In this ad, titled "Soliciting," a man with a comically visible boner is paying a schoolgirl for sex in a bathroom with a notably shiny floor. The joke is that the floor is so clean you can see the sex crimes on the floor even if you are too ashamed to look directly at them (thus the tagline "Filth has nowhere to hide"). Which is, weirdly, one of the few specific reasons to NOT have a clean floor. This floor cleaner is trying the old joke formula of "game of chicken with your human soul," but maybe didn't create enough context for it to work. No one should have ever had to say this, but you can't go from zero to sex slavery in a single floor cleaner ad. You need to build to it over the course of a long floor cleaner ad campaign.
That tagline is equally awful. It's a play on words worthy of a mediocre Family Circus cartoon or even a below-average greeting card, but also seems to suggest that this floor cleaner is some kind of hero for helping you watch a guy pay a teenager for sex? That somehow a streak-free shine at an affordable price is helping shine a light on the horrors of the sex trade?
The ads were created by Hakuhodo, an agency with a portfolio of really beautiful and dynamic images. Which is to say that virtually none of their other work includes young girls being molested. But still, in a universe where literally all known things exist and the only message they had to send was that this floor cleaner is one of them, they decided their best moves were bad wordplay and child molestation. But we guess it worked! We're talking about Penguin, the floor cleaner for sex criminals and/or sex crime voyeurs!
197 Comments