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In advertising, as in life, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. I’m not going to be talking about ancient history here: I’m mainly going to be talking about the seven years leading up to 2026, which is where our story starts.

Imagine yourself, in 2026, sitting in a boardroom in the Shanghai regional offices of British multinational corporation Reckitt. You’re at a presentation where the ad agency is unveiling new creative work for your brand Dettol.

The idea they’re presenting is this: a five-minute mini-drama about toxic masculinity.

The storyline involves a deeply unpleasant young man on the hunt for a pure young woman untainted by having had previous dealings with other men. Because, you see, he finds those other kinds of women ‘dirty’ and ‘contaminated.’ He eventually finds his pure woman, but there’s a twist: she wises up to his ways, and dumps him. Because she uses Dettol. The whole thing ends with an endline. Perhaps the agency account man, or account woman, had it all nicely printed on a big board, ready to hold up:

“Toxic men are just like bacteria. Only by adding Dettol and eliminating them completely can you feel at ease.” 

Perhaps it loses something in translation. I wouldn’t know.

But you’d imagine that you, as a member of the client team, would have some questions about it.

The first question would probably be, is this true? As in, is it literally true?

If you use Dettol, will it actually rid you of toxic men?

I think I can say with some confidence that the answer to that one is no, it won’t.

But then you might ask, is it hyperbolically or metaphorically true?

There’s a long and noble tradition of ads that take product features and benefits and present them in comically exaggerated form. So, for example, the ‘bite and buzz of real oranges in Tango’ might be represented by someone being slapped across the face by a fat man painted all over in orange colouring. Or the refreshing sensation of drinking Heineken might be represented by the romantic poet William Wordsworth struggling for words until he takes a sip, which gives him back his wordy mojo.

On this one you might call it either way. Dettol does get rid of unpleasant things. Our scumbag suitor certainly is pretty unpleasant. So maybe it’s a metaphor, right? And it’s a joke. People like jokes. That, I imagine, is probably the way the meeting went. 

But then you come to a third question, which is this: will it work?

This is where it pays to have a wider view.

And not just for this campaign, but for all campaigns.

There are few truly original ideas in the world. There are fewer still which are both original and good. For almost everything there are precedents from other times and other places. In our industry, the IPA has a huge library of successful case-studies, stretching back to the original Advertising Works book (1980), edited by Simon Broadbent. Meanwhile, WARC currently hosts over 13,000 articles, research papers and opinion pieces, including this one. Not to mention over 100,000 global marketing effectiveness case studies and best-practice guides.

I’m guessing the Dettol team didn’t make use of any of those resources. And I’m guessing that, as a result, they didn’t go back those seven years to 2019, which was when Gillette launched its own toxic masculinity campaign, We Believe. Because if they’d done that, they would have read about the backlash and the boycotts, and they’d have read about the career-destroying $8 billion markdown of parent company, P&G.

At the very least you’d think they’d have reserved judgement until research told them what consumers thought of it.

Instead they signed off the work, with all-too-predictable consequences.

At this point I’d like to step back a little further in time still, to 1919, which was when Anglo-American poet TS Eliot published his essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. In it, he explained that creative work doesn’t exist in a vacuum, but rather comes to fruition in the context of all that’s gone before. In so doing, he said, it both creates something new and, at the same time, makes us reevaluate our understanding of the works of the past. So it is with Dettol. That Toxic Men ad will now forever be seen as coming from the same advertising tradition as Gillette’s We Believe. The reactions of consumers and commentators in 2026 will forever shape and colour our reflections on what happened in 2019.

As for what those reactions were – well, let’s say they haven’t been exactly positive in China. Or indeed anywhere else. This one, from a user on Weibo, is one of the politer responses:

“What a trashy advertisement. It’s left me speechless.”

They sort of go downhill from there.

It remains to be seen what the financial consequences will be, but I’m guessing there probably won’t be many bonuses being handed out on the back of the financial results.

It’s not rocket-science. It’s just due diligence. Your work may be new this year, but your consumer wasn’t born yesterday. Nor, either, was our industry. To move forward and add a new chapter to the story of effective advertising, it helps if you know what was in the chapters that came before.

First published in WARC on 27 July 2026.