Once, dishwater tablets were featureless white dinky-bricks practically indistinguishable from firelighters. But in recent years they’ve been Jony Ive-d. To gaze at the sculpted contours and natty two-tone palette of a Finish Powerball in 2016 is to wonder if you’re about to chuck a state-of-the-art MP3 player in with your pots. Having advanced the design angle about as far as it can go, Finish now wants to make its Powerballs appealing on a sentimental level, signing off on a campaign that pits its product against nothing less than universal existential concepts.
Perhaps the inspiration was Batman v Superman because, like Zack Snyder’s logic-free disasterpiece, the new Powerball v Ageing and Powerball v Heartache clips require narrative backflips and frantic visual sleight-of-hand to justify the smackdown promised by the title. So how does a sudsy wash-brick triumph over the pitiless march of time? Spoiler: it doesn’t, but at least you won’t have to worry about dirty crockery on your deathbed.
The Powerball v Heartache ad has a more resonant throughline, spooling through a montage of jilted lovers comfort eating between sobs. Sure, a Powerball can cope with dishes welded with emergency macaroni cheese, but there’s also the submerged suggestion here that it could help you wipe that sullied emotional slate clean. Perhaps it’s because most of us think of dishwasher tablets as something we slam a door shut on, then walk away as they fizz and froth before vanishing without trace. Which actually isn’t a terrible strategy for coping with being dumped.
