SHAMEPOOH

THE most irritating thing on television these days, next to Kris Aquino and soap operas, are shampoo commercials. All the country's shampoo makers are conspiring to make our TV viewing a tortuous experience. They follow the same soft-and-shiny...]]> TV commercials just don’t get it. THEY ARE IRRITATING! What advertising principle says the best way to sell is to insult viewers’ intelligence? Even if you have an IQ of a tadpole, you feel the urge to fling the remote against the TV screen upon hearing these freakin line “HAVE A HAPPY PERIOD!” Since when did my girlfriend’s monthly period become a ‘happy’ experience for both of us? Hah! I should have paid my cable bills, damn it. – insoymada

SHAMEPOOH

THE most irritating thing on television these days, next to Kris Aquino and soap operas, are shampoo commercials. All the country’s shampoo makers are conspiring to make our TV viewing a tortuous experience. They follow the same soft-and-shiny formula that has long been cliché. They use jingles with a single-syllable lyrics and repeat it so many times as if “bounce” is the only hair word that bounces.

As if taking its cue from the equally irritating Tagalog novelty songs, shampoo commercials invent dance moves for their jingles to go with the bouncing. This looked cute at first, until we are reminded of how we hate the hand movements in the Viva Hot Babes’ Bulaklak, and recently, in Willy Revillame’s Wowowie.

The Village People did it before (hand choreography, not shampoo commercials). But at least they had the letters Y, M, C and A to explain the redundancy of it all. And they could always say they were actually a cheering squad. “Give me a Y! Give me an M!” I’m still confused why that group clicked, and Hagibis too. But I’m digressing (my God, why am I talking about the Village People and Hagibis?).

I’m not an advertising expert, but as a consumer, I know what TV commercial works and what resembles a dung heap. Shampoo brands can use some fresh ideas to work around in their commercials. A little research on hair won’t hurt.

For example, a single strand of hair can support 100 grams in weight. That means a whole head of hair can (in theory) support the weight of two elephants. Imagine a shampoo commercial working around that idea. Since we don’t have elephants here, a shampoo brand can use four fully-grown carabaos to approximate the weight of two elephants. Who wouldn’t buy a shampoo that pushes hair limits to ten carabaos?

Or this: An average scalp has up to 150,000 hairs on his or her head, give and take 40 to 100 strands that are lost even on a good hair day. An effective shampoo commercial should exploit this trivia and make a claim that it can limit hair loss to 10 strands a day.

A single hair has a thickness of 0.02 to 0.4mm, so that 20 to 50 hair strands next to each other make one millimeter. I don’t know what significance this information has to hair care, but the detail in the description is sure to impress TV viewers, especially if a potential customer knows that his or her hair is as strong as a wire of iron and rips only after applying a force equivalent to 60 kg, and only after it has stretched itself for about 70 percent – whatever that means.

If shampoo companies are really sensitive to their customers’ needs, they will design their products conscious of the fact that Asian hair grows the fastest and has the greatest elasticity, or that a blonde head of hair has usually more strands than red or dark hair heads.

More interesting is the fact that a strand of hair carries information about how one lived one’s life. Even though it is dead cells, one’s hair acts like an “Arctic ice core”, trapping within its physical and chemical structure accurate record of one’s lifestyle, habits, origin, and even what telenovela one watched before his death.

But then again, trivia like these are not hiyang. So shampoo commercials prefer to bounce, bounce and bounce.

(sun.star weekend magazine, 2007)