My friends watched the old Vincent Price movie Diary of a Madman recently, and in the introduction to the movie, Ben Mankiewicz said the name of the film in such a way that it sounded rather like Diarrhea of a Madman, rather than Diary of a Madman. And so I thought that might make a fun Halloween-themed ad for Kaopectate. (They never have Halloween ads! I would think a Halloween ad would be pretty fun and memorable for most products.)
So here's how this (joke/proposed) ad would work: Someone would go on vacation somewhere to go relax and get away from the stress of work, etc., but upon arriving there, they'd get diarrhea (like Montezuma's Revenge or something), and they'd be stuck, wasting away in their room while the other people they traveled with are out enjoying themselves. Well, this causes them to go insane, and they begin writing a diary of how cooped-up and stir-crazy they are becoming, and how it's shattering their psyche, etc. But just as they begin writing of a complete mental breakdown, including a psychotic break with hallucinations, they write that they think someone is knocking at their door. Is it a monster, a ghost, or a phantom from the dark recesses of their imagination? Nope, it's just Phyllis, who brought him a bottle of Kaopectate, and after taking some, our madman is now completely cured of his diarrhea and now totally sane again, and he goes out to have a great time, seeing the sites and socializing with his friends and lots of friendly locals. (But then we see another tourist come down with the illness and begin his own "Diary of a Madman"...!)
BTW: The visual look of this ad would be dark, super slick, fast cutting, with wonky effects and double exposures and dream/nightmare imagery indicating the deteriorating mental state of the diary author; and we'd see the pages written in this spooky calligraphy superimposed over the video of the guy in the hotel room having these hellish hallucinatory experiences, etc., with intestinal gurgling, and the toilet in the bathroom becoming dark and scary and really, really tall, towering over the guy, beckoning and laughing at him, with large, sharp shark/monster-style teeth growing between the toilet seat and the toilet rim, etc. And at one point, we see the guy actually chained down to the toilet seat and struggling to escape from it, and arms coming around from the toilet tank to try to hold the guy onto the toilet, etc. So it would look like a dark, crazy hallucination inside a hotel room and its bathroom, and the contents of the diary being written and read aloud as we see each nightmare scenario play out. And when the knock comes at the door, it's like in The Haunting, with it sounding like a cannonball or a bowling ball being smashed against the door, and then with the door stretching out into the room like it's being pushed by a demon; but once he opens the door, it's just a normal woman offering him some Kaopectate, and as he takes it, all the crazy hallucinations cease, and the evil, menacing toilet just becomes a normal toilet again, and sealed closed with one of those "Sanitized for your protection" labels that wraps around it.
