I recently spoke to the women of SheSays, a group devoted to getting more female creatives into digital agencies, and showed them some of the more laughable examples of TV commercials from the 1950s and early '60s, the high time for Mad Men and their equally insane, cleaning-obsessed wives.
An endless spot for Final Touch fabric softener drew lots of laughs. In black and white, it opens on a perfect suburban patio, with two men in whites going off to play tennis while the missuses, both in heels and shirtwaist dresses, stay behind. "You know what's bothering me?" the brunette says to the blonde. "I can't get Tom's tennis shorts as white as Fred's!"
Stricken by the news, Mrs. Fred kindly takes her friend inside to divulge her secret. We see a demonstration, described in the spot as "actual scientific ultraviolet light tests," of two towels side by side -- one washed in Final Touch and the other in "another leading softener." A man's hand throws a switch, and guess what? The light demonstration shows that the Final Touch towel is whiter! It positively glows from within, like a woman who knows how to keep her husband's shorts clean. "I'll get some!" Mrs. Dirty-No-More vows. Lobotomy sold separately.
Now, it's easy to snort at such antiquated, sexist work. But the truth is, attack ads with similar "scientific" side-by-side demos are on the rise, coming back to haunt the ad business like a bad flu. The saddest case comes from Unilever's Dove, a supposed bastion of enlightenment for women. It's excruciating to see a brand like this undermine its exquisitely nurtured image equity for a low-cost spot involving countless repetitions of the word "scum."
I kept hoping it would turn out to be a parody. With "scum" covered, the only word missing is "bag," and the demo would actually look better if these lovely young women in towels put bags over their heads to cover their shame.
The TV version has been out for a while, but a new Web version was just posted. (See it at bit.ly/dove.) "Is your bar of soap leaving scum on your skin?" the announcer asks. "We asked one woman to wash with soap, another with Dove. If you could see the difference, you'd see that soap actually leaves an invisible layer of scum on your skin." They actually had to write "artistic dramatization" over the crud pictured on the non-Dove woman.
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