I just received this comment via my “Contact Us” form:
“John, while the information you post online is informative and I am glad someone is bring (sic) things to public attention it is also can be estremely (sic) opnionated (sic) and unjust. Please realize that the actions you take in your writing can and has cost people their jobs. I work for an ad agency. I try my best to ensure my contributions are not to just sell drugs but to educate consumers. Pharma is about money but its also about making people better. When ads come out they are a result of multiple hands touching a piece from agency, to brand teams to mlr. When you decide to callout an ad you are impacting all those people. So please think about that when writing your blog. And look at what guidelines fda has set and where they still need to go. Rather then being a tatle (sic) tale be a solution maker.”
I’m guessing this has something to do with the post I made earlier today about “Retro Relpax” ads (here).
The person who wrote chose to remain anonymous, so I will I will just refer to him/her as “Anon.”
Anon claims that my writing “can and has cost people their jobs” and I assume he/she means his/her job because the subject line of the message was “lost my job.”
First of all, it seems pretty unlikely that someone would be fired within hours after an “opnionated” and “unjust” blog post was made. Who can be so cruel to fire someone on the spot like that, especially someone who is just one of the “multiple hands” responsible for creating and approving ads?
I wonder if Anon also complained to Deborah Dick-Rath over at MM&M. She wrote her critical piece about the Replax print ad way before I did. She really ripped into the creative team: “And while the Relpax creative team put in a valiant effort, in the end, they were defeated by too many typefaces, too much copy, too many messages and a somewhat unfortunate choice in art direction.”
I suppose she gets a free pass because she started out with praise, faint though it was.
Maybe this doesn’t have anything to do with Relpax at all. I just can’t recall, however, any recent critical posts I have made that may have gotten Anon fired.
Anyway, I assume Anon will be able to collect a couple of years of unemployment insurance, unless Congress refuses to extend that benefit. When I was laid off many years ago during the dotcom bust, I only received 26 weeks of unemployment insurance – damn George Bush and those Republicans!
