Self-Busting Ads

It seems that the in thing for TV ads is calling your own bluff. Old Spice is doing it with their latest ad which essentially uses a dog like some sort of latter-day Spuds Mckenzie, to personify their over-the-top ads, and hiking mothers to represent the overwhelmed viewer. I have to give them credit, I liked having the dog promise things like “free wi-fi” like some out-of-touch exec trying to sound cool. That cut a little closer to their own bones that I would have expected. So Old Spice has gone from ads aimed at your parents, to ads aimed at your kids, to ads making fun of themselves. I have no idea where they go from here.

I'm trying to imagine the thinking going into this.

“It’ll be ironic. You know how those millennials love irony.”
“I think that was Generation X, actually.”
“Close enough.”

And then there's the Charmin Bears. In their most recent ad, they finally acknowledge that their family-wide love of soft toilet paper is a little weird. It's the sort of ad that wins over the costumer by demonstrating that the advertiser knows what the audience is thinking, and understands where they're coming from. Or at least, it would if the ad had run five years ago, which was when the rest of us started getting creeped out by adorable bears that have a semi-sexual toilet paper fixation.

Okay, I just went to Wikipedia to double check that I had the correct brand, and discovered that:

• the bears have names
• the bears are used in 70 countries
• they’re colour-coded based on whether they’re emphasizing softness or strength (never noticed)
• and most alarming of all, they replaced George “Don’t squeeze the Charmin” Whipple

But back to the point. Seeing ads crack jokes at their own expense just emphasizes how behind the times they are. You can’t really get on the audience’s side by being self-deprecating, because the audience has already torn them to shreds years earlier. Saying that the Charmin Bears are weird is like doing a joke on a trend that everyone’s forgotten about: it actually makes you seem more awkward than taking yourself seriously.