Jamie Oliver’s Sainsbury’s sausage ad. (This is not where sausages come from.)
This new advert for Sainsbury's is both baffling and extremely shit.
It starts with Jamie Oliver, a person who no doubt means well but who is, ultimately, fairly annoying, strolling through the countryside, talking purposefully to no-one in particular about the concept of "taste" while wearing wellies. This cements rather clumsily the idea of natural goodness, the great outdoors and good, honest food.
As Jamie walks, he gradually runs out of breath. You half expect him to start reaching for the inhaler but thankfully he reaches his destination without dying. That destination is where the ad gets a little weird, and also becomes forehead-slappingly dumb. Because instead of this field being full of farm animals, as you might plausibly expect, it actually contains a frying pan full of cooked sausages. Before viewers have time to ask questions such as "Why?" or "How?", Jamie takes a bite from a banger and informs us that it represents:
Everything that Sainsbury's stands for, in a bite.
This advert sums up the relationship Sainsbury's would like its customers to have with their food. Rather than provide illumination about the process of husbandry and slaughter that goes into the highly mechanised process of making a sausage, Sainsbury's prefers to create the idea that fully cooked sausages magically appear in the middle of a pretty field after being apparently conjured from nothing by Jamie fucking Oliver.
Other shit things include dismal overacting and, at the end, the way Jamie gazes wistfully off to the right of the screen like a model in a 1970s Littlewoods catalogue underpants photo spread.
You might also be interested in this. Think of it as an outtake from the Oliver shoot.
John Lewis advert seems to misunderstand Always A Woman lyrics
The world is sitting with big, fat tears rolling down their faces watching this advert for John Lewis, at least that's what's the internet is telling us.
Really? The first time I became aware of it was when people started telling us about it on the Suggest an AdTurd form and my housemate started throwing things at the telly.
The first thing I thought was Bill Fucking Joel. I'm not sure how lyrics like:
She can kill with a smile / She can wound with her eyes
or;
She can ruin your faith with her casual lies
really invite me to buy into this touching life story. To me it suggests deep duplicity and cruelty and, of course, she also 'steals like a thief'.
That's just for starters though. Because she will also 'carelessly cut you and laugh while you’re bleedin'. This woman sounds awful! She's a sociopath!
I'd suggest that the ad is missing a few scenes. The one where she gets backscuttled by a bloke at work and then lies to her husband about it.
The bit where she embezzles tens of thousands of pounds from the charity she works for as an fund-raising manager.
Or the bit where she wallops her kid and locks her overnight in the pantry for making a mess in the kitchen. And why not take that 'laugh while you're bleeding' line literally?
Hell, it may not sell as many teasmaids, but it'd be a much better advert.
• FYI: The song is performed here by Fyfe Dangerfield from the Guillemots - a massively overrated band in AdTurds' book
Jimmy’s little cheeky Volvic on the Volvic 14 day challenge
Mineral water company Volvic wants you to think that by spending lots of money on something that's available for free from a fucking tap, this will somehow make you a better person. The worst thing about its 14-day challenge advert is floppy-haired dickhead, "Jimmy", who attempts to persuade you of this.
"I've got to drink a litre and a half a day for 14 days," he whines. No, you haven't. Actually, you really haven't got to, have you? You could drink a different brand of overpriced, environmentally unsound mineral water. Or you could go to the tap. Or you could drink orange juice. Or elk blood.
"So I've got five minutes off work, and, er yeah, I'm gonna have a little cheeky Volvic," he half-heartedly drawls. Bullshit! "Cheeky Volvic"? What the hell are you talking about?
Each one of these segments, you'll notice, is presented with the Volvic challenger supposedly twiddling with the camera and running away to say his little piece, like it's a video diary. It isn't though, obviously. It's actually, you know, an advert.
Finally, we see Jimmy wearing a baseball glove and idiotic fitness clothes (including un-ironic headband), sort of galloping away to the right like a gay horse, having regained his sporting prowess. What an absolute bellend. I thought Evian's dancing babies were bad but I am now resolute that I will literally never buy Volvic ever again.
Redknapp, Wright and Venables form worst band ever
Two footballing Del Boys and one of the most charmless and unwatchable 'presenters' on TV.
Maybe, just maybe, these are three of the worst people you could get to front your latest ad.
Tiger Woods flays remaining soul for Nike
Jesus Christ man, have some SELF-RE-COCKING-SPECT!
Just For Men advert – More Ties
Just For Men adverts have always been on the radar because of their lazy cro-Magnon concepts and appalling dubbing. In fact, the dubbing tends me to be so bad it leaves me to speculate as whether it's deliberately bad - designed to leave a lasting 'WTF?' pinballing around your bonce.
The set-ups tend to follow a pattern: Man notices grey hair; man is told by wife or colleague that he will be more sexy, virile and generally cool with dark hair; man gets dark hair.
This one is different, and seems to feature something hitherto taboo in these kind of incredibly conservative memes: a single-parent family and a jobless lead.
All of this may appear rather brave, though it should be pointed out that it's easy to infer that the guy in this ad is single and jobless because of his greying hair.
And, before we go lauding the company in question for its open-mindedness in featuring a single-parent family - has there ever been one of these ads featuring a black guy? Or a gay man? Possibly in the States, but in the UK? Just asking.
There's a lot of fun to be had in this ad speculating as to just what kind of catastrophe has befallen this guy. Did his wife leave him because of his grey hair? Did she run off with a bald guy? And just what is up with this relationship, where a teenage child presents her father with hair dye and reassuring advice?
Troubling questions. I like to think he goes to the bathroom, tears out his stupid dyed hair and strings himself up from the shower rail with his tie. He didn't get the job after all.
‘Step outside posh boy’ and other political spoofs
There's been a lot of political advert spoofery around recently, what with MyDavidCameron and some other efforts from the Right that were either nasty or just plain shit.
The Grauniad and Saatchi & Saatchi have got in on the act today with a series of very unfunny spoof election posters implying that Gordon Brown is to be presented as a kind of hard nut in the election campaign.
Political spoofs have to be either pointed or funny, in my opinion - preferably both. These spoofs are neither.
I happen to think that a lot of the MyDavidCameron ads were pretty funny. There were a lot of weak ones, and there were some that went for the jugular, rather than aiming for laughs, but a few of them really amused me – which is why they were so popular.
It's interesting, then, to see a professional advertising agency fail to be funny or pointed, where everyday geeks, web types and the listless Mac-wielding millions managed OK.
'Vote Labour - or else' is the extraordinarily tired slogan on these posters, one of which actually has Brown dressed as The Terminator, along with the nonsensical slogan 'Because I'll never go away'. They're fucking rubbish.
Really, I suppose it's uncharitable to knock April Fool's Day spoofs - at least they're trying to show the human side of politics and journalism eh?
Then again, when adverts are this shit, why pull punches?
