Bathroom advertising generates grins and giggles

An alert reader emailed SNEWS® last week that the website AdRants.com had the following notification on its website:

“While advertising on toilet paper has been around for a while, we haven’t seen many, if any, major (or semi-major) advertisers avail themselves of the oddly intimate medium. Thule, the automobile roof rack company, as part of a larger campaign, will slap its logo and messaging on a toilet paper roll near you.”

A link buried in the text above takes you to JustToiletPaper.com, a company that will print toilet paper with, yes, company advertising messages. The company’s pitch is founded on the belief that humans use the bathroom an average of six times per day. So by placing corporate advertising on toilet paper, companies are not only taking advantage of a captive audience (often with nothing else to read we surmise) but also realizing multiple impressions (in an interesting sort of way) each day.

Word out of Thule headquarters is that while the topic of advertising on toilet paper was one of hundreds of ideas, silly and otherwise, batted around in a marketing brainstorming meeting one day, it was an idea that supposedly died in the meeting room — until someone leaked it. In response to our inquiry and a posting of the same item at our friends ThePiton.com, Thule created the following art in response:

Unfortunately, not all ideas die in the board room we’ve discovered. In February, during the WSA show in Las Vegas, and while standing in the men’s room attending to business at a urinal, our eyes fell on the following advertisement at eye level in front of us (the same ad was placed above each of the eight urinals along the wall): “Wireless Internet at your fingertips — SEEnet.”

Now, we like to think we are open-minded about most things, but what brilliant advertising person decided that the message “Wireless Internet at your fingertips” would be ideally placed above urinals in a men’s room? Several other men who entered the men’s room to do what men do began to snicker right along with us.

After all, we knew Mr. Happy was capable of many, many glorious things, but offering up a wireless connection — that’s one grand claim we hadn’t thought of yet.