Ads & Ends
Nanette Franco-Diyco
THE LATEST TIDE commercial of Procter & Gamble is far different from the usual detergent commercials that have virtually toppled in frequency the various product categories on television year in and year out.
The omnipresent serious washing of clothes demonstration that normally takes more than half of the 30-seconds allotted for the commercial is gone. Although I have always liked current Tide endorser Vic Sotto in ads, he could not have credibly managed this brand-new execution of Tide.
Accompanied by the happy lilting music of “Paruparung Bukid” (a rework of the Pinoy folk song), which many mothers learned to sing during their kindergarten years, the female character finds herself with her friends in a room full of clotheslines, with wet and damp clothes hanging all around them.
The commercial is ever so timely, what with the monsoon rains and threatening typhoons heralding the rainy season. The target market: the numerous households that wash, then dry clothes under the sun. This indeed is relevance in advertising.
Without the sun, these households dry their clothes indoors. And more often than not, without the use of clothes dryers, this leaves clothes smelling foul. The local term for that smell is “amoy kulob.” Try grappling with that!
What is amazing is that Procter & Gamble, reformulated Tide to include Downy, another P&G product that is a scented clothes conditioner, which actually prevents that foul smell clothes get when left to slowly dry on clotheslines indoors.
For the majority of households that are not blessed with clothes dryers, that will certainly merit rejoicing!
And the 30-second commercial with the “Paruparung Bukid” music does precisely that — it rejoices with subtle humor even while the all-important message is clearly delivered to its target market.
I like the lighthearted, very creative approach used by Leo Burnett. The commercial underscores the dilemma of drying clothes indoors while it’s raining outside. Therein lies the beginning of the problem. The creative agency thus segues into Tide’s simple problem-solution story.
The female character dances an oriental fan dance with her friends, all the while fanning the rows of wet clothes hanging on the clothesline surrounding them. For a touch of realism vis-à-vis efforts to dry the clothes, we spot a couple of stand-up electric fans and all sorts of floor fans amid the hand-held fans demurely used by the dancers. There must have been an honest-to-goodness choreographer who intermixed the oriental dancing and the drying of the clothes — how can anyone expect Vic Sotto to compete with this?!
The only hard-sell device used in the commercial is the Tide stripe that enters frame with a swishing sound, indicating a better alternative to any woman’s current laundry-related belief. It, of course, ends with a product window plugging the new Tide with Freshness of Downy variant. A colleague, who confessed getting unglued everytime it rains, exclaims she’ll go to her grave brandishing a fork marking her triumph against amoy kulob!
Take a good, low bow, Procter & Gamble and Leo Burnett.
Nanette Franco-Diyco ended her 15th year advertising career as Vice-President of JWT, segueing into the world of academe, currently teaching communications at the Ateneo de Manila University.
