Is Your Message In The Toilet?

I’m just dying to share a photo with you folks, but we have to be ultra-careful about copyrights and such, so I’m afraid I can’t. It made me literally laugh out loud — no exaggeration — for a large part of the morning. I will talk about former FOX News host Megyn Kelly in the same story, but you’ll have to wait a tick for that sneak preview to make sense. Don’t worry; her part of this editorial doesn’t involve a toilet.

Now back to the photo. Picture, if you will, a photo of a large public bathroom stall. You know, the ones made with accessibility features so there is plenty of space to maneuver wheelchairs, walkers, strollers and the like. In the corner is a new toilet, shaped like most other public units — large and oblong. Now the good part. In this toilet is stuffed a 4′ tall wall-mounted dispenser of women’s menstrual remediation products. Huh?

So, here’s the story. A woke high school in Oregon insisted on mounting said dispensers in the school’s men’s rooms. Apparently, the “message” in this case was a forced attempt at some gender inclusion communique, but the content of said “message” isn’t even the point of this story. The point is that regardless of school administrators’ intentions, the “message” completely failed due to forced delivery and a lack of understanding of the target audience. Simply put, this message was rammed down the throats of users of the boys’ bathrooms in this particular school.

The results were completely predictable. Time after time, men’s-room-using-students ripped the dispenser off the wall and stuffed it in a nearby toilet. I think they made their point. You probably won’t be surprised that the school is doubling down on its “message” delivery strategy and focusing its efforts on catching the not-woke-enough vandals. How many companies do we see also doubling down after a message SNAFU these days?

“If you want positive reception of your message and to avoid the figurative toilet, two things are essential: Understanding the target audience and engaging delivery.”

Now back to the point. If you want positive reception of your message and to avoid the figurative toilet, two things are essential: Understanding the target audience and engaging delivery. For decades, we’ve been hearing from our readers daily about their take on our, and our advertiser’s, messages. As for the engaging delivery part, every packaged advertisement is just that much more effective when someone else (that would be us) is also talking about their experiences with your product. By all means, let us know about what you have and get something in our hands to test so we can tell our version of your story.

Oh, and about Megyn Kelly? We’ve heard from one of our advertising sponsors that our message delivery is outperforming her version of the same, dollar for dollar. How about letting us take a crack at getting your message out there in a relevant and effective way?

Contact me to learn how tom.mchale@fmghq.com.

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