Match.com ‘accidental duet’ advert
I hate shit adverts...
...like the one with that dick for Jacob's Creek.
But then again...
...then again...
That's just me.
Actually, not it's not.
That one's shit, and so is this one..
It's smug and sickly...
...and insufferably twee.
Now fuck off.
The lower middle-class, regional, porky, ugly bloke in the Tesco advert
You can almost view the casting notes on this hapless chump. Lower middle-class, regional, porky, pretty ugly.
That way he's not threatening you see, and all you lower middle-class, regional, porky, pretty ugly people can relate to the lower middle-class, regional, porky, pretty ugly bloke.
Tesco isn't a massive, omniscient behemoth spunking cash on racing cars or golf tournaments. It does spend an estimated £90m on advertising in the UK of course, putting it fifth in the highest-spenders in 2009.
Advertising that's currently being spent on how much Tesco hates to spend your hard-earned cash on, er, advertising.
Weird.
Argos ad updates Bing Crosby
A human beatbox Bing Crosby? What larks!
Except... What does it mean? I can't detect anything within the advert that links a rude-boy Crosby to Argos' back-to-front shopping experience.
There's some mention of stuff that's 'up to date', but that's really pretty weak. It could have actually worked, with just a different tagline: 'Not what you'd expect' or 'Different from the rest'. Anything that ties the ad to the product.
Another problem, and this is obviously a judgement call, is that it's not particularly charming. It actually comes across a little bit as making fun of Crosby.
Where does the meme go from here? Olivier's Richard III reciting KRS-ONE's seminal condemnation of the NYPD, Sound of Da Police? Nureyev parkouring his way through Shoreditch? Simon Rattle mashing up some earbleed gabba in a field near the M25?*
Still, what an original idea, eh? Except it's not, it's just like VW's 'Original Updated' advert for the Golf a few years ago.
That ad had Gene Kelly's Singin' In The Rain spot updated, with dancing from David Elsewhere. I thought it was brilliantly conceived, executed and rather lovely.
And it made sense. Because the Golf has been around for yonks, but it's been updated, see?
And it's funny, and engaging and serves to enhance the original. Kelly's family OKed the ad because Gene had always been a supporter of new, innovative dance.
I think this Argo ad fails on all of those counts. It's not hateful, it just seems muddled. Like the whole Argos shopping experience.
* In the event of any of these things happening, I want ten per cent
Eden Mobility stairlift advert
Can't get upstairs to shag your 75-year-old wife? Get a stairlift you dirty old bugger!
Halifax Isa Isa Baby advert
I simply don't have the word to explain how irredeemably awful this is. Perhaps the word hasn't been invented yet.
There've only been two or three ads in my entire life that have driven me to turn off the television; this is one.
It's unbearable, insufferable, enraging. It makes me incandescent with hatred, despair and impotent fury. It crushes my spirit. It makes me want to vomit, spasm uncontrollably and punch myself in the face. It makes me want to find the people responsible and pound them until we're both crying.
When I see it I think of fire, screaming and post-nuclear landscapes. It makes me long for death's icy embrace and an eternity in endless, unknowable limbo.
It's an awfulness so deep and broad it's like some abstract notion of evil; the merest hint of which is so fundamentally disturbing it would drive kind, sane men to murderous havoc.
It makes me want to kill.
And, still, none of this sums up how awful it is. It's simply beyond me. The only upside it that he have glimpsed the abyss. We have looked into it, and it has gazed deep into our souls.
If we can survive this, we can survive anything.
Jenny Craig Cheryl Baker advert
The Jenny Craig programme seems to be some sort of diet scheme for the feckless, in that the company delivers food to its customers as they can't be relied upon to go down to Tesco and not buy a load of jammy bloody doughnuts.
Cheryl Baker is not an obvious choice for an ad to my mind - having been off the telly and out of the charts for some years - but maybe she's a good representation of the Jenny Craig target demographic.
Baker also appears in the advert half way through her diet programme, and as a result still looks a tad on the heavy side.
The money shot in these ads - and frequently on the front of fitness DVDs shilled by the likes of Sonya out of Eastenders and Michelle Bass off Big Brother - is of a dumpy, depressed and dowdy woman clad in an ill-fitting, unflattering bikini contrasted with an airbrushsed pic of a smiling, trim, buff and incredibly-happy, newly-thin woman proclaiming the success of the exercise regime.
This is, of course, about as dishonest as marketing ever gets, and newspapers always seem to be full of relapsed thirty-something women proclaiming how miserable these diet programmes made them.
It's a sad reflection of a society that pushes images of fat women as unhappy and ugly and thin ones as ecstatic and successful; and these women are the poster-people for a cultural theory of alienation.
Bizarrely the Jenny Craig ad doesn't even manage this staple of diet adverts, so the ad is like an episode of Changing Rooms without the reveal.
If Cheryl has any sense she'll release her own diet plan, consisting of an egg-based diet. If you have to ask what it would be called, you're clearly younger than I.
