Head and Shoulders

Some adverts seem to use a stock advertising clip and then apply their own twist to it. Invariably this results in a particularly lame - and sometimes infuriating - advertising campaign.

Head and Shoulders (H&S) are the latest company to use this trick.

Cue a frollicking, attractive couple, waltzing in each others arms on a beach. If you were to pause this advert and ask what it was advertising, it could be anything - clothing, perfume (although maybe not "out-there" enough"), holidays, Durex, etc.

H&S make shampoo, and in particular for dandruffed University lecturers and librarians. They therefore need to somehow turn this off-the-shelf clip into a reference to hair. But how to do it?

Easy. H&S set a poser, a question, a fiendish riddle to really get the greatest philosophical minds working.

"Would you put dandruff in this picture?"

WHAT? It's meant to be rhetorical, I guess, so I the consumer should laugh and say "Of course not, that would be terrible. Good job we have H&S to save us from that ignomy."

However, it doesn't work. I, like most right-minded people, dislike the impossibly beautiful. Therefore anything that might upset them - like finding their scalp off-loading into their perfect hair - would bring a little ray of sunshine into my life.

H&S should stop pretending gorgeous people have dandruff - of course they don't - and return to advertising by getting a dark haired IT services geek to allow his head to be shot close-up, before and after the application of the pureed Smurf.