Flipping through the channels the other night, somewhere between a Mexican novella and a rerun of Antique Roadshow, one of those inane direct response TV spots came on. The right thumb I’ve spent a lifetime training to avoid such encounters somehow didn’t respond in its usual fast-twitch fashion and I got caught watching the first five seconds.
It was about four seconds too many.
I was hooked. My thumb drifted from the down arrow on the remote to its usual resting spot just to the right where oil and dirt collects.
The barking voiceover that’s oh so familiar on late night TV always sets the stage at the beginning of these types of commercials with the usual questions that attempt to immediately qualify and engage the people watching:
“Can your kitchen knife cut through sheet metal?”
“Does your back hair make you look fat?”
“How many light bulbs can you change in 10 minutes?”
The over-the-top pitch person for the particular spot that caught my attention burst out in rhyme with “Does bathroom relief…make you act like a thief. Do you go to great lengths to hide the tell-tell scent…so no one knows you just went? Then you need Sneak A Poo!”
Sneak A What?
“Honey, come in here fast. You’ve got to see this commercial,” I yelled to my wife.
“I can’t. I’m in the bathroom,” she yelled back.
“I know. That’s why you’ve got to see this.”
I went on to yell the details as they were coming in.
“It’s Sneak A Poo. You spray it before you go and then nobody can tell what you’ve been doing in the bathroom during the 10 minutes you were in there. It’s brilliant.
“I think you can even use it on airplanes!” I screamed.
How could I not watch further? I absolutely had to find out what the product “Sneak A Poo” was all about … and what other unique selling propositions it possessed. As a lifelong ad guy, I had to pinch myself. It was raw, compelling advertising in its purest form.
First demonstrate a need. Then satisfy it.
“No one needs to know…when you gotta go,” the announcer chirped poetically.
I closed my eyes and envisioned the meeting where the concept for this life changing invention was first explained to the ad agency. There’s a long conference table with coffee cups, note pads, laptops and dozens of small bottles of a still unnamed product scattered about. There’s both men and women inquisitively looking on. And on a large screen at the end of the table, a Power Point slide featuring a photograph of a woman fanning her nose in disgust.
(Ad Guy) “OK. I just want to make sure I completely understand what you are saying. So before you have to go (finger quote) No. 2 (finger quote), you spray the toilet bowl with your product, and it somehow creates an impenetrable force field that holds the smell underwater so it can be flushed away with, well, everything else, right?”
(Inventor) “Yep. People will be able to go (finger quote) No. 2 (finger quote) without leaving a trace. Sneaky, eh?”
(Ad Guy) “Yeah, snea….what a minute, I’ve got it!”
“Sneak A Poo!”
After an executive decision to change the spelling to “Sneek (with double ee) A Poo” was inexplicably executed , marketing magic – and a TV spot that is an instant classic – was born.