• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, June 14, 2010

You have to wonder what the branding pitch might have been behind the new Orbit gum Web series "Dirty Shorts" that premiered last week. This is the first effort from actors Jason Bateman and Will Arnett and their DumbDumb branded video production company working under IAC's Electus.

In it, Dad Jason Bateman meets his teen daughter's prom date, who turns out to be the girl's Social Studies teacher (played with greasy panache by Will Arnett). Orbit gum has had this sort of "dirty mouth" campaign running on the air for years, but online they take the concept to a new and surprising level.

Bateman warns his daughter that teen boys act all nice and polite in the beginning until "before you know it they've got their Facebook all up in your Twitter." For Arnett's part, he can't keep his paws off the girl and alludes to their sexual role play. Yeah it gets that creepy. Until the Orbit gum comes into play and the world is changed. This situation can't be too bad, Bateman decides. After all, his daughter has chosen a mature man with an education, job car and (as his wife says) a "top of the line mustache). The gum of course transforms Arnett to, into a courteous chaperone.

"A good cleaning no matter what" is the tagline to an ad that is designed to make you feel creepy and then relieved. We can only imagine the twisted Don Draper creative department homilies that rationalized this approach. "We all want our imaginations dragged down into the gutter and then suddenly, falsely and with thick layers of irony applied, made to feel whole and right with the world again."

The pages of commentary on YouTube seem to approve, even if some of the viewers found the ad a bit disorienting. "I'm not exactly sure of the message Orbit is sending with this ad, but it's funny - so what the hell," writes one YouTuber. Somewhere beneath the post-modern send-up of one's own branding message in this piece the real branding message does soak through. The job here is to entertain and so overplay the product placement that no one can possibly take it seriously. And yet the messaging is there and gets the job done regardless.

In the age of irony, virtually any kind of messaging, creepy or smarmy, can be rationalized by a wink and a nod.