Walt will now present the award for most disgusting TV commercial of the winter season. The envelope please...The winner is Buckley's, proud makers of the cough syrup that tastes so awful you know it works! That's an old marketing ploy -- Listerine still uses it too -- but the trick is to illustrate how well the medicine works. Mouthwash manufacturers have tried simulations of microscopic close-ups of the germs dying in your mouth. Not good, especially around dinner-time.
Buckley's has a new product, "Buckley's Mucous [sic] & Phlegm Relief". The same thing, with the same spelling, can be found in the USA as "Benylin Mucous & Phlegm Relief".
Having spent the New Year's holiday in Canada, I had the opportunity [misfortune? Ed.] to see a commercial for the new product, a commercial which managed to offend even Walt's not-so-delicate sensibilities. This one, like the Moores commercial, has yet to appear on YouTube, but I expect it, or a parody, any time now.
The creators thought a good illustration of the product at work would be to show someone suffering from congestion of the lungs standing behind a fluoroscope, so we can see what happens when the stuff loosens up the goo within and the patient horks up a really good one.
All this is done in cartoon form so it's not quite so gross as it sounds, but here's the thing. The sound is this deep, throaty cough and you can see the lunger coming up the windpipe. But then... nothing except the smile of relief on the character's cartoon face. What happened to the big gob of mucus and phlegm?! It doesn't bear thinking about.
Note to advertising agency: The proper spelling of that whitish slime is "mucus". That's how the noun is spelt. You can look it up: http://www.dictionary.com/. "Mucous" is the adjectival form. Dictionary.com says "mucous" and "mucus" can be confused. Even by people in the media who should know better, let alone marketers who really aren't expected to know very much.
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