Ah, summertime, and the ad critic’s livin’ is easy. So much weird stuff to criticize, so few column inches!

I woke up one recent Sunday morning at nine-ish, and caught the tail end of one of the European Grand Prix races. We may assume the commercials I saw therein were aimed at today’s young adult males, and an interesting mix they were too.

There was a curious spot for Bombardier Sea-Doo boats, which got me going because we own a Sea-Doo boat. (Not one of those you ride astride, but a 14-foot five-seat number with a steering wheel.) It is an absolute hoot to drive. A ridiculous amount of fun for about 15 grand, which is not a bad deal until you realize what with the gas pirates in Muskoka dinging you a buck a litre for gas, and a bottle of the recommended two-cylinder oil you gotta mix with the gas going at 50 bucks per, you’re going 50 miles an hour and broke simultaneously.

Perhaps that is why this odd little spot features a dad looking glum and dutiful while the voice-over lists all the dreary, humdrum things a dad has to do (pay bills, work, etc.) to be a half-decent dad. This goes on and on to build a pretty depressing 15 seconds, until a nine-year old son appears in a wet suit with the neat idea that dad and son drown dad’s miseries and go Sea-Dooing for about the last five seconds of the spot, in which case they will only burn about $1.47 worth of oil-and-gas mixture.

So why the glum first 15 seconds? Your wise old ad critic thinks he has the answer, and of course, we can blame research. Back at the beginning of time, I worked on the Westinghouse biz. Westinghouse had just introduced affordable dishwashers, kids. Dishwashers were going great guns in America, but up here it was like they were nailed to the appliance showroom floor.

Why, you ask? Well I’ll tell you anyway. Our research told us Canadian moms did not have sufficient self-esteem to ask their hubbies to buy them a labour-saving device as frivolous and trivial as a dishwasher. What’s more, washing greasy dishes was seen as a kind of noble, moral penance women did to scourge themselves as proof of their devotion to family and spouse.

So armed with this insight, our TV commercials eschewed shots of dishwashers washing dishes, but rather depicted loving moms using the time saved up to their elbows in icky, gray dishwater doing loving things for their families like reading to the children and licking out toilet bowls. Just kidding about the toilet bowls, but you know what I mean.

Sea-Doo has clearly found that young middle-income Dads feel themselves unworthy of laying out 15 grand plus tax to stick a high-revving 100-horsepower engine between their legs and going for a spin on four inches of water two-and-a-half months a year unless they’re rewarding themselves for all the time they spend suffering for their families.

As Orson Welles once put it about something entirely different, This is a lot of shit, you know? If I were Sea-Doo, I’d sell ’em to ladies. Mine will not relinquish the steering wheel from her stiff, numb hands until it is out of gas, which fortunately is about once every forty-five minutes.

While on the subject of guilt, they were selling a fragrance to the young Grand Prix Watcher called Axe. It featured a large number of spectacularly sexy foreign girls muttering lewd, double-entendre, come-hither blandishments at us, the camera, obviously because we were wearing Axe and so they really couldn’t wait to get at us. These were translated by little subtitles which forced me to struggle frantically into the upright position in bed in order to read them, and by the time I got there, there was a pouty, ravishing English chick (think a young, even more wanton Julie Christie) saying Do you mind if my best friend joins us?

Now the other night, I caught the old Seinfeld where Jerry tries to alienate an unwanted girlfriend by making the obscene and revolting suggestion that he and she and her best friend do a threesome. To his horror, she goes for the idea, and Jerry has to realize he’s just not an orgy guy, and even if he was to become an orgy guy he would have to get a new wardrobe and gold chains and re-furnish the apartment and spend a fortune on indirect lighting.

Clearly the Axe people’s research showed them that unlike Sea-Doo Dad and Jerry Seinfeld, today’s hot teen feels no guilt whatsoever. The modern young man seeks not to bed the girl of his dreams, but the girls of his dreams, two at a time. God, what if somebody tells the Beer People about this?*

*Axe Deodorant is number one among males 16-to-24 in, guess where, BELGIUM! Yeah, Belgium! Figures, right?

Barry Base creates advertising campaigns for a living. He creates this column for fun, and to test the unproven theory that clients who find the latter amusing may also find the former to their liking. Barry can be reached at (416) 924-5533, or faxed at (416) 960-5255, at the Toronto office of Barry Base & Partners.