Ambien is a prescription sleeping pill with the well-known and somewhat odd potential side effect of causing something known as "sleep driving", where a person goes driving while asleep, and they don't even remember doing it later. Well, this is a fairly alarming-sounding side effect, but since everybody already knows about it, it's too late to try to hide it. So why not try to tout it as a good thing that's a desirable quality no other sleep aid can produce?
Promoting sleep driving as a selling point for Ambien could be achieved by having a race car driver appear in an ad, like maybe Kyle Busch or Danica Patrick, driving around super fast in his/her race car during a race while sound asleep and snoring, with a pillow behind their head. And we see them win the race, driving under the waving checkered flag while still fast asleep and drooling on their shirt! And they keep driving at full speed after the checkered flag, so their pit crew has to wake them up using one of those air-horn-in-a-can thingies, and then they wake to find they have won the biggest trophy of the season! And then we see them, yawning and stretching, up at the winner's podium; but rather than drinking champagne out of the champion's cup, they're drinking coffee out of it, or eating cereal with milk, because they've just woken up. And maybe they could even be wearing a pajamas-with-attached-feet version of their racing outfit, just to stress the whole idea that they've been asleep the whole time while they were driving. And the slogan could say something like: "Ambien makes you go "fast asleep"!"
If they made an ad like this, I'll bet Ambien would quickly become the #1 prescription sleep aid of NASCAR fans! And then Formula 1, IndyCar, and drag racing would be the next markets to conquer with Ambien racing ads! How could it fail to sell like hot cakes, being the only racing-inspired sleep aid? Maybe they could even have a promotion where you can send away for a free Ambien racing helmet or pit crew uniform with a certain number of empty prescription bottles, like breakfast cereals used to do when I was a little kid. (And I guess they could have an Ambien Racing Series, where everyone who races has to be sleep driving on Ambien to qualify, and no racers would even be allowed to be awake for the race. Now that's some excitement right there!)
