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.
One series of adverts that is rapidly starting to get on my nerves are the Halifax adverts. It seems I am not alone. Congratulations on pushing back the boundaries of advertising tyranny. First we had Howard, bottle lensed bespecticled bank manager, singing about their latest banking products to popular show tunes or something like that. I cannot remember exactly as my mind has repressed those memories.
Now we have a load of retarded, obese bankers packed into radio studio presenting a show with the inane stupidity that only Radio One can muster. You will get £5 a month if you pay in a thousand pounds every month. Sound like a good deal? Not so fast. I don’t think this is anything for customers to be raving about as this is an interest rate of 0.5% only on the first £1000.
Anyway I digress. We instinctively know the product is crap. This blog is about venting my spline against the advert. In fact there are a number of adverts now. One has them high-fiving each other. Like Jerry Seinfeld, I believe high-fiving is such a low form of primate communication. As he says, even some apes can do sign language now but it seems like a suitable method of communication for the unctuous, knuckle-dragging Halifax staff.
Another advert has them hosting a phone-in show for some inexplicable reason, as a reward, we can choose a bang of a large gong or the ‘reward horn.’ The hapless Halifax customer chooses the reward horn and there is a large Parp from the horn. I think this is a strange sound and that subliminally, it represents the booby prize as in ‘wah wah-wah, wahhhh.’
All the adverts are odious and hide the fact that while they are very vocal about the money that we get by putting money in I don’t hear so many tubas and gongs about their share of the £37 billion pounds of government money used to bail them out.
Oh no! It has just dawned on me that the Christmas adverts are starting. Only a few more days and every advert will be for a crappy compilation CD or Argos advert with bloody Noddy Holder shouting “It’s Chrrristmmassss!”
It is definitely the worst time of year for television advertising.
A few year’s ago I was fortunate enough to escape the commercial hell by going to Goa over the Christmas period.
Although they have meld of religious beliefs, there is a strong Catholic community and so they also follow Christmas but all was quite (except for the barking dogs) until the actual day.
This advert has simple concept. Take someone that uses your product and get them to talk about it, then people will go out and buy it. Well it is seems like a good idea but it backfires if you choose someone that is clinically insane. Seriously, this woman takes enthusiasm to a whole new level.
There is a thought in advertising that the more annoying the advert, the more it will stick in the mind and therefore the more it will influence people into buying your product. This is complete tosh as exemplified by the We Buy Any Car Advert.
They must have spent all their money buying cars because there was only about 5p left to make this crappy advert.
It looks like it was made by a six year old child with a donated PC from the late 90s and the earliest edition of Adobe Flash. Cut out car shapes like you used to find in Fuzzy Felt move along a motorway not making it to the other end of the screen before being transformed into a sold sign. (If you watch the advert closely, they don’t buy every car. There are several cars that get away without being bought.)
The sound track is equally naff. It sound like a variation of the Mc Mental Chav dance and also doubles as sensory torture for use by the American government at Guantanamo Bay, as it is the just the continual repetition of the phrase “We buy any car” with a vocoded “.com” tacked onto the end of the sentence.
It should be a cardinal rule that children never appear in advertisements. I believe that children should not be seen and not be heard. The Glade Touch n Fresh ad just makes me cringe every time I see it. If you haven’t seen the advert, an all too understanding parent is talking to their child that is about to shit their pants but won’t go to the toilet in their own home.
Stupid enough but the whining little brat when questioned why not states, in the most annoying voice. “I want to do a poo, at Paul’s” (the implied reasoning is that because they have a better class of air freshener.) If had said such a thing when I was a child, my mother would have clouted me around the head and justly so.
But the extensive use of scatological references makes this ad sickening and annoying at the same time. Even, the concept is flawed. When you have a poo (at Paul’s or otherwise) you don’t smell it. Somehow over the years your nose has adapted to the smell. If you go back in after the event you can. Therefore, the only reason you would use an air freshener is as courtesy to others.
So this advert is saying that the child is going out of his way to be altruistic so that no one else need smell his disgusting poo. I am baffeled how anyone could come up with this concept for an advert. It is just terrible and that is why it disearves a place in this blog.
What is the most annoying advert in history? An advert so bad that you remember it long after it has ceased being shown. My candidate has to be the AOL adverts. At this time the Internet was still a novelty and most people used a dial-up connection to get online.
To some people even connecting to the internet was a techie thing to do. AOL decided that they would guide people with a computerised Mary Poppins character called Connie that would appear, uninvited, in your house and take control of your computer. Much like the annoying bastard paperclip, ‘Clippy’ that used to appear when you began to type anything in Word except with an annoying bob haircut and whiny voice.
AOL Advert most annoying in History
Unfortunately, the video can only convey a fraction of the patronising, annoying quality of the adverts as there does not appear to be a copy of the original ad on YouTube.
The reason why this advert is my nominee for the most annoying advert in history is Connie’s patronising attitude when ‘helping’ people. As I recall, I think that she tells the man in a rather stern voice, ‘click here’. For all she knows the guy could be a CPU designer with a PhD in computer science. (Although this does beg the question why he chose AOL in the first place.)
The other distinctive thing about this advert was her dress, which had scrolling screenshots of various different website. There was a parody of the advert in which the screenshots were porn websites.
Just like torture in a Chilean prison cell, the memory of this advert is still fresh in my brain even though the character was first shown in the late 1990s. If you can think of a better candidate for a more annoying advert then let me know.
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