs.  Several recent Disney movies have turned in unusually poor box office results.  It looks like parents are taking the kids to the zoo instead of the theater.  What the heck is going on?

I think what's happening is that the normies have reached the limit of their tolerance.  This isn't new.  During the Age of Covid, parents discovered to their horror what their children were learning at school — and they didn't like it.  They didn't like it so much that they descended on school board meetings en masse to let the administrators know how much they didn't like it.  It could all have ended there, but the newly-installed Democratic administration decided to make an example of those uppity parents by siccing the Famous But Incompetent FBI on them.  Lots of normies suddenly were awakened (not 'woke') to the truth that they were a mere complaint away from getting the same treatment.

And their response has been a collective middle-finger.

In this game of economic 'chicken', the consumer has options; the retailers don't.  The LGBTQIA-LS/MFT community is a fraction, a puny fraction of the retail audience.  Even if that community doesn't initiate their own boycott because some retailer backs off their full-throated support of their tiny population, they aren't enough to rescue a brand that has — for all practical purposes — poisoned the well.  That's what Anheuser-Busch has discovered, much to their chagrin.  In some parts of the country, Budweiser brands, not just Bud Light, have lost up to 30% of their market share along with their #1 spot.  Miller, Coors, and Yeungling have gleefully stepped in to take up the slack.  That looks suspiciously like a Kiss of Death.  It's not outside the envelope of reality that ABInbev might be making some serious changes, perhaps 'ownership'.

It will only take one major corporation to crumble to end, completely, the current fascination with 'ESG scores'.

All things considered, I think that would constitute 'a good thing'.