Would 'Got Eggs? Donate some!' work for you?

“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.