Okay, there’s a man-eating shark in Australia, and I blame Gillette! They’re making sharks crave human blood with advertising like this! What else is going to happen? Of course sharks are going to start eating us when they see this ad! In fact, I’ll bet this ad has started a whole new macho contest thing for divers to shave under water, releasing drops of blood into the ocean, and that’s what’s getting the sharks all hungry for humans! (In addition to this ad being shown on shark TV!)
I first saw this ad in Spanish on GolTV, and I thought it was a Spanish-language campaign. But no, it’s American. And I should have known it too! After all, what other country makes TV shows like Jackass? Nope, only in America would they come up with something like this! (Actually, I’m kidding: I love this commercial! What a great idea! And they should run this ad during Shark Week on the Discovery Channel too!)
But this commercial is a bit of a letdown at the end. What difference does it make what razor they use if they both make it out alive? If they really want to sell razors, they should have the guy with the cheapo razor cut himself, chum up the water with his blood, and then have the sharks smash through the cage and gobble him up in a feeding frenzy! If they can’t make it look like our lives depend on buying their product, how else are they going to get people to waste fifteen dollars on their ridiculously overpriced disposable razors? Only a threat like being eaten by a shark will scare most guys into dropping that much coin on a razor in this economy!
But how about this to scare guys into dropping the money on the counter: they show the guy get eaten by the shark, and then they say: “But you don’t have to worry about that out of the water, right?” And then they show a guy shaving with the cheap blade and nicking himself. As soon as he bleeds one drop of blood, a knock comes at the door, and he goes to answer it. And as soon as he opens the door, a huge shark chomps down on his head like in that “Land Shark” sketch from Saturday Night Live in the 1970s! That will teach everyone the value of the Gillette ProGlide!
Then their next ad in the campaign could have a team of police detectives and forensic pathologists at the scene of the guy’s front door shark attack. There would be a mangled corpse, gallons of blood everywhere, and shark tracks swimming away from the scene with a big trail of blood leading away from the house. Then the cops could say: “Another senseless slaughter! When are guys going to learn to use the Gillette ProGlide? I’m tired of cleaning up shark victims all over town, with nothing more left of them than fits in a bucket! Oh, the humanity!” That would make those razors fly off the shelves, right?
Actually, no: I forgot, sorry. These overpriced razors are always locked up to the shelves or in behind locked plastic cabinets in pharmacies, so they can’t actually fly off the shelves, now can they? The truth is, if they want to sell these things, they’re going to have to stop making them such a hassle to buy at the stores! But I guess they have to make them fun to steal too, just to keep everyone interested, huh?
And then, after the shark campaign had run its course, they could do a new campaign where they show the guy who uses the cheapo razor nick himself and attract vampires who attack him and drink his blood! And the only way to avoid this horrible fate is to use the Gillette ProGlide razor! See? It’s worth the ridiculously exorbitant price after all! Unless you want to be one of the undead, wandering the Earth a soulless demon endlessly searching for blood! (But maybe this idea would backfire, because then the cheapo razor companies could run ads that make it look like the vampires you’d attract when you cut yourself with their cheap razors would always be the smoking hot sexy female vampires. So then all the young nerds who couldn’t get dates would buy the cheap razors in the hopes that whenever they shave, they’ll be inundated with sultry, gorgeous Hammer-movie vampire women in silky, diaphanous gowns! Then Gillette would never sell another razor again!)
Here’s the shark-teasing spot:
