Bad-Ads.co.uk

I reserve a special form of hatred for advertisers that try and get you involved in their products. Not content with replaying the same crappy adverts they ask us to do their job for them so that we, the audience, become involved in the product. In this case, making the mundane service of supplying a conduit for porn and torrents a Zen life-changing experience.
In the BT ads, we have this mini soap opera between Jane and Adam, which has been going on for far too long in my opinion. I would like to enlighten you and bring you up to date as to the story so far but I can scarcely give a damn about characters whose life problems can be solved by a wifi connection. Broadly speaking, I think they had a bit of a bust-up and now she is pregnant so he is going to be the first wireless father, whereby he visits his child entirely online saving money on their BT Home Hub and saving money on child maintenance.

Anyway, I digress. In the last completely forgettable ad, we were invited to vote on what should happen in the story. Viewers with less restraint obviously opted for them to get back together again. Unfortunately they didn’t include in the voting options my suggestion that the entire cast be incinerated by a MOAB that accidently fell out of a passing C-130 aircraft because their router was working on the same frequency. Oh and stop charging line-rental for a copper wire that was installed years ago.

If you have an iphone or have ever used one, you will know about the way in which you use gestures to push and drag screens around and they move and react in an intuitive way. Screens scroll across at the same speed at which your finger move and they have a ‘weight’ so they rebound when they reach their limits of travel. Things react in the same way you expect them to in the real world. This not only looks cool but it is somehow more pleasurable and pleasing to use. All pretty great on a phone but tacky, shit and lazy in advertising.
You only have to look at the influence that the iphone interface has had on car adverts for instance. The new Range Rover advert has the pull and drag gesture to change scenery. A Toyota ad has also copied the idea to move the car around and see inside it. It is just laziness on the part of the advertisers. I can picture the scene, ‘Oh the way the iphone works looks cool, lets use that idea and then people will buy it because it associates any crap product vicariously with the iphone which is the current flavour of the month.’

What is worse than a shrieking opera singer wailing ‘Go Compare’ ad nauseam? It is Calypso music juxtaposed with an opera singer wailing ‘Go Compare’ ad nauseam. God. It is fucking annoying. Every time I see this advert, it make me reach for my remote control to turn the sound off.

This opera singer idea just doesn’t work. Give it up already. It doesn’t work because it is a crap idea. It doesn’t work because on a desert island you don’t have a car and even if you did, you don’t need car insurance. It would make a pretty short episode of Bear Grylls. All he would need to do would be wait for the idiot to arrive shouting in his ear to renew his car insurance. I wouldn’t buy anything from the Go Compare website now.

The World Cup is a hell that every four years, for those who couldn’t care less about a bunch of retarded guys kicking a dead cow’s skin around a field, are bored to death by the tedious onslaught of unrealistic hopes and ultimately anti-climatic sentiment that dominates the television. Sensing the cash to be made by the people who sheepishly follow this stuff it means it that the advertisers crowbar any reference into their ads also.

Tesco have another advert in their soap opera-like series of adverts in which we follow a family that live for Club Card Points. (Not so long ago, I seem to remember that they were particularly cash strapped, economising using the club card points to go to the cinema.)
That must have been some economy drive, because the hard times seem to have left them now and they are spending money like nobody’s business, possibly getting into debt, but fuck-it, what about the Club Card points? The fat husband, longs for a flat screen television, hinting that it would be great to watch the World Cup on, to his surprise his wife says, “Treat yourself.”
Then, in another moment, he opines for a comfy chair to watch the World Cup. “Order it.”, his wife says, to his surprise. She further encourages him to buy everything that a stupid, beer-swilling, cretin needs to watch England predictably lose.
The reason for this generosity of spirit? Bloody Club Card points. To escape the imminent tsunami of football tedium, she is intent on putting her family into debt to fund an excursion to a health farm funded by Club Card points.

Maybe I just have a heart of stone but  this advert with laughing gurgling, freaky, cackling babies just makes me cringe. It consists of a succession of babies laughing with a jarring pinging sound. I get the feeling they are trying to condition me like you might with a dog with a clicker during obedience training.

Oh, and the last fat faced, gurgling baby sounds like my grandfather coughing up phlegm from smoking too many Woodbines. When I see this advert now, I just instinctively grab my remote control and press the mute button as it is so painful. It is a terrible advert. Please stop it.

Glade have a bad track record when it comes to adverts. They are the ones that made the almost universally hated ad in which a spoilt brat announces to his mother, “I want to do a poo a Paul’s!” Well done, both disgusting and annoying at the same time. Creators also of the loveless couple who know each others habits so well that the women predicts exactly where to place her air freshener and also how her stupid husband will huff and chuck his stinking sports kit on the chair.

