Tampons Vs. Pads!

Excellent! This ad is crowded like Mt Albert Pak'N'Save with things to analyse! First and foremost, FASHION! Every woman is looking for the perfect fit. Whether it's her new blue sequined basketball singlet, a pair of high waisted jeans (notice how the woman in this ad ALSO draws attention to the shape of her behind by checking it in the mirror), or how easily her riding boots slip on before a nice spot of dressage, ALL women are concerned about fashion. No seriously, ALL WOMEN. Even women who aren't white! (Re: "You Bet!"). Tampax tampons (supposedly) give every woman a personalized fit. Kind of like couture. The woman who is admiring herself in the shop window is certainly impressed with hers. Except she can't actually see it, because it's inside her body and has nothing to do with fashion. Maybe they forgot to get footage of people admiring actual tampons, and had to use stock footage from a hat making show. The point is, pads are not in fashion. They are big bulky things (comparable to overstuffed pillows), which have the capability to fold themselves into angles that nobody's genitals could contour to. "Who needs that?" asks a curly haired woman, who finds the concept of sanitary pads hilarious.  "WE DON'T!" 

But women CERTAINLY "need" Tampax. With Tampax tampons, you don't have to worry about doing spontaneous yoga on park benches. You'll be so comfortable, you'll feel like you're reclining in a deck chair on a sunny day. (Unless this is more hat show stock footage. I'm not sure).

We're only up to the second ad analysis, and we've already come across the notorious blue liquid.  The blue liquid represents sterility, hygiene, science, anything but blood really, because heaven forbid we mention THAT.  In this case, it's sort of functioning as a serious aside.  Yes, tampons are modern, fashionable, comfortable and convenient.  Woman seem to enjoy themselves even more than usual while they're wearing them!  But just incase somebody remembers that they're going to have to put this product inside their body, they can rest assured.  Tampax is a company that know what they're doing.  The tampon is placed inside a test tube, which is then filled with the liquid.  The presence of the test tube, (which if you ask me, probably couldn't squeeze a baby through it), is enough for us to know that we're talking about facts here.  This tampon is absorbent, and hygienic.  Science says so.  Animated arrows point out from the test tube, to indicate the tampons ability to expand in three directions.  (They have to show expansion this way, because vaginas aren't made out of glass, that's just TV vaginas).  

I would have liked the next line more if she combined a nice sassy finger click with it, but instead, we hear the dialogue "No pad does that!" from an enthusiastic blonde woman, accompanied by a graphic of the text, with purple backgrounds in CRAZY shapes like ovals and rectangles, and a wiggly line to connect all the words together, so that deaf people can understand how modern and funky fresh they'll be if they use tampons too.  If they don't quite have time to read the whole sentence, they'll at least take notice of the first two words "NO PAD", written in capital letters.  Is this subliminal messaging?  Let's stop while we're ahead, and move onto the next image.  Another pad, this time looking more like a mattress than an overstuffed pillow.  Its wings flap pathetically like an exhausted battery hen, while a modern woman hails a cab on her way home from her non specific media job, and another woman straddles the seat of a scooter without a care in the world, and rides off into the busy inner city traffic.  Completely independently.