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.
I have to say this one went under my radar for some time. However, it is a particularly annoying advert because it is so stupid and pointless. Whoever came up with the concept failed on every single level. Picture a domestic scene where an urban woman, geeky husband and some other random fellow that has just popped in for a cup of coffee, are preparing a meal.
They have a large, modern designer kitchen so it stands to reason they choose to make packet rice in the microwave. The geeky husband goes to take the rice out of the microwave (even though it hasn’t pinged). The microwave door is stuck. The women says in a matter-of-fact voice, “Oh, It won’t come out unless you tell it it has no artificial colours or preservatives.”
There are so many things wrong about the reasoning behind this statement, both philosophical and causal that make it clear that her grasp of reality is very tenuous. Are you fucking crazy? It is rice. It is inanimate. Leaving aside the point that it is the microwave door that is stuck and how rice can summon the power to keep it shut. What the fuck has this got to do with rice anyway? If it has no artificial colours or preservatives, then just fucking say so. What sort of a moron would you have to be not to be able to cook ordinary rice anyway?
Nothing epitimises the cynical attitude of the advertising toward children more than the Mega GoGos. For those that have not seen the advert it is a basically a collecting scam aimed at children. It has no purpose other than to be a money maker for the company that invented it. It follow the lines of a magazine and a toy. The advert exclaims in a truly unjustifiably excited voice:
“Every week collect & build an all-new mega metropolis with head swapping mega GoGos, mystery mini GoGos & cool pods to display. ”
Which translates as:
“Every week collect a cheap plastic toy, that would make the plastic crap in Christmas crackers look as though they had bought and giftwraped in Hamleys, for a very long time and we’ll sell you some other crappy piece of plastic shit to keep them in but you won’t be able to stop buying them because your children will be left out and possibly bullied if this takes off.”
It is just so lazy. Right down to the name. Mega–this, mega-that. It must have taken about five minutes to come up with this. It is not useful, it isn’t even fun and it is not educational. This product has zero value. I hope that even children are too savvy to fall for this. It is mega-shit.
Filed under: Advertising Idiots — Terry Vision @ 10:02 pm January 4, 2010
Sometimes I feel as though certain ads are just taunting me to write a post slagging them off. This time it’s the Go Compare Advert. I have just had enough. Just because the Compare the Market advert was so successful with its adorable Russian oligarch Meerkat, the Go Compare people had to try and come up with a comic character which everyone is going to talk about.
You’ve used Windows 7, right? It’s Microsoft’s new operating system that is going to replace Windows XP. The previous operating system, Windows Vista was so terrible that users were willing to pay extra to have Windows XP installed on their computer rather than have the bloated, nanny operating system. (more…)