Tonsorial

Tonsorial

When I was growing up, the household shampoo of choice was Prell. People washed their hair fewer times back then because they usually lost a handful of it trying to comb out all the just-washed snarls. I used to be fascinated by the commercials where they dropped a pearl in a bottle of Prell to show how thick and rich it was.

They sold so much shampoo by dropping something into it that other companies picked up on the fad. I remember a Palmolive dish soap commercial where they wanted to drop in a kitchen utensil, but still show the bottle. Fine idea, but they dropped in a chop stick - during the '60s! During that time you show a chop stick and dish soap, the TV viewers kept waiting for the Asian cleaning woman to show up. So Ajax dish soap moved the liquid out of the bottle and into a tall bucket and dropped in the pitcher of a blender. People loved watching it settle to bottom of the clear liquid - sold like hotcakes. Undeterred, the makers of Joy used a tank and dropped in an entire counter-top mixer - base and all! Remember, the 60s, this thing weighed sixty pounds! People liked watching it sink to the bottom - the electric cord stretching overhead - but unfortunately by then the cycle was coming to an end, being replaced by the germaphobe ads that we have today.

7-Up decided to get in on the act, too. To show that their soda was clear and natural, they dropped in a lemon seed. Very effective. So Mountain Dew decided to drop something in their product. Since it's the color of...uh...sunshine...they couldn't think of what to drop, but decided to go with the whole mountain theme and dropped in a pine nut. Yes, I know, but they tried. And considering Euell Gibbons was the only person in the US of A eating pine nuts during the '60s, this was risky. Unfortunately for RC cola, they didn't have much of an advertising budget and couldn't get beyond the Dew commercial, so theirs was a glass container with their soda into which they dropped a pine cone. Really, guys, a pine cone? Not only did the choice of dropped item not make any sense, the cone was kept aloft by the carbonation. They tried it without the carbonation but even when the weighted cone did finally sink, you couldn't see it through the caramel color. Go figure.

The dropped item to end all dropped items (literally) in advertising was when Tide tried dropping a kid wearing dirty clothes into its laundry detergent. Remember, this was the 60s and all laundry detergents were powder, so when they dropped the kid from the crane, he landed with a thud and just laid there. He decided to improvise and tried to swim around in it, but ended up just sneezing from it getting up his nose. They spent $14M on that commercial it never even aired. The share holders were not happy!

But I don't care what anyone says. While watching things sink is fun, you don't need to drop things to be effective. You just need Ann Miller and Busby Berkeley.*

*The commercial was for Heinz, not Campbell's.