Oh boy, so I haven't written in quite a while. Sorry about that!
Today I'd like to throw my hat into the extraordinarily outdated ring and talk about the long-running Mucinex campaign. As you probably know, Mucinex is an over-the-counter expectorant that loosens and thins mucus to help clear lungs and sinuses during illness or allergies. The ads have featured coughing human characters, and animated, anthropomorphic phlegm people who "live" in lungs. Most of these humanized loogies are depicted as overweight, ugly, sweaty, free-loading, gruff-voiced men and women being evicted from their respiratory-organ-shaped apartments by way of forceful cough. I find this to be a totally satisfactory way to advertise a product, apparently so does everyone else because these have been running for a few years now.
Where it started to confuse me, was when they came out with Mucinex for Kids. They were fast melt packets flavored cherry and grape and all-around a good idea. However, the ads feature the same mucus monsters, except now they are children. These phlegm babies are still fat, slovenly-looking and obnoxious...but they are depicted in the dynamic of a family, living comfortably in a lung house together. In my eyes, I sort of sympathized with the little mucus children being forced from their happy home. Obviously, the fictional plight of anthropomorphic sputum wouldn't keep me from properly medicating my own child. But I think that using the same intruder-looking adult mucus people instead of the vulnerable image of children being victimized and made homeless, or even just showing more of the miserable, coughing human child would have gotten the message across more effectively. "Fat mucus is in your child's lungs. It is unhealthy. Remove it."
I would love to hear more about everyones' opinions about this. What to you think? Should they have introduced the loogie children? Or should they have used the grown up freeloader mucus men?
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