‘Every Dove rip-off gets exponentially more shit. It’s maths.’

Commenter Greg dropped that truthbomb on last week’s do-gooder ‘experiment’ from Ikea.

I think that he makes a great point. This new genre of ‘we’re so nice, and we can make you nicer’ advertising leaves an excremental taste in my mouth for a number of reasons, all of which I’m going to blather on about right now:

1. The arrogance, the fucking, fucking, massive, revolting fucking arrogance of these giant corporations and their high-handed de haut en bas didacticism, as if it’s their place to correct the public’s erroneous behaviour in the name of furniture, or soap, or ‘feminine hygeine’:

2. None of them means it. They’re only doing it for money. If you doubt that in any way please bear in mind my oft-mentioned observation that Unilever makes Dove (all women are amazing and beautiful) and Lynx (all women are nowt but holes). Of course many corporations are now doing the CSR shiz that they ought to, but let’s not forget that Nike and The Gap happily used sweat shops to make most of their stuff before someone pointed that out to the rest of us and they changed their ways. I’m sure some companies are run in such a way that they always do the right thing, no matter what the cost, but most will just do whatever makes them the most money, so if they think they’ll lose sales because we hate them then they will try to make us like them.

3. The way these ads fool people into thinking they’re a new, nicer company (even though they really aren’t) is another nail in the coffin for truthful, believable, trustworthy advertising, and that coffin has so many nails it might as well be made of iron.

And it’s the disguises don’t just come in the form of those delightful experiments; they also sneak in by making a straight ad that enshrouds the collective of shitbags in a cloak of niceness. But when a company does all this shitty stuff (and this) then hits you with this…

…You have to do a little sick in your mouth. I mean, if they were really the kind of lovely folks who ‘sponsored mums’ with that plinky music in the background they probably wouldn’t pollute the planet or treat their workers like poo.

*Sigh, vomit, etc.*