Branding Alzheimer's

So, I finally got caught up on all of my TV shows through the wonder of the Internet (if you haven't heard of it, you should probably get it) and I realized how much more aware of hot topics I am in the media than before. This week the hot topic seemed to be Alzheimer's disease, which if you don't know, I'm a huge proponent of promoting, because there is so much that the masses don't know about it, hence why I am writing about it now, interning at the Alzheimer's Association, conducting my thesis on it and writing the world's longest run-on sentence!

So, it started last week when the Alzheimer's Association was promoting their most recent campaign: The Shriver Report. This is interesting on a number of levels. First, they named it after Maria Shriver, California's First Lady and longtime spokeswoman for the Alzheimer's Association. You can see videos about her promoting it all over the the association's website (www.alz.org). Secondly, this is a novel idea, because they are focusing solely on the impact this debilitating disease has had on women, whether they are suffering from the disease themselves or are caring for someone. Thirdly, the media campaign for this has been quite large. So, in other words, if you haven't seen anything about this you either don't watch television or don't receive remarkable channels like ABC (Jenn!). So to roll out the promotion of this there was a huge campaign every morning for the whole last week on GMA (see previous post for breakdown of acronym) they featured this campaign. Here is a link (tear warning again) to one of their interviews with Maria Shriver. So yea, they talked a lot about AD on GMA, but then I was watching all my shows and I started noticing a trend.

I first noticed it when I was watching Desperate Housewives (loyal fan since the very beginning) and when Tom's mom came to help with the new baby and kept referring to him as Rodney (Tom's dad's name), I realized that something was going to develop from this within the plot. This was validated when Allison (Tom's mom) asked Penny (Tom and Lynette's daughter and Allison's granddaughter) who she was and if she lived at the house. I checked with one of my contacts on the set of the show and told them how I was glad that they were using the show to raise awareness of this issue from the perspective of the family. I was told that this story would develop over the next few episodes, so I am interested to see how this plays out. In one of my other favorite shows, Grey's Anatomy, which has dealt with the issue of Alzheimer's earlier in the season (Meredith Grey's mom who died had Alzheimer's), also brought up the issue. However, I don't know that I really agreed with the way that they went about it, because in the story Meredith goes on to get a blood test to determine if she has the "Alzheimer's gene". I didn't agree with this, because they have never made it known whether or not her mother had early-onset Alzheimer's, which is linked to the ApoE-4 gene. This gene is a risk factor for general Alzheimer's disease, but not the number one risk factor (in fact, the number one risk factor is still age), so they way they referred to it in the show made it sound like if she did have the gene she would develop Alzheimer's. Regardless of how it was done though, I think it was interesting how both of these shows brought up Alzheimer's disease around the same time that GMA was highlighting the Shriver Report and their stories about women taking on Alzheimer's disease. In another note related to our HPV campaign, another episode of Grey's had a man who had been exposed to HPV and due to some kind of immune deficiency, his face was covered in warts and his hands looked like tree branches, because he had left it untreated for so long! And then his wife left him after the surgery and he was just sleeping there when she walked away! FEAR TACTICS!