The soap wars are back – but this is no set-to between long-standing TV rivals EastEnders and Coronation Street.
Instead, this is a fight between glamorous influencers for supremacy over the nation’s laundry baskets. And it’s every bit as bitchy as a Queen Vic catfight.
Gone are the 1990s, when radio personality Danny Baker cornered the market for detergent adverts by standing on doorsteps challenging housewives to brighten their whites with a box of Daz.
Today, the big washing brands have turned to young mums like Irish presenter Vogue Williams and Love Island winner Dani Dyer to front the campaigns with the help of their enormous social media followings.
And the latest entrant to the ‘soap wars’ who has set tongues wagging is Molly-Mae Hague, the juggernaut influencer with nearly nine million Instagram fans.
The 26-year-old Love Island star signed a lucrative seven-figure contract with consumer giant Unilever to be the face of Persil and Comfort’s ‘Pure Heaven Scent’ range campaign.
I’m told the partnership couldn’t have come soon enough for Unilever after it wasted millions by rebranding bottles as part of a tie-in with Disney’s live-action Snow White.
Critics panned the movie starring Rachel Zegler as a hopelessly right-on remake and it proved a box-office flop after its premiere in March.
So the firm scrambled to launch its new signing in May, releasing a series of adverts featuring
Molly-Mae and her two-year-old daughter Bambi – who wore a baby-pink fluffy jumper and ballerina tutu.
And last week Molly-Mae stepped up her campaign by sending hampers of her range – which consists of Comfort fabric conditioner and ‘scent booster’ and Persil liquid detergent and non-bio capsules – to her famous friends.
One of these was Love Island pal Maura Higgins, who told her four million followers it was ‘pure heaven for sure’.
While neither Molly-Mae’s face nor name feature on the packaging in the way Disney’s Snow White did, the influencer describes her range as a ‘new match made in laundry heaven’.
Friends of Vogue Williams tell me she is fiercely protective over her image as the modern mum since she signed a seven-figure deal with Fairy detergent in 2019.
The 39-year-old, who is married to Made In Chelsea star Spencer Matthews, was waxing lyrical about ‘fragrance lasting through the day’ alongside her children Theodore, six, Gigi, five, and Otto, three, long before Molly-Mae was a twinkle in an ad firm’s eye.
‘You can only imagine what Vogue thinks about Molly-Mae parking her tanks on Vogue’s lawn,’ said one associate.
‘It feels like such a blatant copy of what Vogue has been doing for years. Molly-Mae could at least try to be original. It took years of hard graft from Vogue to land such a lucrative job and she has worked tirelessly for six years to keep it. Now Molly-Mae is trying to one-up her.’
Another star who could be forgiven for seeing red is Dani Dyer, 28, also a Love Island alumna. She had signed a deal with Surf, and her ‘Perf with Surf’ catchphrase from a 2019 advert went viral.
Her foray on to the detergent scene netted her an estimated £500,000, but as her celebrity waned in the years following her Love Island win in 2018, she was dropped by the brand and replaced with ex-Towie star Gemma Collins.
However, last year, following her high-profile engagement to England and West Ham footballer Jarrod Bowen and the birth of her twin daughters, Dani was once again signed up by Surf, with her face emblazoned nationwide in Home Bargains stores.
One insider tells me: ‘Unilever owns Surf as well as Comfort and Persil. It could very much be seen as Molly-Mae coming for Dani’s gig. Just as Dani is getting back in the game she could get knocked back out again.’
So why is Molly-Mae so appealing to advertisers?
Yes, her social followings dwarf her rivals’ – on YouTube alone she has two million subscribers – but crucially the partner of boxer Tommy Fury has a reality TV show in her marketing arsenal.
Her Amazon docu-series Behind It All began in January and its second part was released in May – just as she launched her Comfort and Persil campaign.
I’m told one of the conditions of her year-long ‘brand ambassador’ deal with Unilever was that some behind-the-scenes footage of the ad campaign would be featured in her show.
And indeed the TV cameras were there with Molly-Mae on set as she shot content for Comfort and Pure, filming her as she coddled her daughter who had burst into tears.
The scene caused the mother to pause and reflect on whether she should be pushing Bambi into the limelight.
Afterwards Molly-Mae said: ‘I think it’s quite a big decision when you are in the public eye and you have a baby, as to your approach with showing them to the public. I hope that she grows to not resent me for having a life where she is thrust into the public eye. The life that Tommy and I have chosen she doesn’t really get a say [in] especially right now because she’s so young.
‘She can’t tell us how she feels about that. Obviously when she’s older she can, and that’s something that we will 100 per cent listen to. At the end of the day, it is being in the public eye that has given us the life that we have.’
And what a life. Molly-Mae lives in a £3million mansion in leafy Cheshire and her detergent deal has reportedly swelled her coffers to a staggering £8million.
Vogue Williams has also done well out of detergent money, living in a £4.5million house in Battersea, south-west London, and is estimated to have £3million in the bank.
Meanwhile, Dani Dyer lives in a £3million seven-bedroom mansion in Emerson Park, Essex, with her footballer husband Jarrod – the couple married in June.
He earns a staggering £150,000 a week, but Dani – who will also star in the new series of Strictly Come Dancing from next month – is said to be worth £7million in her own right.
All three women seem to have made a success of the soap wars, but for how long? Only time, and perhaps next year’s sales figures, will tell.
But as one marketing expert told me, the competitive world of celebrity detergent deals has a certain irony to it.
They said: ‘These companies pay millions for influencers who almost certainly hire cleaners while they pretend to scrub for their social media followers. They must think we’re all stupid.’