Right Guard 3-D advert – For all the c***s you are

As I’ve mentioned previously, deodorant adverts exist in an irony-free zone, presumably because men still believe they can actually pull women and be successful at work simply by not smelling like a jockstrap.

Deodorant ads play no small part in fostering this idea, one of the few areas of marketing where men are no longer portrayed as useless simpletons. All male grooming features cool-sounding products that basically make you smell or look slightly less repulsive than you generally would.

This one for Right Guard is so absurdly straight-laced I can only assume its operating on a level of humour so sophisticated that I can’t actually detect it.

Its tagline is ‘for all the men you are’. In the case of the bloke in this advert, every single man he is is a total c***. A self-satisfied modern yuppie who cycles to work, gives over-enthusiastic presentations, displays dangerously competitive table football traits and sits on a park bench in his garden at the end of the day surrounded by his doting family.

He doesn’t exist, but if he did he’d be insufferable. A kind of Tory Party political broadcast made flesh. I’d rather smell of sweat.

• If you’re wondering what the godawful music is, it’s by ‘David Were, John Cottam from Germany’, apparently.