Hasta La Creative!

KBS+, Toronto have a new campaign for Bissell that gets a little gross. In the spot, promoting the Bissell Symphony, which vacuums and cleans hardwood simulateneously, Bissell Canada Senior Brand Manager Ravi Dalchand sets out to prove that he’s behind the product one hundred percent.

So he uses the Symphony to clean a subway floor and then takes things a giant step forward in the gross department and eats some saucy pasta right off the spot he cleaned, seemingly to the disgust of fellow subway passengers.

“Instead of just showing how it works at home, we felt the stronger message was to show how well it could clean, even in an extremely tough, dirty, messy situation,” Bissell Vice President General Manager Craig Emmerson told The Huffington Post.

As that publication points out, however, this was not a normal Toronto subway stop. The stop used was the Bay Lower Station, which TTC CEO Andy Byford said had been “closed off to the public six months after opening in 1966 due to passenger confusion and consistent delays.” It’s now mainly used as a set for movies and television. So while eating off of subway tile is still pretty gross, it’s not as disgusting as it originally appears. And those onlookers are almost definitely actors. But KBS+, Toronto and Bissell assume (probably correctly) that most people won’t reach that conclusion, and, staged or not, the gimmick is pretty memorable. (more…)

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Bacon doesn’t make everything better. Hughes Carwash “wanted to capture the emotional relief one feels after having their car washed.” So TAXI Vancouver took that idea and ran with it — all the way to crazy town.

Their four new spots for Hughes Carwash — “Bacon Underwear,” “Rabies Shot,” “Nose Hairs” and “The Internet?” — all feature a couple coming clean with each other about various things they’ve been keeping secret. Three of the four spots open in the same way: with the woman revealing she’s not a natural redhead and the man revealing that the necklace he bought her (and that she is currently wearing) is actually just a string of sausages. That should give you an idea of the crazy brand of humor that fills out these spots. One of these thirty second ads contains a full 25 seconds of the man laughing. So clearly over-the-top is what TAXI was going for here.

While the campaign as a whole may not be laugh out loud funny, they do have a certain meshugana charm to them, and the actors portraying the couple do an admirable enough job. The exception being the one that wastes most of its thirty seconds on the man laughing. If you don’t already know the concept behind the spots, the idea may not make sense until the end of the ad, with the “It Feels Good to Come Clean” tagline. Without such an excellent tag to tie things together, it would be easy to forget why we’re watching these crazy people in the first place. All four of these spots will air during Canadian coverage of the Super Bowl. Click through for “The Internet?” and credits. continued…

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