About 5 years into my career as a copywriter I was working on a campaign for a client in the pharmaceutical industry.
The product I was being asked to write about was a hospital analgesic – a painkiller for dealing with severe pain in a hospital setting.
The trouble was, when I looked through all the clinical studies for that product, I couldn’t find any evidence that it was effective as a painkiller.
In fact – and I remember this after almost 30 years – the best I could find was a statement that described the product as “slightly more effective than placebo, but not significantly so”.
