Mucinex Commercials

TODAY I SHALL JUDGE

MUCINEX COMMERCIALS

I return from my unannounced one-week-plus hiatus-due-to-illness-and-other-things to discuss the way in which Mucinex is marketed to us. Not content to engage in the time-honored practice of advertising a cold medicine by giving us a pretty chart with meaningless arrows to look at, the Mucinex brand subjects commercial-watchers to deeply unpleasant, poorly-rendered anthropomorphized globs of mucus that dress and talk like Brooklyn street toughs from 1930s musicals.

Why would anyone willingly associate their product with something so off-putting? These mascots are ugly, shoddy and irritating on every level. They are relevant to the product being advertised I suppose, in that they are meant to resemble mucus, which the product is meant to destroy and Mucinex does routinely destroy these mucus-men in the commercial. Is a Mucinex commercial meant to replicate the experience of illness then? A band of disgusting little creatures invade our television set  and we squirm with discomfort and annoyance until Mucinex sweeps in and saves the day by ridding us of them. This seems like a poorly executed game of good cop/bad cop where we’re supposed to thank the brand for saving us from the ordeal that it itself inflicted on us. Mucinex is personifying themselves as what we wish to be rid of. It’s like a feminine product using a piece of clotted menstrual blood with googly eyes as its spokesperson. Actually, that would be amazing and I’d be fully in favor of it.

But these spokesboogers aren’t just generically unpleasant, they are an oddly specific outmoded stereotype. They are working-class, suspenders-wearing, white-but-ethnically-nonspecific New Yawkers of a type that haven’t existed for the better part of a century. I like to think that the creators of these commercials went through a number of permutations before they arrived at this one, that their initial test runs which showed a bunch of top-hatted monocle-wearing aristocratic boogers didn’t go over well and so they decided to play on their perceived audiences fear of rowdy hooligans that might be involved in the bootleg whiskey trade.

MUCINEX COMMERCIALS HAVE BEEN JUDGED AND ARE HEREBY DECREED

A MELANGE OF BAFFLING UNPLEASANTNESS