Girl on the platform may well have smiled, but I fear that advert is more than just a tiny bit of wishful thinking. Even at a quiet station the kind of separation between the two of them and the volume the bloke is singing at means that girl on the platform probably can’t here what is being sung. Her reaction, therefore is probably all coincidence.
One the train pulls out the bloke seems surprised that the girl is no longer on the platform. I think it’s safe to assume that the girl on the platform is waiting for a train and so it’s highly likely she’s going to get on one when it arrives, an action that would leave no girl on the platform. Regardless, trains are resplendent with many windows on both sides which actually allows you to see people getting on and off, or in this case, get up, leg it up the stairs, over the bridge, down the stairs and arrive, without being out of breath, next to the man without being seen or heard.
So girl on the platform may have smiled, but I’m going to guess it’s wind. The resulting song and her appearance next to the man is then the daydream of a man trying to find love while the girl heads off wherever she was going on the train.
Soap. It’s pretty boring, fairly ubiquitous, hard to differentiate and low margin. We’ve gone from plain old bars (Imperial Leather, remember that?) and tried every trick in the book to make the product stick out and increase market share and margins. Bars with metal plates that stick onto magnetic holders, soap on a rope, liquid soap, soap with moisturiser, smelly soap, hypoallergenic soap, soap in dispensers, it’s all been tried. Recently one company has taken this to extremes allowing you to buy an automatic, hands free dispenser for their soap. The marketing pitch? With this product you don’t have to touch the nasty, icky dispenser that’s been touched by your families dirty hands.
Let’s step back and think about this. Let’s take our hypothetical hands and cover them in hypothetical dirt. Now we need to clean them, so let’s go to our hypothetical sink and wash them. We turn on our hypothetical taps, pump our hypothetical lemon and lime liquid soap (enjoying the thoughts of sherbet lemons it conjures) and… oh no, the soap dispenser may have put dirt and germs on our hands! Whatever will we do? Now at this point we could bemoan the lack of automated soap dispenser as we risk near certain Ebola, however, I’m going to suggest an alternative. Let’s carry on with our thought experiment. Let’s take our wet, dirty, soap laden, germ coated hands and let’s wash them. Look! Clean! Magic. Kind of renders the automatic dispenser moot. Sure, there’s the gadget appeal but it’s also not the cheapest thing in the the world.
They’ve missed a trick though. Let’s continue our thought experiment, where we take our lovely clean hypothetical hands and turn off the taps. But wait, our lovely clean hands are touching the now filthy taps, necrotising fasciitis ensues followed by death. Automatic taps, that’s what we need.