There’s a lot to be learnt about different countries from the sorts of advertisements they run most frequently – you may even get a bit too much information.
It’s impossible to watch TV in the United States without getting an encyclopedic grounding in the varieties of laxative available. In much of Europe, it’s all about limescale and the war against occlusion of a different sort of plumbing.
Anthropologists will affirm that the different ways products have to be pitched in different countries can tell you a lot about their societies.
However, some new TV ad campaigns for, shall we say, personal products available in the UK and Europe, raise societal questions, the answers to which we may not care to know.
One features (fictional) Kenny the Koala, who has for years been marketing the softness of a brand of toilet paper to popular effect. His latest outing, however, is a speaking part which reveals cuddly Ken to be … well, let’s say Australia, which has no dominion over this particular toilet paper brand and every right to sue for the reputational damage to blameless marsupials.
Kenny is seen leaning pub-style, speaking in a voice that you might expect to hear from a dodgy uncle in Neighbours, circa 1980, about someone called Denise. The camera crosses the room to show us Denise, who is sitting browsing photographs with a dreamy look on her face. Suddenly she notices a talking male koala is in her room – which may in fact be her bathroom, and though it’s blessedly not clear, Denise may also be, ahem, on the throne.
The horror on Denise’s face could be used effectively in a serial killer story.
How this creepiness might shift loo paper, who knows – though it may do well for laxatives.
Another alarming new sales pitch is also for loo paper, and begins winningly with a loud fart resounding through an office. The product’s usual mascot, a chubby Labrador puppy, makes a brief appearance looking innocent from under a desk. Then rises the star, a woman whose defiant and evilly smirking face strobes, “I am Farticus!” She then, with queenly hauteur, staring down all her colleagues, glides to a locker where she produces a roll of the sponsor’s product. She also pointedly stops to collect a fat volume of French-to-German translation and completes her regal procession to the lav.
In case anyone is confused – or, more likely, in shocked denial – the ad then informs us that “47% of people are uncomfortable pooing in the office”. The implication it intends is that people should be proud like this woman, and not shy, to do number twos at work; and that people should bring their own stash of labrador puppy-branded loo paper work so as to make an occasion of it.
The inference sure to be taken by most people is that this colleague, like Captain Oates, May Be Some Time, and to follow her would be inadvisable.
Small wonder working from home has remained so popular.
Pausing to reflect that most of us grow out of proud public toileting very early in life, there’s also an infantilising spray deodorant ad campaign. It’s not just for underarms but for – bouncily illustrated – “bazoongas”, “nads”, “spuds”, “jigglies” and so on. It finishes with “trotters”, omitting only to advise a blast of the product in one’s lugholes.
The ad gurus clearly think Europeans have forgotten about washing.
It’s a reminder of how innocent were the days when some New Zealanders were outraged at Hercules the huntaway muttering “Bugger!” in a Toyota commercial.
Unwashed “spuds”, jiggling sweaty keks and performative elimination – it’s enough to make any sane person hide in the stationery cupboard. Unless Kenny’s perving in there, too.
