So what’s a Halls to do — show families 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 place somewhere on a level with Emersonian transcendence. The pandemic has given us all, to varying degrees, a brush with mortality and meaning. After that, campaigns like “Live in the Moment” seem to be saying, comes the time to grow the lotus from the mud, and use all that hardship 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-breathing woman-in-bathtub ads so jam-packed with blissful interiority that they feel like old spots for Calgon. Even Mucinex has quieted its obnoxiously jeering mascot, Mr. Mucus, in favor of a female D.J. who sits on the floor, digging through crates, crafting a playlist. In the second, post-cough-drop half of Halls’s “The Hiker,” the yoga person lands her pose, and the photographer gets his shot of an elusive mountain lion. In this framing, a nasty cough isn’t a disruption of your busy work day; it’s a block in your self-actualization.
If this feels like a story about work as told in cold-remedy ads — the move from gig-economy hellscape to great resignation — well, such ads really can feel like a decent barometer of work culture. In the 1980s, for instance, offices and other workplaces seem to have featured less. Brands like Theraflu and Tylenol’s cold offerings depicted sniffling baby boomers finding relief within the cozy wall-to-wall carpeting of their own homes; they switched off soft-bulbed bedside lamps for a good night’s rest or snuggled up in front of roaring fires. The most memorable Halls ads of the 1990s featured coughing people leaving their workaday world for a Tetris-like liminal space grandly called “the Halls of Medicine,” an alternate universe of candy-colored relief.
By the aughts, tag lines like “We’re Going to Work” and “Get Halls and Get Going!” started to ally the brand with functional illness. But things seem to have really changed in the years before the pandemic, as millennials reached a labor market grown precarious and Darwinian, where workers needed to rely on their hustle rather than their employers. The Halls campaign with the aggro bullies screaming at low-wage essential workers was called “A Pep Talk in Every Drop.” It featured tough-love slogans — “Don’t try harder. Do harder!” and “Don’t wait to get started” and “Be unstoppable” — printed on actual cough-drop wrappers.
Interestingly, Halls has not gotten rid of the wrappers with these slogans. But like fortune cookies or horoscopes, they are open-ended enough to change their meaning: “Impress yourself today” sounds very different in the context of the blissfully introspective “Live in the Moment” campaign. “Take this medicine because you can’t afford not to” was one kind of pressure. Now we see another, more aspirational and, frankly, more annoying. These ads zero in on pandemic-inspired curiosity about escaping the rat race for a life of quiet meaning. They sell cough drops not merely to soothe our throats but to offer nothing less than portals to a better self, to wellness and windsong.
