The annoying VEET Wax ad: It was in French!

 

I know you probably think I’ve been spending these romantic early days of motherhood experimenting with organic, gluten-free baby food recipes so I’ll be prepared when the little bundle of joy starts on solid food, but the truth is that what I’m mostly doing is watching television while I wait for someone to stop by so I can hand them the baby and go take a shower.

One of the problems with watching so much television is that you end up seeing the same commercials, over and over again.  And when you get a a bad one, it starts to drive you nuts.  Like this one:

Can you spot what’s driving me mental?  

Veet is owned by Reckitt Benckiser.  Wikipedia tells me that Reckitt has a market capitalization of 31.6 billion pounds. That’s 31.6 billion.  I feel certain that with this kind of money, and their global market penetration, Reckitt could have afforded to create an English-language spot and avoided this trainwreck that voiceovers forgot.

The original ad appears to have been in French:

 

Sadly, I can guess what happened here:  Some navy-blue-suit type in the global head office noticed that the Canadian operations were about to spend a shedload of money on a media buy and said “Whoa, Nelly!  That’s a lot of money, and Canada only has, like, 127 people.  So don’t go wasting all kinds of budget shooting a new commercial.  Everyone in Canada speaks French, right?  Right!  So let’s just run that French spot we did last year.”

And then the masters for the ad arrived in the Toronto office of the ad agency.  The account director sighed, had a fight with the media buying company, finally managed to extract $5k from the media buy in order to get the French spot dubbed into English, and reflected, not for the first time, that being the advertising account director for a packaged goods client was not nearly as exciting and creative as she thought it was back when she was a junior account coordinator.