NEWS -- Pharmaceutical advertising guidelines .... what happened?

Hey, what happened to those guidelines put out by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of Amerca regarding television advertising of prescription drugs?

No, this not something I lie awake thinking about each night.

Frankly, even though I covered the issue extensively when I wrote for Advertising Age magazine, I pretty much forgot about it.

Until Saturday.

We were watching Fox News in our room, and the boys were getting dressed in their room when, naturally, they started horsing around. One thing led to another and then it was, "He's bothering me." "No, he's bothering me." So we told our oldest to go in our room to finish getting dressed. Tee was in the kitchen, I stepped out for a moment.

When I came back in, a Viagra commercial was just finishing up and, sure enough, my son asked me what a "wreckshun" was. Believe me, I danced around that one.

The point is, it was just after 9 in the morning. According to the guidelines (and I looked them up on PhRMA's web site just to make sure again), one of them is: "In terms of content and placement, DTC television and print advertisements should be targeted to avoid audiences that are not age appropriate for the messages involved."

Now, granted, you usually don't have 7-year old kids watching Fox News, and some of the responsibility certainly lies with me. But it's not like we had the Playboy Channel on when my son came in our room. It was a news channel.

And, it was 9 o'clock in the morning. There has to be SOME responsibility on the part of the marketers and the television network to, as the guideline says, better target their audience.