In its latest ad campaign, AXE has decided to promote its shower products by introducing a new web series titled ‘Shower Thoughts.’ The problem with this is that they’re directly stealing these thoughts from users on Reddit, a site that confidently bills itself as the “front page of the Internet,” in order to market their product on the web to a host of people who would quite obviously be able to spot that this is the case.
The commercial features a “shower thought” directly lifted from the subreddit r/ShowerThoughts, which is a forum for people to “share all those thoughts, ideas, or philosophical questions that race through your head when in the shower.” The first episode in the series was posted to the subreddit r/videos today, with the headline ‘AXE is jacking our shower thoughts and not giving credit. Literally word for word.’ It inevitably reached the front page, with it having since garnered over 300,000 views and a whopping 10,000 downvotes.
Check out the commercial below:
And here’s the r/ShowerThoughts post that the commercial quite clearly used as inspiration, which dates back to August 2015:
AXE posted another entry in this series today, which includes the shower thought “it’s the biggest brass instrument; why isn’t the tuba considered cool?” a thought which has run through the mind of approximately zero people on the planet. Still, it’s nice to know that it’s not just websites that jack content from Reddit users without correctly attributing credit, though AXE likely wouldn’t want to use one of the suggestions a Reddit commenter had for the company’s next shower thought: “Do douchebags smell like Axe, or does Axe smell like douchebags?”
I’d laugh, if I wasn’t wearing AXE body spray right this second.
