Okay, this ad is almost the same idea as the cartoon commercial for a different anti-depressant where some lady has some hole following her around, only this time it’s a cloud that personally rains on the depressed person’s parade. But this one is live-action, with a CGI dark-ish cloud that looks really good, and is just the right size to follow whoever it’s after around wherever they go. This works really well, if you want my opinion (which you must, if you’re bothering to read this), and even better than the Abilify cartoon ad with the “hole” thingy stalking the woman around, since this time we don’t have a scene of a doctor standing next to a movie screen with a film of himself wearing the exact-same clothes yammering on about the drug’s side-effects, and the even more ridiculous image of the woman’s “depression-hole” thingy sitting next to her, taking notes about the drug that’s going to try to kill it (presumably so it can find a way to fight back!). Awesome! (But not the best selling-point for the drug.)
In any case, this idea of having your own personal dark cloud to rain on your parade all the time to represent depression is wonderful! It’s so apropos, and it’s truly amazing nobody has done it before now, now that I think about it. And this commercial resonates amazingly well with me personally, for an extremely quirky reason! When I was in 6th-grade, I went to some all-boys military school on the Gulf Coast, where it is notorious for raining on one side of the street and not the other, and for torrential rainstorms to pop up out of nowhere at the drop of a hat! Well, one day, while waiting to be picked up from school after a particularly rough day, I found it was raining on me, but not on anyone around me (!). In fact, it was sunny (or partly cloudy) everywhere else, so it was really bizarre! So I looked up, and no exaggeration and no joke, there was a little teensy dark cloud hanging over my head (and my head alone) and raining on me only! Ridiculous!
So when I see this commercial, it just brings that whole thing back! But what a wonderfully simple visual metaphor for depression! I guess it was that, or say everything feels like crap when you’re depressed, and have everything they touch or step on turn brown and squishy and make everyone around them make “stinky-smell” expressions when they see and smell it. That would work too, but I’ll bet nobody will ever do that one!
And something else has just occurred to me: Misery loves company, right? Well, if they could figure out how to make it so depressed people could learn to control their little dark clouds so they could make them fly over and rain on other people, or strike somebody else’s head with lightning and such, it might cheer them up even more than the drug. In fact, they could hide behind corners and make the little cloud sneak over and strike somebody they don’t like and give them a really bad hair day! Or else they could make the little cloud hang really low and just over someone’s bag, and fill it full of rain so it ruins whatever they just bought, etc. Think of all the mean-spirited fun they could have abusing their clouds for annoying purposes! I’ll bet that would improve their mood significantly, especially if nobody could prove they did it! Maybe the Seroquel scientists ought to consider working on that, and then we could develop a really big version of it for the military so we could rule the world! Mwa ha ha ha ha! (<Evil laugh.)
This ad isn’t on the internet yet that I could find, but there’s a picture on the Seroquel XR website that shows the woman and the cloud (but it’s one of three images, and it changes on you, so use the little arrows on the top right-hand corner of the image to scroll through until you can see it). So here’s a link to that website, if you want to see the cloud:
After having seen this ad again on TV, I notice a problem in it: In the last vignette, there are three women hanging out together in an urban high-rise apartment living room. The woman on the right, on the couch, has the little cloud next to her head, outside the window. That’s fine, but her body language and facial expressions make her positively look like she’s about to leap through the window to her death by suicide! If this product is supposed to help with depression, perhaps they should direct that woman not to act and appear so suicidally miserable, as it tends to undercut their message. But it’s just a suggestion.
Yes! I found it! Here’s the ad, or at least a long version of it (That suicidal-looking woman is at around :30 sec.):
