When A ‘Black Mirror’ Plot Comes To Life: Should Targeted Ads Run In Shows About Terminal Illness?
As an entertainment writer, I am always catching up on new content, and this week, two new releases converged in a very disturbing experience for me as a viewer. As I was watching Michelle William’s new drama, Dying For Sex, on Hulu, which is about a woman diagnosed with terminal breast cancer, I was served multiple ads for a breast cancer medication.
A few days later, I watched the first episode of Black Mirror Season 7, “Common People”, about a woman whose brain is held hostage and then hijacked by a cloud-based healthcare company, causing her to involuntarily spout off verbal ads for different companies, chosen because of the context of different conversations she finds herself in.
She unwillingly recommends Christian family counseling to a student facing parental tension, a senior dating app to a disgruntled colleague, and lubricant and erectile disfunction pills to her husband while they’re trying to be intimate. It’s inappropriate and highly uncomfortable for all parties involved, and an invasion of privacy.
On an informal level, the contextual ads shown to me felt icky. On a critical level, while tapping into my thirteen years of advertising experience, it felt ill-advised, insensitive, and unstrategic. First of all, I could not imagine this show would be appealing to someone who is dealing with the overwhelming emotions it portrays in their own life, so this approach would likely miss its intended target audience. But, I don’t have cancer, so this is merely a hypothesis.
If hypotheticals are all I have to work with, let’s take the construct a step further and suppose that I, or someone close to me, has breast cancer, and I do watch this show because it connects to my personal experience. Is it unkind and somewhat predatory to pounce on that moment with a contextually targeted ad? To take advantage of my pain for capitalistic gain? What if that cancer is, as it is in the show, terminal? Is it cruel to wave a cure that isn’t relevant in someone’s face?
That’s not to mention the nuance with pharmaceutical advertising in general. Sure, there is some rationale to raising awareness about potential treatments amongst consumers who may not be aware their migraines or psoriasis can be alleviated. But a layperson isn’t prescribing their own medications, a doctor is, and the logic that someone with cancer or someone close to them will see this ad, march into a doctor’s office and request this medication by name is frankly, flawed.
But the pharmaceutical industry isn’t the only one profiting from this exchange. Disney owns the Hulu platform, and is selling the ad time. It is their technology that is determining the context of their own programming, and pairing it with brands seeking that kind of targeting. They even have a name for this offering, “Magic Words”, and they unveiled it at their Tech and Data Showcase at CES last year.
Clearly, as with the fictional Rivermind from Black Mirror, this tech needs tweaking. Hopefully, the dialogue sparked by that episode, and consumer feedback will encourage media companies to be more mindful when they ‘test and learn’ with such sensitive scenarios.