(When I went to see The Conjuring 2 recently, I saw some commercials prior to the trailers, and in one of them, Tina Fey is in a gym, and standing around weights, she says to some muscular guys: “I’ve got ‘roid rage: hemorrhoids.” Well, that’s the joke in an ad I wrote a few years ago that I was saving for a portfolio separate from this blog, and since now that she’s made that joke in an ad, it’s only a matter of time before someone writes an ad like the one I wrote, I figured I might as well post mine, which is the last paragraph below. As you can see, I wrote it up for the blog like I used to do, with the thinking behind it all laid out, but then I decided not to post it.)
Commercials for hemorrhoid medication are usually so boring, with delicate descriptions dancing around the issue. Only recently did someone come up with the idea of showing barbed wire on a bicycle seat to indicate the pain, etc. And that’s getting there, but I think it could go a step further, with a memorable play-on-words that might keep the issue on people’s minds in case they need the product, and so they’d definitely remember it.
That’s why I thought up the idea of “’Rhoid Rage”. The concept of “’Roid Rage” is very much in the zeitgeist right now, what with all the steroid investigations in sports, and the concern over “’Roid Rage” being a potential side-effect. So as a twist on that term, I thought it might be fun to refer to hemorrhoid pain giving someone “’Rhoid Rage”.
So here’s how an ad with this “’Rhoid Rage” term would work:
A high-powered executive walks into work, and his secretary has some important information to give him. So the executive walks past the secretary and into his office and sits down, trailed in by the harried underling. And as the executive sits down on the chair, he recoils and screams in pain from the hemorrhoids he’s suffering from, smashes his desk to pieces with his fists, gets up, storms across the room, and smashes through the wall, leaving a man-shaped hole in the wall. Then the announcer says: “Do you have ‘Rhoid Rage: the fury that comes from hemorrhoid pain? Don’t let it make you the terror of the office! Use Preparation H, and say good-bye to ‘Rhoid Rage!”
