Help Me Out Here
February 5th, 2016 by Mitch BergTo: Colgate
From: Mitch Berg, Uppity Peasant
Re: Your Super Bowl Ad
Colgate,
So I watched the teaser for your Super Bowl spot:
I get it. There’s big money in appealing to the altruism of the soft-core social justice warrior. There’s a whole generation of Millennials out there who are impressed by symbols.
And I am not one of the people who “wastes” water like the guy in the ad. I’m way too frugal for that.
But I have a question. Several, actually:
- If I did leave the faucet running, what do you think would happen (other than inflating my water bill)? Would the water disappear from the face of the earth, never to be seen again? Of course not; it runs down the drain, through the sanitary sewer, back to sewage plant and a holding pond, where it evaporates, turning into humidity, clouds, and eventually rain or snow, falling…somewhere in the world, usually to repeat the cycle over and over and over.
- For that matter, what do you think happens to the water I drink? That it disappears from the earth for good? No – it comes back out in one form or another; #1, #2, sweat, tears, spittle, whatever. It eventually gets back to the environment, where it evaporates and becomes humidity, clouds, fog, snow, rain, ice, glaciers, or something. And then repeats the cycle, over and over again.
- You end the ad with a young, ethnically-ambiguous girl (Asian? Central American? Briilliant casting, actually) thirstily and heart-rendingly slurping up every drop of the “wasted” water she can get her hands, literally, around. Now, I live in a part of the world blessed with a lot of water. My city water comes from the Mississippi River. And any water I don’t physically consume eventually probably gets back there, or seeps down into an aquifer, or evaporates back into the atmosphere to go heaven-only-knows where. So please tell me; if I don’t use a gallon of water, how do you propose that it gets to that little girl in Myanmar or Honduras? Can I pack it up in a jug and send it there, with Colgate paying the freight? Will you be holding a water drive? How is my use of water – which, between nature and a government that handles basic services with some degree of competence, is plentiful where I live – related to the availability of water in a third-world hellhole beset by banana-republic socialists, corruption and incompetence? Can the water I don’t use be re-purposed to drowning the successive waves of dictators that have managed to make places like the little girl’s hometown short of water, even though they’re by a freaking rain forest.
Thanks in advance.







