Super Pell: What Mess?

Super Pell: What Mess?

 "What Mess?"

Everywhere we see pristine, sparkling white. Even the woman is no exception. Everything is right with the world — or is it? Suddenly, she starts to trip! Oh no, anything but a horrible dark stain on our picture of perfect whiteness! But wait, is that a bottle of floor cleaner?

I'll cut to the end of this dramatic narrative: Super Pell saves the day.

So today we have a 2012 ad for Super Pell, a floor cleaner that seems to be exclusive to Indonesia. You can thank Ads of the World for bringing this to my attention.

If there was a mess, who would clean it?

Probably not a rich white woman, especially in Indonesia. The ad was close though. That aside, I find the choice of model here interesting for a couple reasons.

We have a rich, perhaps professional, young woman. She's pristine, like her house. And we're supposed to believe that if something got spilled, she would obviously be the one to handle it. Why? Well, she is a woman isn't she?

The subtext here seems to be, "No matter how far you climb, you will always be bound to scrub a man's floors." Thanks for that insight, Super Pell.

Anything but brown!

Then there's the fact that this is an Indonesian product and the ad agency decided to use a white woman. In fact everything is white and perfect, and that's just the way it should be says Super Pell.

Note that the main antagonist here is coffee, a decidedly non-white substance. And this ad is aimed at a decidedly non-white population, one that would look a bit more like that dreaded, prevented stain than those lovely white floors.

So white and all that goes along with it is good. The native brown... not so much. A case of cultural imperialism? You decide.

Buy the product and be more white.

The ad seems to say to people in Indonesia that their way is the wrong way. If you want to be successful like this white woman, you need to be more white. Super Pell can help you there, and you'll start feeling bad for being who you are before you know it. 

Using Super Pell will also bring some class to your one room shanty or whatever you non-whites live in, the ad seems to say. You want to be like that woman up there, don't you?

Would I buy it if I could?

Even if Super Pell was readily available to me — and I actually cleaned things —  I wouldn't buy it. Perhaps I'm just looking too far into it, but the subtext I see is just too over-the-top offensive. I wonder if it was intended to be that way.