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.
As someone with a scientific background nothing is more likely to get my back up than people messing with the laws of physics in the context of reality. This is not exactly the same version of the advert I am describing but it suffers from the same problem at the very beginning.
It shows an extreme close-up of a drop of water hanging on the side of the water bottle, in the background is a blurred roller coaster, with an in focus image of the roller coaster in the water drop. I don’t have problem with the focusing issue that is just the depth of field of the camera lens but rather the image within the drop itself. Even the magnification of the image in the drop would have been to trivial to write about.
If you look at the physics of spherical lenses, which is a rough approximation to a water drop, it will produce an inverted image if the object is beyond the focal length and for a large object such as a roller coaster, it is so the image should be inverted. (Have a look at the image formed in a raindrop on a pain of glass.)
If advertisers are willing to play with the physical reality of the world, then one has to ask what other facts would they would distort to sell their product. It is just wrong.
Apart from the fact that advertising is too frequent. It is always so loud when compared with the sound in the programmes. I almost always have to reach for the remote control to turn down the sound or mute it completely.
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) receives hundreds of complaints each year and yet they are found to be within the rules. Currently, the BCAP TV Advertising Standards Code states that: “ads must not be excessively noisy or strident.
The problem arises in the way that the sound is measured. When testing the level of sound it is the peak volume that is measured. However, advertisers in an attempt to make the advert as attention grabbing as possible compress the sound making the quite sounds louder but keeping the peak sound levels within the rules. The result is a sound that is subjectively louder than it would be if it had been recorded naturally.
