Recently I remember hearing someone talking about how advertising these days is mostly about making people feel insecure about something, and then offering them a product to fix it. (I actually think ads these days are more like a sketch comedy piece that’s completely unrelated to the product they’re selling, and then they tack the product on at the end.) I don’t know for sure, but it seems to me that the earliest example of this may be the dandruff ads that offered the opinion that an itchy scalp proved that you had dandruff, and that if you ever even think about scratching your head, that everyone will reject and humiliate you.
This is funny, because prior to this, scratching one’s head used to be an old movie shorthand to suggest that someone was thinking hard about something. If it’s also true that dandruff makes your scalp itchy, perhaps the two things are connected. Could it be possible? Let’s think about this (and scratch our heads): What if great intelligence radiated through your head when you thought hard about something? Perhaps when you’re really smart, the brain’s brilliance literally radiates through your skull, through your scalp, and then bursts off your head in the form of dandruff. So then maybe dandruff isn’t such a bad thing after all, since it would indicate genius. And so scratching your head wouldn’t be bad, so much as a leading indicator of intelligence, right? So maybe the guys who thought up the ad were just mad that everyone with an itchy scalp was smarter than them.
Here’s the most recent version of the ad (But this goes way back!):
