Commercials are designed to get a consumer to use a product or service.  Purex, the maker of laundry detergent, fabric softener and dryer sheets, has done the opposite with their new ad.

It took them just six seconds to alienate me:

Did you catch it?  We have two women, with one of them making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

Now, we don’t know if there are any other people in the house, so I won’t judge the potentially high number of sandwiches she seems to be making.  My quibble is with her technique and the other woman’s reaction:

Note that the bread on the left is smeared with peanut butter, while the one on the right has the jelly.

Longtime blog readers will recall that in 2011, I tackled the debate over how these sandwiches should be made.  Many people said my method of putting both the peanut butter and jelly on the same slice was wrong, but my grandma is with me, so it can’t be crazy.

I don’t want to get into the fact that she clearly did the jelly slice first, which is indisputably nuts.

As I said in my earlier pb&j posts, the end result is bread, peanut butter, jelly, bread — no matter which construction method you use.  The older woman in the ad has to chime in and suggest there is something wrong with the orientation of the sandwich, creating a hostile lunch environment and a lower level of pb&j enjoyment for all of us.

The lesson here is to make your commercials more focused on your actual product.  You don’t want to put off a potential laundry detergent customer with the way you talk about sandwiches.