S03/ CONFORMEX: DISAGREE TO DISAGREE
Conformex / 2019
A satirical take on the absurdity of American pharmaceutical commercials, Conformex is a fake drug that purports to rid the world of conflict.
Year: Winter 2019
Typology: Video
Size: 1280 x 720 px
Typology: Video
Size: 1280 x 720 px
Tools: Adobe After Effects, Adobe Creative Suite
Typefaces: Aktiv Grotesk by Dalton Maag
Typefaces: Aktiv Grotesk by Dalton Maag
A satirical take on the absurdity of American pharmaceutical commercials, Conformex is a fake drug that purports to rid the world of conflict. The goal was to create an archetypal drug commercial with slow fades, sanitized stock footage, and cold marketing photos to run a social experiment.
Once the commercial was complete, fabricated testimonials of the drug collected, and the product marketing shots captured, I released all promotional material into WhatsApp groups that I was a part of to see how people responded. To cut a long story short, the kind of credulity that I saw disturbed me. So many people were convinced that such a drug existed that I had to quickly respond with messages clarifying that the drug was, in fact, a hoax. This project spoke to the ease of releasing potentially dangerous information into our social media streams the effects of which we have witnessed in India, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.1
Conformex / 2019
My classmate Weixi Zeng posing with the Conformex drug package as part of the marketing campaign.
References
1 Goel, Vindu, Suhasini Raj, and Priyadarshini Ravichandran. “How WhatsApp Leads Mobs to Murder in India.” The New York Times. The New York Times, July 18, 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ 2018/07/18/technology/whatsapp-india-killings.html.