Advertising's final frontier

There's a lot to be learnt about different countries from the sorts of advertisements they run most frequently - you may even get a bit too much information.

- Jane Clifton

It's impossible to watch TV in the United States without getting an encyclopedic grounding in the varieties of laxative available. In much of Europe, it's all about limescale and the war against occlusion of a different sort of plumbing.

Anthropologists will affirm that the different ways products have to be pitched in different countries can tell you a lot about their societies.

However, some new TV ad campaigns for, shall we say, personal products available in the UK and Europe, raise societal questions, the answers to which we may not care to know.

One features (fictional) Kenny the Koala, who has for years been marketing the softness of a brand of toilet paper to popular effect. His latest outing, however, is a speaking part which reveals cuddly Ken to be ... well, let's say Australia, which has no dominion over this particular toilet paper brand, has every right to sue for the reputational damage to blameless marsupials.