Finally Figured Out Why Charmin Uses Cartoon Bears in Ads

A long-standing advertising mystery has been solved. Why does Charmin use cartoon bears to sell their toilet paper?

There’s no way you haven’t seen these ads. They’ve Charmin Bears have been the public face of the company since the year 2000.  There are multiple families of bears. The red family, the blue bear family and, originally, a family of brown bears sang the praises of Charmin.

One particularly perplexing ad has the red brother bear singing about how clean his “hiney” is while waggling his bare/bear behind to the audience.

Even Saturday Night Live has acknowledged the oddness of this 20 plus year campaign.

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After seeing the Charmin bears commercial for the 3^rd time during the Texans game on Saturday, it suddenly came to me: Charmin uses spokes-bears because of the old saying, “Does a bear ***t in the woods.”

Think about it. Bears don’t use toilet paper. As far as I know only humans (and maybe a trained monkey) use toilet paper. Even if animals did use toilet paper bears would STILL be a weird choice. Because, you know, they’ve got so much hair on their hind haunches T.P. would probably only make an even bigger mess.

Here’s how it probably went:

AD EXEC 1: Mr. Whipple is dead! We need a new spokes character for the Charmin account.

AD EXEC 2: How about…bears?

AD EXEC 1: What? Why bears?

AD EXEC 2: You know…because bears are famous for s*****ng in the woods.

AD EXEC 1: Henderson! You’re a genius!

When I shared this theory with Joanna, she made the “mind blown” gesture. That’s how I know I’m probably right.