And what it reveals about modern culture
Oscar Rickett is a journalist and cultural commentator who specializes in examining how brands engage with social movements and taboo subjects. His work frequently explores the intersection of marketing, psychology, and cultural trends, bringing a sharp eye to the industry’s absurdities while maintaining a genuine curiosity about consumer behavior.
The rise of bathroom humor in marketing
As explained here, Marks and Spencer made a curious request of the UK government: to relax regulations prohibiting the use of clinical terminology like “fecal bulk” and “intestinal transit” in fiber product marketing. The request highlighted an irony—that while governments restrict such language, marketers have become increasingly obsessed with discussing digestive outcomes and bowel functions.
This fascination accelerated during Pride Month when HelloFresh’s social campaign promoted fiber-rich meals with coded references to the occasion and a promotional code “BOTTOMSUP.” The incident sparked broader reflection on how extensively bodily functions have permeated advertising in 2026.
The evidence is everywhere. What began in the hygiene category—with brands like Andrex and Pampers leading the charge—has spread across industries. The 2026 Super Bowl became notable for the sheer volume of bathroom-related humor, prompting observers to dub it the “Toilet Bowl.” Meanwhile, new product categories have emerged, from specialized wipes to digestive health supplements, all leaning heavily on scatological marketing angles.
The psychological underpinnings
To understand this trend, it helps to examine the psychology of marketing itself. Edward Bernays, the early 20th-century advertising pioneer credited with modernizing the field through Freudian concepts, once increased Betty Crocker cake mix sales by adding a single instruction: “add an egg.” The egg symbolized the housewife’s creative contribution, transforming a passive process into an active one.
Freud himself provided fertile ground for understanding bodily functions as psychological constructs. He identified feces as the first “possession” a child owns—something external to the body yet entirely theirs. In the context of marketing, a fundamentally materialistic enterprise, this association carries weight. Freud further noted that toilet training represents one of childhood’s crucial developmental moments: the discovery that producing something generates reliable responses from authority figures. Feces becomes, in essence, the child’s first “gift”—something offered for attention or withheld as an act of rebellion.
By this logic, feces represents an early form of social currency. Centuries later, brands have rediscovered what children learn intuitively: excrement provokes reaction. Whether disgust, embarrassment, or laughter, feces demands attention—even when encountered while scrolling social media on the toilet itself.
When shit works well
Philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin argued that excrement carries profound symbolic weight. It destabilizes social hierarchies (even monarchs defecate), represents transformation, and embodies the cyclical nature of degradation and renewal. Applied to advertising, this theory helps explain why some bathroom-humor campaigns resonate while others repel.
Consider Liquid Death’s collaboration with Good Wipes, which offered consumers the chance to win a personal “buttler” (butler). The campaign’s copy—including lines like “Excellent doo-doo, sir” and “you’re number one at number twos”—transformed a base subject into sophisticated wordplay. The humor worked because it elevated rather than degraded.
Similarly, Who Gives A Crap has successfully repositioned toilet paper as a culturally significant product worthy of discussion. The brand’s approach transcends the product category itself, connecting it to larger values and identity.
By contrast, campaigns like Andrex’s “Scrunch or Fold” or the wipes brand Wype fail because they focus too literally on the mechanics of bodily hygiene rather than the emotional experience surrounding it. They invite consumers to visualize the act itself—an uncomfortable crossing of the boundary between private function and public discourse.
Andrex’s “First Office Poo” campaign, however, succeeds by tapping into a universal anxiety: defecation in the workplace. It transforms this mortifying experience into a relatable, even sympathetic moment. The campaign acknowledges an emotion we’ve all felt and positions the product as an ally.
The broader cultural shift
The prevalence of fecal humor in advertising may indicate something deeper about contemporary culture. The enshittification concept, coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022, describes the seemingly inevitable decline of digital platforms, consumer products, and public services over time. The term itself—deliberately crude—has gained traction as a framework for understanding systemic degradation across multiple domains.
The question emerges: why do excreta metaphors resonate so powerfully when describing cultural and institutional decay?
Freud identified anal-retentiveness as a personality trait characterized by excessive control and rigidity. But he also described the opposite tendency: anal expulsiveness, wherein insufficient boundaries during potty training produce chaotic, undisciplined behavior across all life domains. By extension, cultural enshittification may represent a systemic imbalance—excessive control in some areas, chaos in others.
Perhaps, then, the literal eruption of excrement into mainstream advertising and cultural discourse reflects something beneath the surface of collective consciousness. It serves as a warning signal from the societal gut: something is out of balance.
The protein paradox and unconscious messaging
An adjacent cultural obsession reinforces this interpretation: the protein fetishization sweeping wellness culture. Protein has become ubiquitous to the point of parody—internet users commonly comment “but does it contain protein?” as satire directed at the wellness industry’s algorithmic obsession with macronutrients.
Protein and fiber represent contrasting fixations on bodily function and output. Together, they suggest a culture hyper-focused on consumption and its consequences while remaining squeamish about discussing systemic problems. We willingly engage with crude humor about elimination but resist examining who bears responsibility for the institutions that produce genuine cultural decay.
A diagnosis: The creativity deficit
If excrement’s ubiquity in advertising signals cultural imbalance, the solution may lie in creative renewal. Advertising and marketing serve as culture’s metabolic processing centers—they digest and reflect societal anxieties. When constrained or formulaic, this metabolism stalls.
The parallel is deliberate: when the creative industries operate without genuine freedom to interrogate culture, society becomes intellectually constipated. Its unconscious manifests this blockage through obsessive fixation on undigested nutrients (protein, fiber) and eliminated waste. It’s a symptom of constipation seeking attention through grotesque literalism.
Without creativity functioning as a laxative for culture, brands default to recycled formulas: gut health, digestive wellness, protein optimization. These tropes become so ubiquitous that even transgression loses its power; taboo calcifies into formula.
The proliferation of fecal humor in contemporary marketing reveals more than a simple loosening of social taboos. It suggests a culture attempting to communicate something through crude symbolism—that systems are breaking down, that genuine transformation requires moving beyond surface-level disruption.
Bakhtin’s concept of the “lower bodily stratum” gains relevance here: the body politic functions optimally only when properly nourished and balanced. When something becomes stuck—intellectually, institutionally, creatively—mechanical extraction becomes necessary. As Bakhtin might suggest, sometimes you need a pencil to work out the blockage.
Marketing thrives on attention, and excrement reliably captures it. But attention alone proves insufficient. Genuine creativity determines whether that attention serves meaningful communication or devolves into spectacular noise.
The question facing contemporary advertising is whether it will continue pushing the same tired wellness tropes, protein obsessions, and fecal jokes until transgression becomes formula, or whether it will deploy its metabolic powers to diagnose and address what actually troubles the cultural system.