The Glad ForceFlex Bag commercial
In just 30 seconds, a commercial can create an indelible impression in the minds of consumers. A new ad for Glad's ForceFlex garbage bags should serve as a warning to advertisers to choose their imagery wisely.
In lieu of narration or voiceover, the entire ad is set to upbeat, bouncy, sort of circusy music. In the beginning, the white ForceFlex garbage bag is filled with lots and lots of plastic hangers. We see someone pull them from a rack and stuff them into the bag, which stretches accommodatingly around its large, unwieldy and somewhat odd cargo. Cut to a closeup shot of the ForceFlex material, made strong (we assume) by its quilted, diamond-honeycomb design. Next we see the ForceFlex bag being stretched tightly around the corner of some sort of box — a pizza box? — from several different angles. Someone repeatedly pulls the bag tightly around the box's sharp corners and, again, the diamond design of the ForceFlex bag allows it to stretch easily around the box without tearing. Another closeup of the bag's diamond-patterned material follows.
At this point, things get a little weirder. The next shot is of a large, red, plastic hoop, around which the mouth of a ForceFlex bag is stretched, the bag part hanging down below it like a freakishly strong basketball net, but closed at the bottom. Inexplicably, colorful bowling balls begin rolling rapidly down some sort of Rube Goldberg ramp and drop forcefully through the hoop into the bag. Three bowling balls zoom, one by one, down the ramp and bounce into the ever-resilient bag. We are shown this sequence three times in rapid succession but it is unclear whether we are seeing an instant replay of a single three-pronged bowling ball event or witnessing the ForceFlex bag valiantly withstand a tri-partite, nine-ball onslaught.
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The now-familiar closeup of the ForceFlex material that follows in no way prepares the viewer for what is to come — the ultimate, brutal test of the ForceFlex bag's strength:
Vigorous, repeated, purposeful fisting.
The box and the hangers were plausible examples of the type of unwieldy trash you might put in one of these bags. The bowling balls and special launch ramp seemed somewhat showoffy and weirdly over the top. But the fisting? The fisting is just fucked up. You don't have to have been fisted to feel an
uncomfortable sensation in your abdomen watching what happens to those
bags.
The final seconds of the commercial show five separate bag fistings, distinguishable from one another by the technique and angle each employs. There appear to be two different fists violating the bags, one male and one female, the relentlessly jaunty music playing all the while. Mercifully, after the fifth fisting, the polymer-stretching debauchery ceases and the commercial ends on a brief shot of some boxes of ForceFlex products.
According to AdAge Magazine, the ForceFlex bag is part of parent company Clorox's "game changer" product strategy. A recent article about the campaign cites industry speculation that Clorox plans to spend as much as $60 million on ForceFlex promotions and quotes CEO Gerald Johnston as saying, "We believe Glad ForceFlex is an important game-changing consumer proposition."
The attendant televised fisting of household sanitation products, however, may dissuade consumers from playing at all.
Most troubling, though, is the Pandora's box violently ripped open by the ForceFlex fisting. What will happen when other companies develop competing products and the inevitable cycle of advertising oneupsmanship ensues? Commercials featuring sodomized Ziplocs and skullfuck-withstanding lawn and leaf bags may lurk menacingly just beyond the horizon.
— Alissa Rowinsky Wright (alissa@flakmag.com)
