Bad breath? Text!

The mouth wash products Oral B lauched a printed ads campaign in Romania for their new product Pro-Expert, a mouth wash which, not only kills the germans in your mouth, but also gives you a mint flavour that keeps the bad breath away. These were the ads they used:

                                                

                                                

                                                

Did you follow the idea? I confess it took me a couple of seconds to fully understand the concept, but then it stoke me: each ad shows us a conversation between two people but in the form of text messages, probably because their breath is so smelly that they’re not able to talk to each directly.

Without a doubt it was a very creative idea: we live in the cell phones era, when we talk through technology all the time – it’s not a difficult scenario to imagine as reality, as a matter of fact. It’s mostly humorous, picking up something so trivial as a conversation in bed between a couple or an elevator talk through text messaging. It surely wants to get attention and be remembered by the target.

That can even be seen through the risk they took by designing such ads: if you see the ad for the first time, you may not understand what it stands for. You see the product, you know it’s for bad breath, but you don’t understand what are the dialogues for. Unless you are acquainted with the fact that the layout of text messages in an iPhone is exactly like the one of the ad. When you finally understand it (and, as I told you, I took some seconds to figure it out), you see how genius and funny it is.

By the time you get it, it’s impossible not to enjoy the improbable conversation via sms due to bad breath. It turns to be funny, able to remember  and, most importantly, effective. There is nothing in the ad which tell us those people have bad breath, but the presence of that specific product makes us use our imagination and get there. Besides, is really subtle the way the brand places the product, creating in the minds of the consumers how the only possible solution must be the Oral B Pro-Expert, although nothing in the ad says so, besides the little image of the product in the bottom. The main attention goes to the problem so many people have; very discreetly, they show us a solution.

In this case, the risk of placing a possible not understandable ad for all and the kind of humour used end up working with each other, giving the image that, the times may change (we can now text everything we want and find there a solution for our problems), but talking with each other face to face is always the preferred way of communicating and some problems are always there. Apparently, bad breath is one of them.

Inês Maria