HeadOn turns me off

Maybe it’s the loud, repetitive chanting of “HeadOn – apply directly to the forehead” or the yellow arrow pointing to the forehead (the area, in case you weren’t listening, on which should apply HeadOn), but nothing makes me change the channel faster than this commercial. I remember HeadOn though – which is where this company’s primitive marketing tactic prevails.

Slate’s Seth Stevenson gave the commercial an A+ in the magazine’s “Ad Report Card” series. He said the company’s use of blunt force advertising succeeds in its use of repetition, kitsch, mystery and ubiquity. Besides the line, “HeadOn – apply directly to the forehead” the commercial’s entire script consists of nine more words, spoken quickly at the end, “HeadOn is available without a prescription at retailers nationwide.”

The advertisement, which debuted in June 2006, courts its critics, but serves as a muse for video parodies as well. Even Lil Jon got in on the action.

“We did not intend to make a joke out of this or a parody,” Dan Charron, vice president of sales and marketing for HeadOn’s maker, Plantation, Fla.-based Miralus health care, told USA Today’s Theresa Howard. “All we are trying to do is create brand awareness.”

That they did. USA Today reported at the end of July 2007 sales were up 50 percent for HeadOn since that April. Retail Wire said sales for the over the counter headache remedy rose 234 percent from 2005 to 2006 and rose again two-fold in 2007.