10:10 – No pressure AKA cut CO2 or we’ll kill you
Trying to convince people to green up their lives a little bit is a tricky one at best, especially on the internet where various forms of naysayers and- HOLY FUCK SHE EXPLODED THE FUCKING CHILDREN!
Jesus. Anyway, as I was saying it's tough to convince people of the need to scale back their personal carbon emissions when our whole economy rests on the very concept of- WHAT THE COCKING FUCK? THOSE PEOPLE JUST ERUPTED LIKE A GEYSER OF SHIT IN AN INDUSTRIAL PIG FARM!
What makes it all the more difficult is when you try to patronise or shock people, and this 10:10 advert is a case in SHITTING CRIKEY! DAVID GINOLA JUST EXPLODED LIKE A PORN STAR IN JENNA JAMESON'S FACE!
The problem is any message is lost amongst the shock value inherent in TWUNTING HECKERS! HE JUST TORE APART GILLIAN ANDERSON LIKE AN ANGRY CHEF SHREDDING A CRISPY DUCK!
GAME OVER, MAN! GAME OVER!
HOLY FUCK!
Acuvue: Like a nagging housewife screaming in your face
I don't love Ghost Whisperer before you megaLOL my ass off with comments. It's a pile of crap. A big, steaming pile of crap ... albeit with a very shiny cherry on top.
But Acuvue's sponsorship of Living TV's 'first look' slot means GW is ruined beyond redemption and I cannot forgive the contact lens pedlars for that.
You see, for the very seem reason I am forced to watch Ghost Whisperer (I'm a sad proto-middle-aged man with a wife and child) I can find a very good reason to enjoy it - Jennifer Love Hewitt. Or more precisely, JLH's kit.
The star of this mindless girl show is a mistress of inappropriate dress. She heads to the store in a corset and knee-high boots. She manages her antiques store in a skirt so tight she can barely put one leg in front of the other.
She skips to the coffee house in a flouncy dress which flaps in the wind like a ... you get the picture. Manna from heaven for a saddo like me, and just about enough to make the show bearable.
In one episode Jennifer is possessed by a pole-dancer. I shit you not.
So why in the name of Satan's shit-pipe is this ambient ogle fest interrupted by sponsor's ads from contact lense firm Acuvue? Their super-compressed audio blasts punctuate every commercial break - start and finish.
Bright and loud, they contrast with the show's pseudo atmospheric vibe and feature themes such as 'take the kids to school' and 'be plain in front of a mirror'.
I feel like my wife is leaning in to me on the couch and shouting 'stop looking at her arse you fat tosspot' to deliberately wake me from my state of quasi-arousal.
They might as well remind you to put the suitcase back in the loft, take the bins out and ask your mam if she can fucking babysit (again) next Saturday.
Leave me alone Acuvue. LEAVE ME ALONE.
Go Compare ad infinitum
Some things seem to be a fact of life these days; things we hate; things that add a little spot of irritation to our lives; things that just make us want to punch the nearest face until it's just a bloody pulp.
Traffic jams, road works, premiership footballers, Piers Morgan, X-Factor, train strikes, the News of the World, Kelvin MacKenzie, Kay Burley and... adverts.
Were adverts always designed to annoy us? Probably, watch any selection of ads from the 50s and there are catchy jingles, overenthusiastic actors, glitzy sets and repetitive slogans. All there to burrow into your consciousness like a parasitic wasp on a caterpillar.
But it's only recently that adverts have become actively hard to escape. Sure, the way we watch television these days means we consume more adverts than when it was just the good old BBC, cheap'n'cheerful ITV and young upstart Channel 4.
But the way we consume across a number of media means there are more routes of attack for advertisers. Print, radio, online, cinema, mobile, interactive... All are simply roads into your consciousness, ready to be exploited.
And what roads. The absurd thing is, you choose to watch them. You sit, supine, while they sap your will to live.
You even seek them out on the internet to confirm how much you hate them. Advertisers must be frotting themselves senseless.
What else to make of people who come to this blog seeking to watch an advert that drives them around the bend? An advert that could almost be pitched at kids, it's so ridiculous.
An advert that draws LOLz and ROFLz like it's a dramatic chipmunk. Only the dramatic chipmunk never wanted you to fill in your car insurance details on its site in order to save twenty quid. It's sheer, evil genius.
Go Compare seems to annoy people much more than any other ad on the TV. Sure it's annoying, but it doesn't actually bother me as much as many others.
Readers searching for the ad and ending up here seem almost driven to homicidal rages by it; here are some examples of what AdTurds reads have been searching for:
go compare ad fuck
i fucking hate go compare
go compare ads fucking shit
go compare advert racist friday
go compare arse
go compare died
i fucking hate go compare adverts
Who'd have thought Gio Compario could stir up such ire. But it's not Gio's fault. We watch them; we seek them out; we Google them; we buy the t-shirts.
We created him; we nourished him; we sustain him. It pains me to say it, but we get the adverts we deserve.