Kimberly-Clark slapped in paper-towel wars

I’m going to hate myself forever for this opening line, but it looks like Kimberly-Clark’s Viva paper towels made a mess they can’t clean up. Some of the brand’s ads, like the one below, were a little too harsh on P&G’s Bounty brand, disparaging quilted paper towels as “towel-speak for air.” (You have to love packaged-good insults.) K-C also got in trouble for claiming that its Scott’s towels are more absorbent than Bounty’s. The official ruling from the National Advertising Division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus is that the Scott commercial “conveys an unsupported message of overall superior absorption,” which is a phrase you never hear outside discussions like these, and that the Viva commercial was “unfairly disparaging.”