The Media and Me - 11

by Paul McMillan | 3:08 pm 11/07/2010

I hate to get petty and single particular advertisements out for excoriation, but ... well, I don’t have an excuse. I’m just going to. I probably should have brought this up during the Health Issue, but all these hand sanitizer ads are getting ridiculous.

ng the Health Issue, but all these hand sanitizer ads are getting ridiculous. The sinisterly upbeat musical accompaniment to one of these ads involves telling everyone to expunge their hands of all matter after every social interaction, or else! They sound like old pseudo-scientific ads from the ‘50s that are totally disconnected from reality. You know the ones: a smarmy Troy McClure look-a-like tells us that our paint should be lead-based, smoking Chesterfield cigarettes is good for your lungs, and nuclear attacks can be survived by tucking yourself snugly under a table and waiting out the radiation with some tea, a nice book, and a biscuit.

One of the leading fear-mongering ads (Dettol, I think) convinces you that if you don’t use hand sanitizer, you’ve definitely got an influenza outbreak on your hands, literally. You’re getting sick because you don’t blast your hands with cleaning napalm after all your social activities, because bacteria is everywhere, you know. Well, I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Matchstick Men, but that’s pretty much where the people that use these products are going to end up: cleaning their floors and walls with bleach and going into fits when they touch anything from the dreaded outside world. I’m not a practicing scientist, but I’m pretty sure that we need to come into contact with a range of bacteria and viruses during the course of our day, otherwise our immune systems would collapse when we strolled the streets.

It seems like this paranoid hyper-cleanliness (or the attempt to create it) might be riding on the back of the swine flu scare. It’s still pretty recent in our minds, and ravenous advertising execs are probably chomping at the bit to nab all the germ-freaks that went out and bought seventeen surgical masks the day the media began whipping up pandemonium over porcine flu. It’s an effective way for them to sell their product, but it might just end up with the more credulous and impressionable turning into Michael Jackson-style germ freaks. You won’t be able to re-invent contemporary dance and pop, but you may end up living in an oxygen chamber for a good part of each day.

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