9eco-homes. If the old drill sergeant came
here, he would very likely be given a
microdose, a meditation cushion, a lesson
on droplet transmission and a talk about
toxic masculinity.
I have been thinking about this for a
while, and I have been unable to come
up with many things that seem harder, for
an advertising person, than spending the
past couple of years trying to shill prod-
ucts designed to suppress, and thus hide,
respiratory illness. At the beginning of the
fi rst Covid wave, a few Chinese cities actu-
ally banned the sale of cold medications,
to force people with symptoms to go to
the hospital. The temporary relief that
Vicks or Halls or Mucinex once off ered
as their main benefi t to a sick person has
a pox against it now. If you have a cough
or a cold, nobody wants you made just
well enough to do the thing that, until the
pandemic, these meds increasingly prom-
ised to help you do: go out and ‘‘power
through’’ your day.
So what’s a Halls to do — show fam-
ilies with Covid dribbling through days
in deep quarantine? Astronauts in space,
hacking into their helmets? As Covid
continued mutating, so did marketing’s
response to it, until it arrived at a placesomewhere on a level with Emersonian
transcendence. The pandemic has given
us all, to varying degrees, a brush with
mortality and meaning. After that, cam-
paigns like ‘‘Live in the Moment’’ seem
to be saying, comes the time to grow the
lotus from the mud, and use all that hard-
ship and all those feelings of aloneness to
craft a new, more beautiful state of being.
Lately it’s not just Jeeps cutting
through untrammeled nature; it’s also
dads, in hiking gear, with Robitussin in
their packs. Vicks is running deep-breath-
ing woman-in-bathtub ads so jam-packed
with blissful interiority that they feel likeAmong the
factors a recent
market study
concluded would
enlarge the
market for throat
lozenges: Covid-19;
decreased
immunity due to
diet and sedentary
lifestyles; and
‘increasing H.I.V.
penetration.’