Commercial Exposure

Eric K. Curtis, DDS

Advertising doesn’t say much about the products being sold, communications theorist Neil Postman points out in Technopoly, but it speaks volumes about the "fears, fancies, and dreams" of the people who might buy them.

By that measure, oral health care must be right at the forefront of consumer sensibilities. "My husband is a dentist," says an earnest woman in a Mentadent commercial, who then reveals that her spouse recommends that toothpaste brand. The tone of the spot is informal and confidential, and the message is clear. What the dentist gives his own family is what the rest of American consumers should be buying.

As the century matured, advertisements became not just purveyors of information but powerful tools of persuasion that penetrate every layer of society. The selling techniques became more elaborate and sophisticated. Simple statements gave way to product demonstrations and debates, and then stories. These days, as the Mentadent spot demonstrates, the stories are also about dentistry itself. While dentists generally still refrain from selling themselves, they have been used increasingly and more directly to sell other, even non-dental, products. There are at least four portrayals of dentistry that permeate popular culture—pain, healing, power, and routine. Advertisements harness all of the images. Some examples:

Pain. A commercial for the Toyota Previa minivan depicts a busy mother driving her family around. It’s the perfect vehicle: "For your little babies," says the voice-over, as the scene shifts to the mom driving her husband up to the door of a dental office, "and your big ones." An Ad Council plug for U.S. Savings Bonds shows a sketch of Uncle Sam extracting a tooth from the shaggy carcass of a sluggish stock market. The tagline: "Taking the bite out of the bear."

Healing. "What Novocaine is to dentistry, my new catalog is to shopping," declares Candace Bergen in a Spiegel print ad. A two-page Chevrolet ad lines up several snapshots of happy children over the picture of an automobile. "Chances are their teeth will need more work than your Lumina," goes the heading.

Power. An IBM commercial reveals the dentist as a sophisticated woman who gives her patient knowledgeable advice about a selecting a computer. Crest toothpaste commercials show previously submissive patients equalizing the balance of power in the dental office by having no cavities. "I’m outta here!" proclaims a young man, newly empowered in his caries-free state, as he jumps out of the chair and yanks off his napkin.

Routine. The copy for a General Magic software advertisement shows a list: "Things to do today...Schedule dentist appointment....How you use our software is your own business." Not only is dentistry a symbol of life’s routine, but dentists are routinely portrayed as modern-day Everypeople. An ad for ShareBuilder.com, for example, begins, "Some of us were born to be day traders. Some of us were born to be dentists."

The power of advertisements itself lies in their ability to blend images of routine into the often graphic scenes of magazine copy and television programming they accompany. Commercials are curiously and incongruously mixed with murder and mayhem. "It is," writes Postman with Steve Powers in How To Watch TV News, "as if the program’s producer is saying, ‘You needn’t grieve or worry about what you are seeing. In a minute or so, we will make you happy with some good news about how to make your teeth whiter."

From Inscriptions, Journal of the Arizona Dental Association, 11(2): August 1997.

Dr. Eric Curtis is author of Hand to Mouth: Essays on the Art of Dentistry, Quintessence, 2002.