What was claimed
A WD-40 ad from the 1960s is filled with sexual innuendo.
Our verdict
This isn’t a real ad. It was created as a joke.
WD-40 did not say it “makes screwing a pleasure”
9 September 2021
We’re sorry to spoil the fun, but an old WD-40 ad full of innuendo appears to be a fake.
The ad, which has been shared more than 1,500 times on Facebook, says that the well known brand of lubricant “makes screwing a pleasure” and “gives better penetration”, among other things.
While this may be correct information about WD-40, the text accompanying the ad is not correct when it says: “This is a genuine Ad from 1964 when WD-40 was first released.”
In fact, there are some clues to suggest that the ad is a fake. Most importantly, it misspells the name of its own product, which has been “WD-40” (not “WD 40”) since its origin in San Diego in the 1950s.
It also appears that some of the letters, for instance the words “passage” and “red knob”, have not been distorted by creases in the paper they are supposedly printed on.
Nor is it true to say that WD-40 was first released in 1964. The lubricant itself began to be developed in 1953, and it was launched as a spray in 1958.
Fact checkers in the US decided the ad was a fake in 2014, when they also found the same text on a page of “Dumb Advertising” from a jokes website in 2000.
The joke ad has been re-created in several different forms for sale online.
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as satire because this is not a genuine ad. It was apparently created as a joke.