http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xCYwAOCLiTA
The other day, my husband, relaxing after a hard day’s work with his newspaper and pipe, pulled me out of the kitchen where I was preparing his meat and potatoes while wearing a dress, high heels and a string of pearls and asked me to watch a commercial. (Can you find all that’s wrong in that sentence? Tide could!)
Seriously now, he did call my attention to the above commercial. He asked me to watch it, without commenting. So I did (difficult as that was for me to keep quiet). He then asked me my opinion.
“Well,” I said, “I think Dad is just a little short-sighted. Why can’t he wash this dress while she’s in the bathtub, or sleeping?” He gave me an eye roll and said, “And…?”
“And I think it’s wonderful that Tide is getting with the times. There are so many dads who do laundry.” (ironic because he was folding some of ours at the time) “I think it also addresses the stay-at-home dad phenomenon which continues to grow in our society. ‘Nicely done,’ I would say to Tide.”
My husband, an extremely savvy media consumer, then asked, “Would you think he’s gay?”
I was flabbergasted. Because I was projecting my own biases onto this commercial, I saw a dad fully involved in every aspect of raising his child, with an ambiguous wife somewhere in my subconscious.
But throw the idea of this dad being gay out there and WOW!
If that is your reality, your bias, the story stills meshes seamlessly. Because Tide didn’t define this family visually, your mind completes it in the most familiar way. You enjoy the story, you relate to the dad’s laundry woes, you accept his recommendation on solutions (which, by the way, is almost textbook “Marketing To Women” techniques). Tide becomes an important part of keeping your whole family clean, healthy and happy – no matter what your family looks like.
So I say again, “Nicely done!”