Gardasil, anyone?

As a consultant, one of the greatest challenges is helping clients find solutions to their toughest problems. Recently, a New York Times outlined the anatomy of a television commercial for Gardasil, "a vaccine intended to protect women against some strains of the human papillomavirus, a sexually transmitted disease that has been linked to 70 percent of cervical cancer cases."

Here's the challenge: "A vaccine against cancer: it sounds like the easiest sell in the world. But Gardasil, which can be administered only to girls and women ages 9 to 26, has an audience problem. It has to sell itself to young women who are in charge of their own health-care decisions. At the same time it has to sell itself to the parents of teenagers and preteenage girls. All this is complicated by the fact that HPV, as the virus is known, is a sexually transmitted disease. Parents are being asked to vaccinate their daughters against a sexually transmitted disease before those daughters have even thought about becoming sexually active (or so their parents fondly hope). Further, even as Merck advertises directly to the consumer, it is lobbying state by state for a universal mandate that the vaccine be given to all girls. Pro-abstinence groups are leery of the mandate, as are groups that monitor the legislation of vaccines."

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