Women Will Get Cancer: Visual and Verbal Presence (And Absence) in a Pharmaceutical Advertising Campaign About HPV

Abstract

In 2006, Merck global pharmaceutical company launched a “Tell Someone” direct-to-consumer advertising campaign to educate about the human papillomavirus (HPV). Through a visual and verbal analysis of presence and absence in two videos from this campaign that aired across major U.S. television networks and online in spring 2006, I illustrate how Merck's campaign problematically argues that women will get cancer. Specifically, the videos visually and verbally make present middle-to-upper-middle class adult women as the only people who contract HPV, amplify the equation that HPV equals cancer, and advocate a limited course of health prevention under the guise of a “public health campaign” that has a mission of “education.” These techniques of presence make Merck's argument stand out among the proliferation and plethora of images circulating through current U.S. mass media but at the cost of accentuating women's bodies as inherently diseased. This study has implications for women's health, pharmaceutical advertising, and the growing conversation in the field of visual argumentation about the attention and distraction of audiences. I also propose an improved video for a public health campaign about HPV.