Life Preservers

Do you enjoy the go?

April 22, 2010 at 11:51 am 3 comments

The other day Charmin, sellers of bathroom tissue (what us normal people call toilet paper), encouraged me to “Enjoy the go.” 

When I first saw the commercial, I posted my confusement on facebook. A few people didn’t quite believe it was true. I don’t blame them. I don’t lie, but I am, on occasion, a smart-ass. Heck, if I hadn’t been able to rewind and pause live TV, I wouldn’t have believed me myself.

Enjoy the go, eh? I guess, Everybody Poops but not everybody really enjoys themselves?

Don’t know ’bout you, but I don’t generally approach a powder room door with an expectation of balloons and confetti falling from the ceiling. Not that the loo is an un-happy place but, you know, it ain’t Disney World, people.

I saw the tagline again yesterday, and, curiosity got the best of me. I googled it. And I’ve learned more about this campaign—a campaign that someone thought up and (instead of just amusing colleagues with fake mockups) shared with a client, that someone reviewed, that someone presented to the boss, that someone approved and spent a lot of money on.

Enjoy the go is part of Procter & Gamble’s “Charmin-branded bathrooms. . . . multi-channel campaign. . . . [which] includes a microsite, a mobile application, social media and charity components.”

That sentence alone is a preposterous and euphemistic gigglefest.

But there’s more.

Their bathrooms include extra, giant toilets. For “photo ops.” They do a daily blog. Yes, they publish a journal about what goes on inside their bathrooms. 

Please insert your own pretend bathroom blog post here. I tried. But I just couldn’t do it without slipping to a level of humor that would only have been appreciated by my 12-year-old nephew and my cousin Denny. And a Lady always edits.  

I vow to you Life Preserver readers:  I will never blog from the smallest room in the house.

Last but not least, Charmin offers consumers (a word choice I would have deliberately avoided in such a promotion) the benefit of being entertained by the Charmin Go Team. No, they are not there to monitor your performance or cheer on your efforts. They are there to perform musicals.

Yes, I said musicals. Inside the bathrooms.

Now, I believe in the beauty and magic of dreams as much as the next old-fashioned starry-eyed romantic, but if you’ve packed your little bag and run off to the big city and your break finally comes and it’s doing song-and-dance in a public bathroom, it might be time to become a hooker.

Okay folks. Looks like intermission is almost over and the bottle of champagne I keep in the tank is perfectly chilled. I gotta go.

Entry filed under: Humor - Commentary. Tags: bathroom, enjoy the go, humor, marketing, song and dance, toilet paper.