Why I tore a deodorant ad to bits after it showed up on LinkedIn

I don't get to switch it off. Forty-odd years of selling does something to your eyes, and one of the things it does is ruin advertising for you forever. I read every ad that crosses my path whether I mean to or not, pulling at the seams to see what holds and what gives, and these days half of them reach me through a screen rather than off a street.

This one came up on LinkedIn, a Fussy deodorant poster somebody had snapped on the Underground, and once I'd stopped admiring it my first thought was that it was ripe pickings for a Blue Orchan teardown.

Ripe being the word, and I'll not apologise for it. So instead of tapping like and scrolling past, I sat with it and pulled it apart properly. Then I wrote the read down, because a teardown you keep in your head proves nothing to anybody.

The ad, and why it's worth the bother

The ad's a good one, which is exactly why it earns the effort. Bad ads are dull to pull apart, all the same faults in the same places, whereas a good one teaches you something about where even careful people leave money on the table.

The headline read "Loved by millions of armpits. And whoever is next to you." Under it, a line doing more work than the whole rest of the panel: the refillable natural deodorant that actually works. A Trustpilot score, a discount code, a photo of the little case in someone's hand. Pale blue, tasteful, calm.

How I read it

When I read an ad I run it past the same handful of questions, the ones any decent salesman carries around without ever writing them down. Does it earn a glance off a wall full of other posters. Can a tired commuter tell what's being sold and to whom in about a second. Does it touch a real feeling. Is there any reason to believe it. And is there a way to act while the wanting's still warm. Five plain questions, and most ads fall down on at least two of them.

The armpits line is the best thing on that wall. It's funny, faintly rude, and it breaks the smug health-shop tone you'd expect from anything with "natural" stamped on it. Then "and whoever is next to you" aims the whole joke at the one person reading it, packed against a stranger on a rush-hour carriage, quietly hoping they're not the one who smells. That's not a lucky line. Somebody thought hard about where this poster lives and who's standing under it, and that kind of thinking is rarer than it should be.

The tagline does the plain work the headline doesn't. Category, two selling points, and the objection every buyer in the category is already thinking, all in seven words. "Actually works" is the clever bit, because anyone who's tried a natural deodorant has a story about one that let them down by lunchtime, and this line walks straight up to that story and answers it.

Where it softens is proof and the next move. A claim as bold as "actually works" gets backed by a Trustpilot score and a smile, and for the one product where the whole argument is "will this keep me from stinking," that's thin. There's no QR code either, no address, nothing on the panel to act on, so a sold commuter has to remember the name, get home, and go hunting. That itch fades somewhere between the poster and the platform, and a fading itch spends nothing.

Then the harder pass

Here's the part most people skip. I stop reading as me and start reading as the person trying to talk themselves out of it, because that's the person who actually decides whether the ad works. The bloke who bought a natural deodorant once, spent a day damp and self-conscious, and swore off the lot of them, he reads "actually works" and thinks yeah, that's what the last one said. Nothing on the poster gives him a reason to reopen a closed case.

The careful shopper is a different problem. She already knows Wild exists, she's seen their ads for years, and this poster never tells her why Fussy instead of the brand she can already picture. And the one who's basically sold but glad of any excuse to leave it till later, the ad hands them that excuse for free, because there's no way to act on the spot and later is a polite word for never.

None of those kill it. It's still one of the better ads I've seen on that line all year, and I'd tell the person who made it so. But each one is a small leak, and leaks are money going somewhere other than the till.

What I'd change, and what I wouldn't

If it were mine, I'd keep the headline exactly as it is and not let a soul near it. Knowing what to leave alone is half the job, and most of the damage I've watched get done to good advertising is a clever person improving the one thing that was already working. Under the joke I'd put one hard proof line, a real number or a real protection window the brand can stand behind, so the burned buyer has something solid to argue with instead of an adjective. And I'd drop a QR code in the corner to catch the buy while the phone's already in the hand. Two changes, and neither of them touches the joke.

So I built one

Talk's cheap, and a critique that never lays its own money down is just a bloke pointing at other people's work. So I set myself the brief I'd handed the original and made a version of it, my own mockup, different name, same job to do.

The headline went big and loud on a deep colour, because the first job of a poster is to win the glance off a crowded wall, and a calm pastel panel loses that fight before the words get a look in. "Your pits deserve better" keeps the cheek but turns it on the reader, a small dig at whatever they're using now and a nudge that they could do right by their own armpits.

The refillable promise moved up into the subline where it earns its keep in five words, and the one thing a natural deodorant has to swear to, that it holds through the day, sits under the hook where the doubter meets it first.

Then the Trustpilot mark got pulled out where it can be seen, and a QR code went in the corner to catch the buy while the phone's still in the hand. Every leak I'd named in the original, closed, and not one clever word laid over the top of another.

Why any of this matters to you

That's the whole job, near enough. Notice what's working and guard it, find the quiet leaks, then patch them without breaking the thing that made the ad worth reading in the first place.

I've been selling for forty years and writing about it for a good stretch of them, and I've settled on calling myself a salesman who writes rather than a writer who sells. The order matters more than it looks. I care whether the thing shifts product before I care whether it reads nicely, and the two aren't always the same ad.

If you've got an ad, a page, or a whole site that's soft in the middle and you can't put your finger on why, this is the read you'd get from me. Plain words, fixes ranked so you know what to do first, and no forty-slide diagnostic that nobody opens twice. Just where the money's leaking and how to stop it.

That poster's still up, by the way. Still a good ad. Still leaking.