Meituan (美团) has found a creative new way to advertise its pharmacy section (美团买药) by repurposing vintage pharmaceutical commercials to deliver an urgent public safety message. The ads, familiar to many parents, now end with “child-safe” reminders, showing medicines stored well out of children’s reach.
Meituan is one of China’s most prominent tech and e-commerce companies, widely known for its super-app that handles everything from food delivery (sometimes by drone) to hotel bookings, share-bike hire, and pharmaceutical services.
This new initiative addresses a critical issue: pediatric drug poisoning. Studies indicate that the majority of accidental poisonings occur at home when adults leave medications unattended. By highlighting safe storage practices, Meituan aims to prevent these incidents before they happen.
Many parents with young children grew up in an era where pharmaceutical commercials displayed medicine in familiar places around the house: on the dining table, a kitchen worktop, a nightstand – all places well within the reach of a child’s hands.
These portrayals inadvertently shaped real-life habits, leaving children vulnerable to accidental consumption of medicine. Meituan’s repurposing of vintage ads cleverly turns this legacy on its head, transforming nostalgic advertising into a tool for public education and building bonds of responsibility and trust with its audience.
Five pharmaceutical companies have already committed to re-releasing their vintage ads with these updated endings, signalling a collaborative effort across the industry to prioritise child safety. This move exemplifies how corporate social responsibility can be embedded directly into marketing efforts, merging commercial reach with social impact.
With Meituan’s campaign, a simple act like placing medicine out of children’s reach is elevated to a shared cultural conversation, cleverly putting Meituan’s name on the lips of consumers. It can’t hurt that the discussion they’ve slipped into is one that’s close to those consumers’ hearts.
