Empowering Patients One Pill at a Time: Zoloft’s Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Campaign

Pfizer’s campaign for Zoloft, an antidepressant, was one of the Direct-to-Consumer advertising campaigns in the pharmaceutical industry. The purpose of this paper is to examine the rhetorical strategies of Pfizer’s commercials and see how they used different strategies to appeal to a wider audience. The effects direct-to-consumer marketing can have on an audience have not really been studied. The Zoloft ads are some of the most memorable ads in the last ten years, and several other antidepressants seem to be using the same strategies. This will be accomplished by looking at different facets of the commercials, the historical context, and studying how direct-to-consumer marketing works. The anticipated results of this paper would be to find how Pfizer’s use of multiple personas and simplistic style appealed to a wider audience. An examination of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertisements is necessary to see whether drug companies are empowering patients, or influencing the overmedicalization of American society