“Got Eggs? Donate some!”
Even you have to admit that is an arresting headline, especially when it appears, not in your local Pick n Pay, but a doctor’s waiting rooms. The brochure on which this headline was displayed was a soft pretty pink, so it was immediately clear what kind of eggs they had in mind.
I sat there while I waited for the doctor — I suppose that’s why they call it a waiting room; because you wait and wait and wait — and pondered this strategy. I like pondering strategy; it’s something I do all day anyway, and it’s always an interesting exercise to guess what thought processes led to some of the communication we see around us.
Did they test this headline, I wonder? Did they ask a few fertile females, “Hey, what would make you submit to being injected with hormones and having a few eggs ripped from your ovaries?” and get the answer, “Oh, just ask us if we’ve got eggs and like, maybe say we should donate some. Or something.”
Even if I were within the right age range, I don’t think that “Got Eggs? Donate some!” would induce me to think further about a procedure that involves all sorts of ethical questions that many women would find overwhelming. Donating eggs is not the same as giving last year’s clothes to the Salvation Army. It is an act of altruism that requires much reflection and a real sense of making a difference. Obviously.
The bizarre egg donation brochure wasn’t the only interesting piece of communication lying around there. There was the one about Botox and excessive sweating (it gets injected into your armpits or feet and prevents your eccrine glands from producing sweat by blocking the nerves that trigger them); Botox for wrinkles (“A first choice for a Natural look”) and brochures for two different companies offering to store your baby’s stem cells for future use.
Medical advertising is of course an entire specialty on its own (one of our sister agencies in the building specialises in pharma communication and I’ve had several fascinating discussions with the MD around pain, stress and Viagra). Doctors are motivated by messages that are very different from the ones we in more mainstream agencies are accustomed to crafting for consumers; there can surely be no more intensely branded space than a doctor’s office, where everything from the box of tissues to the lollipops sports a logo of some high blood pressure pill or deworming potion.
The messages that might persuade a doctor to prescribe Lipitor are very different from those that would convince a housewife to try a different brand of toilet cleaner. Still, I’m mystified. Sure, advertising is not an industry known for its sensitivity. But I can’t imagine any copywriter, even one who helps Lolly Jackson with his billboards, coming up in all seriousness with a line like “Got Eggs? Donate some!” and thinking it could possibly work.
It certainly doesn’t work for me.
I have to say it didn’t work that well for me either!
While it may not work for you personally, it certainly got you talking about it – which I bet was their intention. Egg donation is such a new thing, relatively speaking, that there is still a lot of misunderstanding out there. And if that headline gets you to pick up the brochure to at least read more, it means that the idea has at least been sown into your mind. Maybe the next time, or the time after that, that you see/ hear anything about it, you’ll be more open to the idea, and maybe, just maybe, one day, you’ll donate. In SA a paradigm shift is required in the minds of its womenfolk about this, and maybe the advertisers understand that, and maybe, just maybe, all they want is for you to read the brochure and set the process into (very slow) motion.
Sarah, I fail to understand. I have lots of sperm and donating is charitable, is it not?
So, Sarah, is that just a very old photo? What age to you have to be?
Wherever there’s a market, donors can usually be found.
As you should by now know, advertising agencies market back to front. They take a (client’s) product and try to interest a market. The right way to do things is find a market and THEN something to sell into it.
If an agency wants the money, it’ll do its damndest to sell anything the client wants sold. How often does yours turn away accounts?
I can well remember working on an NP ad one day and an ANC ad the next…
We’re doomed as a species. Already the planet is creaking and groaning under the weight of too many people, and still we continue to reproduce. I have plenty of eggs, none of which I’ve ever wanted, needed or used. But I would refuse to donate them on principle because I will not contribute to the biggest human problem – overpopulation.
I agree 100% with CB. And I also consider the need to procreate one of our baser instincts, so I’m left without much sympathy for those for whom it becomes the be all and end all of their existence. I find it all rather pathetic.
When you see the number of children produced whose parents seem to think their upbringing is someone else’s responsibility, and this lack of care on their part foists dysfunctional adults onto the rest of us, I have even less sympathy.
The real issue here is the lack of willingness to compensate the donors in KASH MONEY.
You want eggs, pay for it. You want blood, pay for it. You want organs, pay for it.
In other countries, blood donors get reimbursed in KASH, but not in South Africa. In South Africa, people are expected to give blood out of the goodness of their hearts.
That is what does not work for me.
If you want some human spare parts, be prepared to pay for it, or go home. If all the bleeding hearts currently giving away their blood for no reward refused to do it unless they were paid for their blood, the SA government would have no choice but to allocate a budget to purchase blood, instead of getting it for free.
So, yeah, you want an egg? Sure. They’re $10 000 each. You can pay me in gold bullion.
Well Anne and CB here is hoping you never experience infertility. or motherhood for that fact. we would want people with a little human empathy to continue procreating the world. and if overpopulation is such a problem – do the world a favour and take yourselves out.
Jenny – what a nasty comment. Full of the human empathy you say the world needs.
It just reinforces my feelings about the whole thing.
And your comment was not nasty Anne?
We have a 16 year old son by grace of donated eggs & will be eternally grateful to the anonymous donor. Some women are content to be childless, some love being mothers. If everyone felt like CB & Anne there would no overpopulation & no population. Agree with you Sarah, the headline is pathetic. And as an adlady you know how easy it is to criticise. Rather tell us what the brochure should have said,