Odious Comparisons II – Even Whiter

Can we do even whiter? Since I have the use of reason, and since I started watching television and advertising, many years ago, I follow with interest the progress of whiteness.

Often creativity of some advertisements is criticised, especially that of some detergent ads. In my childish imagination I thought at first that advertising should tell us about products and give us rational arguments for us to value whether or not to buy them. I soon discovered that ads do much more, they tell us (or we pretend to tell) who we are, who we like to be, and even more, why we are who we are. How pretentious!

But the advertisement of the detergent which washes whiter than the rest was neither one nor the other. On the one hand, we are mainly talking about the properties of a product, i.e. a detergent soap which washed cloth whiter, but at the same time we plunged into a maze of illogic and irrationality that transcends generations.

Because, can something do whiter? I mean, about forty years ago, the first versions appeared to be a culmination of the industrial development in our country, once abandoned the ghosts of post-war and once the misery that we had embedded in the collective mind which told that cleanliness was a symptom of wealth, high social status and living in the city. I can understand that at that time, some products could effectively wash better than others. We also used to have more dirt on our clothes. But year after year, the miracle was repeated. The next release of product happened to wash even whiter than before. Perhaps. But the following did even whiter. And the subsequent did nuclear white. I wonder where you can get once you reach white, at snow white may be? At the spiritual white? At super white ultra reflective? Such progression in white scale with no shades should have burned our eyes years ago. At this stage if we do a retrospective exercise, it appears that with the first super white that was obtained in the beginning, the laundry should have gray-black colour, right?

The issue is that they continue playing. And if these ads are still repeating that is because they work. I'd really like to know how advertisers get to such an overwhelming conclusion. Surveys, sales figures, or an ethereal collective rumour that if it washes whiter is better, but the colour has completely lost its meaning. So I believe that under the disguised excuse for a good reason for purchase, these curious examples of advertising actually exploit our fantasy for a never-ending world, huge like when we were children, with infinite scales of heavenly whiteness.