• by Aaron Baar , December 6, 2016

There’s only so much jewelry and clothing a person can give and receive as a gift. Perhaps this holiday season might one suggest another option: a bidet toilet seat. 

Plumbing manufacturer Toto is taking to the airwaves this holiday season to promote its popular Washlet bidet seats. The company, which has already sold 40 million of the seats globally, has begun running a television commercial in three key markets to encourage people to try it out. 

“Certainly one of the challenges we have is the experiential aspects of the products,” Bill Strang, the company’s president of operations and e-commerce, tells Marketing Daily. “It’s a product that people don’t talk about. But once you begin to use it, the impact is significant.”

The television commercial, developed with Wray Ward Advertising in Charlotte, N.C., is stylish and mild, depicting streaming jets of water around one of the toilet seats as a voiceover describes the product as “clean and simple” and “smarter than ever.” It also promises a “just showered feeling.”

The spot will run in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York through December and January on networks such as CNBC, HGTV, Bravo and The Travel Channel. The company is hoping to attract viewers who are using second screens while watching television to check out the product details on the product’s Web site, Strang says. The three markets were chosen because of their robust dealer options, where consumers can try out the product, Strang says. 

While many home-improvement companies ramp up their advertising in the late winter and spring to take advantage of warm weather renovations, the Washlet is not dependent on temperate conditions for installations, Strang says. Instead, the company is aiming for the gift-giving season, he says. 

“You’ve already bought as much jewelry and clothing for you and your partner as you can.” he says. “It’s an opportunity to give to someone something that you haven’t given before.”

And before one can mock the idea of giving a loved one a toilet seat as a gift, Strand notes Jennifer Aniston recently (unprompted and organically) told Parade magazine that one of the best gifts she’d ever given was a Toto toilet seat. “The single most pervasive word that expresses the emotional [feelings] people have for this product is ‘love,’” Strang says.