There’s nothing like a few weeks of TV news horror stories to get a marketer motivated. From Ad Age:
Two weeks after news that taking Ambien could result in binge eating and driving while asleep, sales of sleeping medications began tanking, finally causing Sanofi-Aventis to wake up and advertise the safety of its product. And it looks like rivals won’t be far behind.
The print campaign for Ambien, the $2.1 billion leader in the insomnia category, began three weeks after The New York Times reported March 8 that Ambien was linked to traffic arrests around the nation by drivers who had no memory of getting behind the wheel, and two weeks after researchers at the Minnesota Regional Sleep Disorders Centre and the Mayo Clinic found that some people who take Ambien binge-eat while sleeping.
Frankly, Ambien isn’t the problem. It’s our modern society that’s the problem. The light bulb and electricity have only been around for 125 years or so, and our bodies haven’t adjusted to the changes modern society has wrought. So we don’t get enough sleep, at least not on a natural cycle. Hence, you get things like binge-eating (out of the refrigerator) while sleeping. C’mon, let’s go back to the hunter-gatherer days!