Now they have another in their series of tedious adverts which is set in a boring suburban scene where a group of women are looking at a collection of pebbles that one of the twee, idiot women has collected from every single one of  her holidays. “Where’s this one from”, one women exclaims with interest.

“Oh, that’s from Greece.”

“And this one?”

“That’s from France”

“How about this one?”

That’s an air freshener.” and they fall about  laughing at their mistake because it looks like a pebble, you see, and she mistakes it for a pebble in the collection. Ah, how we laughed.

The Volvic 14-day challenge urges participants to drink a litre and a half of bottled water a day. In this video diary style ad we are introduced to an annoying twat called Jimmy  who is so amiable, enthusiastic and gullible. Jimmy is apt to saying stupid things like or “That’s a lot of water, but if it makes me feel better then I’ll give it a bash.” or “I’ve got five minutes off work and yeah I’m gonna have a cheeky Volvic.”

It would be good, if on day 14 of his Volvic challenge he ended up in intensive care with some cheeky water poisoning.

The idea of drinking 1.5 litres of bottled water to keep you hydrated is based on the amount of water that the body is supposed to lose each day and drinking 2 litres a day is much favoured by  some supermodels. However, the idea is completely fallacious but the myth of drinking extra water persists despite experiments which disprove that additional drinking water has any benefit to your health or skin. Most people are well hydrated by the water in the food and drink in their diet so drinking bottled water this is completely unnecessary.

It must have been a great day in the office when advertisers persuaded people to buy bottled water at a more than 10,000 times the cost of tap water (source: Times Online) and we haven’t even got on to the environmental effect of making, transporting and disposal of the plastic bottles.

This cheesy infomercial is for a very expensive electric shaver that has been appearing on late night television in the UK. It had to have come from the US because it is the exactly the type of hard-sell that doesn’t work over here. I don’t know about you, but when shaving, I have never thought, ‘Sure I have this normal electric shaver which works fine but if only it were smaller than the area of a credit card but still unable to fit in my wallet because it is as thick as a pack of playing cards.’ It is a bad idea because it is a solution for a problem that doesn’t exist, like a combined bowler hat and duck decoy.

It is, however, the perfect shaver for people that live in their car or at a desk. To demonstrate how well it works we are shown how it is possible to shave under water, especially if you don’t have any facial hair to begin with. (Surely a more convincing demonstration would be someone with a heavy beard having it removed by the shaver?)
But to lessen the blow of the hefty amount of cash you will need to part with for the Micro Force, they then go on to tell you how you will also get a MASSIVE case filled with an impressive array of grooming implements, including nail clippers, a disposable lighter (wtf?) and  what looks like a shoehorn. This advert is truly persuasive but unfortunately it is persuades you to buy a BIC.

Cats are okay, I suppose but most of the time they are just purring parasites that just stick with people for the food they can get. In the Whiskas chicken advert I think it is trying to say that their cat food is as good as fried chicken cooked by their owner. The advert shows the cat in the kitchen looking eagerly at the frying chicken. It then puts its paws on the work top. Unlike many people who think, what a cute cat. I just think Toxoplasmosis. I think it is really disgusting to have cats in the kitchen where they will inevitably jump on to the work surfaces. People say that cats are clean, but Toxoplasma gondii is a parasite that can be spread through cat faeces. Imagine the scenario; Cat has a shit, buries it in the garden and then comes into the house, jumps on to the work top where you prepare food. It just makes me feel sick.
Why should cats have food that is tastes like human food anyway? They are quite happy hunting birds or catching mice and rats. I suspect that it meant to appeal to the owners because cat food smells so disgusting that it makes you gag.

This is beginning to feel as though Halifax are deliberately making annoying adverts to piss everyone off. This time in their moronic radio show they are talking about ISAs and the women co-presenter tries to be cool and links the acronym ISA with the  Hip-Hop song, ‘Ice, Ice, baby’ by Vanilla Ice. Incidentally, Vanilla Ice is intrinsically not cool being a white rapper. His work is seen as derivative and mainstream but it is exactly the sort of music that might be considered cool if you are a out of touch bank manager who still thinks that Stravinsky’s, Rite of Spring to be a dangerous work.

I hate it when banks to try act cool and ‘down with the kids’. They end up looking like William Hague wearing a baseball cap  backwards or David Cameron chasing the popular vote in any television interview.  This is how those idiots in the Halifax ad comes across. Not cool, not funny, just embarrassing.

Given the distrust of financial institutions in general, financial products and light hearted entertainment should be kept as far apart as possible. Would you trust your savings with a clown?  ISAs are a good thing if you want to save but this advert is terrible.