Doan's claimed to be better for back pain — the FTC made it spend $8M saying it wasn't

For years, Doan's Pills advertising implied superiority for back pain — campaigns telling consumers Doan's was the choice when back pain struck. The FTC found the comparative claim unsubstantiated: no adequate evidence that Doan's worked better than any other over-the-counter pain reliever. Stopping the claim was not enough, the Commission held, because years of advertising had left the belief behind.

The order of 27 May 1999 required Novartis to run corrective advertising: ads and packaging had to carry the message 'Although Doan's is an effective pain reliever, there is no evidence that Doan's is more effective than other pain relievers for back pain' — for one year or until $8 million was spent. It was the FTC's first litigated corrective-advertising case in nearly 25 years, since the Listerine case of the 1970s.

The remedy is the lesson: deception leaves residue after the ad stops. Corrective advertising prices the belief the false claim created, and makes the advertiser spend its own media budget dismantling it.