Zahnpasta - Toothpaste

To work in toothpaste marketing must be one of the toughest jobs out there. Every year they have to come up with a new smile-destroying toothy threat for which, very luckily, they have a magical pasty treatment - a shiny re-branded, ever-so-slightly-tweaked version of what we were using last year. The toothpaste-purveying tycoons obviously do it to compete with each other, resulting in several new varieties each year, while never seeming to get rid of their older formulas. The result being an impossible choice in the supermarket between literally thirty or forty different tubes, all of which probably have the exact same ingredients and are made in the exact same factory. This year it seems to be all about acid erosion, and several brands urge us in the strongest possible terms to ask our dentists all about this, the Al Qaeda of tooth decay. Of course they then get one of their very own BDA-approved sadomasochist to profess how everyone should be using a product that tackles this new form of oral terrorism head-on, all the while caressing a tube of Colgate Pro-Enamel Plus Excel till it comes. For me, any dentist who does an advert is off the medical roll call, everything they say is suspect, you can’t trust anything that comes out of their mouths, or anything they do in yours. They make enough money charging twenty quid for a three minute check-up without pushing new designer pastes on vulnerable acid addicts. I’m not referring to blotter-acid users - although I imagine that stuff can’t be great for your teeth - but anyone who eats a lot of fruit is apparently most at risk. It’s funny how this was never an issue before the government’s big push to get everyone eating more fruit and vegetables. I don’t believe for a second that those campaigns are actually working on a grand scale, besides a few extra middle class, high-horse riding health-fad obsessive fucks forcing hundreds of apples inside their children. Yet when it’s in the news constantly, one possible but quite unlikely side effect - acid erosion - is suddenly Satan, and an instant excuse to sell their cure to an ever-gormless public. So actually, toothpaste marketing probably isn’t that difficult because you’re dealing with a mostly thick audience who’ll believe anything you tell them, provided it has some snazzy graphical representation emphasising whatever borderline science and in-house research they’re employing. But anyway, I can’t be bothered with all that, marketing has absolutely no effect on me, so I’ll just carry on picking up whichever has the most eye-catching packaging, fizzling my way out of this piece quite miserably. Oh, and ten bonus points if you got I was paying homage to Bill, not stealing his material. And minus eleven if you’ve no idea what I’m talking about.