"Gee, that blood pressure medicine really makes me feel great!"

RODALE NEWS, EMMAUS, PA—Pharmaceutical television ads promising blissful erections on warm summer nights, or painfree joints while frolicking through wildflower meadows with your grandchildren, may seem convincing. But the government isn’t buying it. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration this month released a draft of recommendations for print and broadcast drug ads. The proposed guidelines aim to prevent misguided information that often focuses on the benefits of a particular drug or medical device but fails to appropriately disclose its risks.

Here are 5 marketing techniques pharmaceutical companies use in their ads:

1. They serenade you. Distraction is the name of the game when it comes to drug advertisements, and music is an effective way of grabbing your attention. Next time you’re watching an ad, pay particular attention to the music played throughout. Chances are it’s upbeat until it’s time to talk about side effects, when the tempo may speed up or become even more distracting.

2. They’re vague about side effects. If you took the benefits and side effects mentioned in an ad, and placed them on a seesaw, poor Mr. Side Effects would be stuck high in sky, screaming for more airtime. Certainly, we can’t expect drug makers not to tout the benefits of their products. But the FDA found that drug makers spend a lot of time talking about how a drug will improve your life, but often downplay or eliminate the risks. The government report also found that oftentimes, the risks are stated in a vague way, such as, “Like all arthritis medications, Drug X has been associated with a risk of serious infection.”

3. They overload your eyeballs. During the side effects portion of the ad, scenes will typically change very quickly, often showing distracting joyous or exhilarating moments, people benefiting from the drug, or some other nonrisk-related scene. Moving camera angles and graphics flashed on the screen are also used to distract viewers from the risks of a drug.

4. They show us what we wish we were. Who doesn’t want to be young and vibrant? Drug companies use younger people, or find the hottest grandparents around, to sway us into thinking their drug can make us look and feel that good, too. (Of course, so do soft drink marketers, car marketers…and, well, marketers of just about anything.) Since most of us watching the ads have physiques similar to Homer Simpson’s, maybe we should be seeing more commercials prescribing exercise, which can alleviate many symptoms caused by being chronically overweight. Next time you feel yourself identifying with someone in a drug ad, pinch yourself, get off the couch, and take a walk around the block. Now that’s good medicine.

5. They show only the bright side. In a perfect world, all drugs would work as prescribed and no one would suffer side effects. We all know that’s not the case. But drug companies’ cheery ads are anything but fair and balanced. Sure, they’ll show you a scene of a middle-aged couple soaking in a tub under a Tuscan sunset, but they probably won’t include a scene of the guy burping up reflux during sex, or sitting in the ER with a persistent eight-hour erection. While neither of those scenes is likely to turn up in an ad even if the FDA guidelines are adhered to, it’s hard for consumers to weight the benefits of the medications against the risks when the commercials paint such a one-sided picture.