You know what’s crazy? I’ll tell you what’s crazy.
The Febreze Experiment.
You know Febreze, that air freshener stuff that takes turkey poop and makes it smell like a Bed Bath and Beyond candle.
So I’m watching this commercial and quite literally it made my jaw drop.
After 10 seconds I’m sucked in. It’s like a reality game show. It’s survivor meets the Jersey Shore.
After 20 seconds, I can’t decide if it’s brilliant advertising or just urban warfare crazy.
After 30 seconds I can’t tell if it is human abuse or the perfect product pitch.
The spot opens with the giddy announcer saying:
“We asked real people if they would help us with an experiment for Febreze Fabric Softener.”
They show real people on an urban street signing authorization agreements and then getting blind folded.
The shot cuts to a warehouse. It’s dark and foreboding. It’s like a rusty dumpster filled with soiled diapers from a thousand babies suckling at the breast of pestilence.
There is a tattered couch in the middle of the room. On cue, a pack of wild dogs roams by. They snarl and look to hump one another, but decide to wait for a cleaner environment.
The set looks like a place where transients come to relieve themselves and spend special quality time with forty ounce beers and crack.
While something like a jackal lifts its leg to urinate on a broken coffee table, the crew sprays the product on the couch and nearby cushions.
The announcer tells the blindfolded people to “relax and take a deep breath.”
They cut to a montage of the contestants holding the moldy cushions to their noses.
The happy urbanites breathe in deeply, inhaling all the molecules of urine and dog fornification that has saturated into the fibers of that couch.
Then the masking power of Febreze does what it does. Somehow it has adhered to the molecular structure of the stench and dog feces and effectively diminished the noxious odor that lurks within.
“What do you smell?” the announcer asks as a cushion full of HOBO DNA is released into the air.
Its clean,” one blind folded woman says.
“Something smells really fresh,” another test subject says.
Others chime in “It’s like children’s blankets”
“It smells like home, and something beachy.”
One jowely faced woman blurts out “It smells like Lilac!”
Yeah, If Lilac can be urinated out out of a werewolf in a cess pool.
Then the voice commands two women sitting on the couch full of excrement and baked-in perspiration; “take your blind folds off!”
The women take their masks off as a heard of wildebeest creatures saunter into the room.
The women are perplexed, even horrified as they lean forward, their hair, filled with static electricity.
They are looking around as if the camera crew has abandoned them in this heroine shooting gallery of filth.
The announcer pipes in; Febreze up to two times the odor elimination so you can breathe easily again, guaranteed.
It is real?
The small text says real people, not actors. there is no text explaining the mutant creatures that periodically stroll in and excrete toxins onto the floor.
All in all, I like the commercial’s aggressive in your face delivery. It’s like gorilla marketing where they make real people sit in some bum’s vomit while they sniff a couch where a coyote just gave birth in a quagmire of liquids that nobody would want to smell up close.
And that is the commercial. It’s a 30 second mixed martial arts combat film.
I don’t usually say this, but I kind of want to go out and buy me some Febreze.
Apparently it is the air freshener recommended by four out of five crazy people and a hobo making love inside a dumpster.
and that is crazy.