The ad that avoids seeing

The announcement of The Marathon The ad from that year, dedicated to the fight against cancer, is, from an advertising standpoint, incredibly effective. If the goal is for people to connect with suffering, feel a certain anxiety upon seeing it, and make donations, they've done it perfectly. In a very simple way, without needing words, we witness the entire process of the disease, from its unexpected onset in a young man. We see a happy family whose lives are turned upside down by cancer. The green graphic that stains the screen symbolizes the cancerous cells invading the body.

However, it's so realistic that it hurts and even provokes repulsion. Everything about it is devastating. So much so, that the viewer even avoids watching it. Cancer is a disease that many people have suffered from and that everyone (or almost everyone) has experienced more or less directly. The ad very easily reactivates the feelings, fear, and pain associated with the experience. Whether it's a distant memory, a recent one, or a present circumstance, whether it has been overcome or has a sad ending, the events that the announcement condenses for us The Marathon We are suddenly and unprepared for a moment of suffering. For those who have lost a loved one, reliving this process on television is especially cruel. It stirs up anguish and grief.

Given that it is such a common illness, that we are very aware of what it entails and that it causes so much suffering, perhaps it wasn't necessary to reproduce the entire process in such a dramatic, explicit, and literal way. There is a degree of sensationalism that may be overwhelming for many viewers.

The slogan "Let's detect it, let's fix it" is also hard to swallow, because we know it's not always possible. There's an implicit message suggesting that if you're proactive, you can avoid a tragic outcome, and science, well, that's something it can't yet guarantee. But the worst part is the song's optimistic lyrics: "The pain made you stronger," it says at the beginning. "When there's no hope or faith left, you called life 'I love you.' If you believe in life, you believe in the impossible, everything incredible, you'll achieve it," or "If you believe in dreams, you heal wounds." Well, no. This isn't enough to overcome cancer. I wish it were. And what the music does is perpetuate a very common and dangerous inertia: placing the responsibility on the patient and their desire to get better. This idea of a fight that, if you have a good attitude, you win.

Since we'll have to endure the penance of watching the ad for a few weeks, or dodge it with some frantic channel surfing, we hope that, on December 14th, the celebration of The Marathon Don't fall into toxic positivism, nor into the mistake of romanticizing the struggle, and even less so into the mania of shifting blame onto the patient. People donate money to science, to investigate a complex biological process. It's pointless to raise awareness in society if the message of the advertisement emphasizes an individual emotional issue.