“I don’t mind fantasies, but shouldn’t it be a female one?”

I started working in the ad industry a year and a half ago. Since then I’ve paid a lot more attention to the commercials, especially ones that seem slightly off. This one from Bounce struck me as a little wrong the first time I saw it. The second time I watched the ad (while viewing Project Runway online at Lifetime) I realized what was wrong: the ad showed a t-shirt being ironed and folded.

Who irons t-shirts, then folds them?

Maybe there’s an alternate reality out there I know nothing about. But more likely the ad wasn’t checked by someone to say ‘Okay, do these chores actually make sense?’.

That’s the beauty of working in an interdisciplinary team; you always have someone with a different point of view, someone who knows that ironing a button-down shirt would be a much more realistic choice. Ads don’t have to tell the truth to be believable. Does anyone really think there are currently 4 people stuck in an elevator, a la the Sprint ads? Probably not. But do the Sprint ads make some sense? Yes, because they speak to real things in our lives, like working on the final-final-final-revised-final copy of a document.