When soap ads had the wit to change

Have we seen the last of those terrible shampoo commercials that made fools of us all?

What's the worst advert you've ever seen? Nanette Newman's Fairy Liquid ad? Anything with a soap powder or floor cleaner in it? Or are these all so dull, so stupid, so culturally polluting that it's hard even to remember them? If so, it may come as no surprise to find that there is the same guiding force behind almost all of them.

Ever since the Fifties, Procter & Gamble, the US manufacturing giant that has created such well-known high-street brands as Ariel, Bold, Daz, Flash, Fairy Liquid, Oil of Ulay, Clearasil, Pampers, Head & Shoulders and Max Factor, has thrived on a style of advertising known in the business as 2CK (two c***s in a kitchen). This usually involves two women in immaculately clean surroundings extolling the benefits of some household product.

Dreary, yes, but phenomenally successful. You presented the problem - greasy hair, dirty floor, whatever - threw in a bit of science and delivered the product as a solution. You backed this up with heavyweight repetitions of the message, decade after decade, until you had carpet-bombed the consumer into submission.

But something is changing out there in adland. Last year, Clearasil produced a series of press ads that engaged the reader in a most un-P&G way. Instead of spots we had "zits", and the whole tenor of the ad was designed to engage emotionally with teenagers. Oil of Ulay's latest campaign featured five women artists using make-up as their inspiration.

More recently, a new Fairy Liquid ad features a child anxiously waiting for her mother to finish the bottle so that she can use the empty for some Blue Peter creation. Of course, by the time the bottle is empty, we hear the Blue Peter presenter saying: "Take one yoghurt pot". And this week Pantene launches a new shampoo ad. Out go the models no one could identify with; in come four ordinary women who responded to a P&G advert for Pantene users.

Cutting edge it isn't, but even so, it's a radical shift. And when it's instigated by the world's biggest advertiser - pounds 2bn a year - it suggests a major upheaval.

So what's going on? Why is P&G vacating its ivory adland tower, to disarm the real world with charm? Predictably, nobody at P&G is saying much. The company is obsessively secretive about its practices, fearing the smallest leak might lose it a competitive edge; a spokesman would only say that there was no U-turn in its advertising strategies. Which would come as a hell of a disappointment to John Pepper, P&G's chief executive and chairman, who last year issued an internal company directive demanding just that.

Insiders say that the change is being forced upon P&G because, with the traditional style of ads, it is having trouble reaching its stated growth target of doubling turnover every seven years. Put simply, P&G used to be able to get away with saying that their products were scientifically and significantly better than anyone else's, because they were. But these days all products are much of a muchness in terms of quality, and consumers know it. So spending millions of pounds telling the punters something they won't necessarily believe is likely to be an expensive waste of money.

Consumers these days can sense bullshit a mile away. "Young people are terrifyingly sophisticated," says Kirsten Clayton, the account director at Euro Wnek Gosper who came up with the new Clearasil ads. "They want their ads to be witty and clever, and they'll reject anything that doesn't engage them. We designed the Clearasil campaign to be deliberately different from the normal P&G style. Teen magazines have come a long way since Bunty and Twinkle, and the ads have to reflect that. Otherwise they're dead in the water. You have to reach your audience at an emotional level, by talking to them in a language they understand."

Not that we can expect a deluge of interesting ads. P&G are particularly hard-nosed about their research; they won't change something just for the hell of it, or just because it sounds like a good idea. Clayton's approach didn't go through on the nod. She had to prove to Clearasil's brand managers at P&G that it was better than any other. And measuring intangibles such as emotional response is hard to do.

Even so, change is on the way. The first people to feel it will probably be the agencies themselves. P&G has a roster of approved advertising agencies, and some of them will be distinctly worried that a few smaller, more creative outfits may start to grab a slice of the business.

But the real winners in all this will be us, the consumers. Imagine a world with no ads that insult our intelligence. It makes an evening in front of the TV infinitely more attractive - even if it does make it trickier to decide when to make that cup of tea.