The focus group defense to false advertising

The NYT ran a story about negative reactions from doctors to an American Cancer Society ad about skin cancer, funded by Neutrogena: ““My sister accidentally killed herself. She died of skin cancer,” the ad says. The problem? Sunscreen protects against skin cancer, but it’s not necessarily your best bet for avoiding melanoma, the fatal kind of skin cancer. The society’s explanation:

Dr. J. Leonard Lichtenfeld, deputy chief medical officer at the American Cancer Society, acknowledges that the advertisement is aggressive. “We have taken some license in taking that message and using it the way we’ve used it,” he said, “because that’s the way to get the message to our target audience.”

Dr. Lichtenfeld said the advertisements were aimed at women ages 20 to 48 because sun exposure in childhood and young adulthood can influence skin cancer risk later in life, and it is mothers who largely control children’s time in the sun.

He added that the advertisement’s creators settled on the approach with the help of focus groups, who told them, “To get the message through to me, you have to shock me and get my attention.”

In other words, we are so inured to claims of danger that it takes exaggeration – what some might call false or misleading claims – to get us to notice smaller, but still important, risks. This is a persistent problem in advertising regulation: Because of predictable problems with human cognition, our regulatory choices routinely require us to choose between overkill and underkill.