Wednesday 30 January 2008

"My Laser Nipples Will Make Short Shrift Of This Sheet Metal"



[Advert Man is in a small, confined, dark place, with two slender beams of light doing their pitiful best to intrude on the blackness. He tries his actorly best to look edgy and uncomfortable throughout the following statement.]

Advert Man: "This is the actual size of your nasal passages when you've got a cold. That bunged up feeling you suddenly get is not caused by snot, it's the blood vessels in your nose filling up due to infection. The only way to stop it is to expand your nasal passages and increase the air-flow, giving you...

[Advert Man dramatically opens the doors to the dark place, revealing a clear, sunny day outside. He quite audibly expels a large amount of air from his nasal passages as he utters the phrase the highly paid marketing team spend three whole minutes brainstorming in their special room devoted to such herculean feats of word-putting-together-ing]

...room to breathe.

[He places a box of PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCT X into the middle of the screen. The name of PHARMACEUTICAL PRODUCT X and the witty slogan "Room to breathe" appear to the left of it.]



Ignoring an easy riff about the warning disclaimer at the bottom of the screen during the advert ("Always Read The Label? Why? Does it somehow magically change on the box after the first time you read it etc"), what's the deal with trying to sell us something with a sales pitch including the word 'snot'? Yes, snot.

It's not an advert especially aimed at the lowest common denominator or anything, markedly different from the adverts you get on daytime television where a cartoon telephone encourages you to take out a crippling loan. It's not as if they're chasing that oh-so-fickle People With Colds Aged 18-24 demographic (speaking of which, we're not entirely convinced having episodes of Spendholics introduced by grainy 3G video of their viewers is going to save BBC Three, nice new logo or not). What with this advert, and the one that declares a pregnancy test "the greatest piece of technology you'll ever pee on", we're wondering (in a rather lazy "we've not watched any telly over the last week, what on earth can we write about" type way) which other products might benefit from being associated with slang terms for bodily excretions.

"When you want to spuff your wad with impunity, it's Durex every time. "

Hmm. Let's not, actually.
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