• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, January 7, 2016

So, how many of your new year’s resolutions have already gone by the wayside? As of today at 2:46 p.m. ET, I’ve blown three. “Eat healthy” didn’t survive the New Year’s Day brunch pancakepalooza. “Drive mellow” lasted until the moment I attempted to navigate the daycare parking lot at rush hour. “Don’t yell at the kids” bit the dust when the 17-month-old acquired the ability to climb onto our kitchen island, resulting in a weekend’s worth of “no! bad, bad, bad! that’s it - no more Internet poker for you!” Related: DNA testing is underway to determine whether the kid’s actual father is Dominique Wilkins or Spider-Man.

But I’m hoping to keep the last of my resolutions, which is simply “be positive.” This comes as naturally to me as “be tall” or “be a mezzo-soprano,” neither of which exists within the realm of physical possibility. That said, as I age - poorly - I find myself gravitating to happy, well-adjusted people and content that is in some small part affirming. Like this here column about a locker-room attendant for the Green Bay Packers - I interact with material like this and feel… what’s the word I’m searching for?... good. Better than I feel after perusing most everything else related to sports, music, science, politics, marketing, health or The Force Awakens, in any event.

The question, then: Can hugs-and-sparkles-and-la-la-la-Larry still write a column of this critical nature? Can he sustain that positivity while watching tens of dummyhead brand videos every week and keep his unkind thoughts to himself, with the exception of his contempt for the everyone’s-BFF stylings of Jimmy Fallon?

Probably not, given that he/I just cut away from whatever this column is about to watch a montage of Artie’s saltiest moments from The Larry Sanders Show. Nonetheless, this year’s first review, of a Flashdance-inspired video from a cleaning brand with which I was unfamiliar, receives as many thumbs up as I have thumbs to extend heavenward - which is to say, two.

Primarily marketed outside the US - take that, Toby Keith! - Cillit Bang products are billed as a miraculous, mystical whole-house cleaning solution. Spray some Cillit Bang potion on your rusty porch screws, say, or your muck-encrusted commode, and their at-birth luster will be magically restored. That’s the pitch, anyway.

To drive it home, the brand goes the nostalgia route with “The Mechanic.” In the clip, a typically super-fit grease monkey is charged with the task of de-dirtifying a jumbo-sized garage. After a single Cillit Bang spray produces favorable results, the dude cues up a cover of “Maniac” and prance-cleans his way around the facility. He runs up walls. He slides across the floor. He jumps and contorts and flips, all the while coating every conceivable surface with Cillit Bang and wiping away the schmutz it liberates.

The video’s manic energy is very much at odds with the act of cleaning, which represents a neat little twist on the usual approach within the category - as does placing a hunkthrob aerobic dancebot at its center, rather than a beleaguered suburban mom. Taken together, these choices do something that, to my knowledge, has never before been accomplished by a household-cleaning brand: Give it an actual personality. The bits that purport to show how well the products work are almost irrelevant in their wake.

I’ll go even further and say that the Flashdance callback is equally unnecessary. Set this thing to the strains of almost any upbeat song and you’d have gotten the same effect. But hey, nit-picking was the domain of the old Larry, not the one who had an almost-pleasant interaction with a tele-pollster earlier today. Good on Cillit Bang for trying something different and for having a sense of humor about its place in the grand scheme of things . Here’s hoping “The Mechanic” opens the eyes of marketers in similarly personality-resistant categories.