Crimes against advertising: Ian Wright
Seriously, how on Earth does Ian Wright keep getting television programmes? The man is one of the least appealing characters on British television, but he's been inescapable for the last 20 years.
Wright began his television career in terrible adverts before graduating to terrible chat shows and the like. Why? Who knows? Why not Les Ferdinand, Chris Armstrong, Andy Cole, Teddie Sheringham or Chris Sutton? At least two of them have shown themselves to be much more engaging footie pundits than Wright, who eventually took himself off to Gladiators in search of more serious TV fare, having sulked or squealed his way through Match of the Day for a few years.
For whatever reason, Wright was earmarked as one of the chosen few who'd go on to make more money after his footballing career had finished than he did prior to it (see also Andy Gray, Jamie Redknapp, Chris Kamara).
Most of the adverts below seem to show Wright as a thoroughly irritating tit, acting like a berk in just about every single one. He does show the occasional spark of comic timing, but I've never found him to be anything other than charmless and tiresome.
Interestingly, Five seems to have made an entire advert for its risible Live From Studio Five programme to showcase Wright's most awful traits; chiefly witless, uninformed jabbering.
There are a couple of good ads here – the Nike battle against a footballing demon; the ad for Swedish betting outfit Stryktipset; and the tolerable Ladbrokes cafe effort, though that's largely down to Ally McCoist (see also: Ladbrokes 2010 World Cup ad).
The most egregious – where Wright visited an Arsenal fan's house to use his phone, only for said fan to stand around dribbling and repeating Wright's name – doesn't seem to have found its way onto the interweb.
That's a shame, because it may have served as a warning from history against the following two decades of utterly appalling advertising from the gobby twat.
NB. In addition to all the spots below, Wright has also filmed adverts for Nescafe, Pizza Hut, Asda, Kellogg's, One2One, Privilege, CarpetRight, Thomas Cook and Walkers. He must have a fucking phenomenal agent.
Dead Dad Paul Whitehouse in crass Aviva ad emotional blackmail extravaganza
Emotional manipulation is nothing new in advertising, think of those kindly old faces plugging life insurance for when they're six feet under, but it's surely never been so in-your-face.
Look at poor Dead Dad Paul Whitehouse. He's dead, as is indicated by his white apparel - long such proscribed as the attire for dead human beings, as laid out in Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) - but at least he provided for his kids with a life insurance policy UNLIKE YOU YOU FUCKING MISERLY, IRRESPONSIBLE, SORRY EXCUSE FOR A FATHER.
What happens if you snuff it eh? There'll be no dead Dad to look after your wife and kids BECAUSE YOU SPENT THAT CASH ON A FUCKING FLATSCREEN TV RATHER THAN PUTTING A BIT OF MONEY AWAY EVERY MONTH, DIDN'T YOU? YOU UTTER BASTARD?
No matey, the only people who'll be around your house when you're six feet under ROTTING IN HELL ARE THE FUCKING BAILIFFS. SELLING YOUR KIDS AND TOUCHING YOUR MISSUS INAPPROPRIATELY.
Unless it's actually Paul Whitehouse himself, bringing your poor widowed wife flowers and gifts of computer games for the little 'uns.
Because maybe that's what Paul Whitehouse will be doing, when you're brown bread. Getting his feet under the table, shagging YOUR wife in YOUR bed and wearing YOUR fucking slippers. And your kids... now they're calling HIM Dad.
All because you didn't take out that life insurance policy with Aviva.
Masturbation innuendo no longer present in Canesten advert
So, it seems there's a new advert for Canesten's thrush treatment that doesn't include the cunning innuendo 'leaving you feeling yourself again'.
I find it very difficult - if not impossible - to believe that the original wording wasn't deliberate; either as an in-joke or as a means of making the ad stand out.
Still, regrettably, there's a new version that rewords the final line as 'you'll soon feel like yourself again'.
Booo! Bring back the wanking gag!
Check out the original and the version currently airing below.
Worst adverts of 2010: results
So, with a sense of inevitability I'm here to name Halifax as the most despised adverts of 2010, running away with over one fifth of the vote in the worst adverts of 2010 stakes.
These adverts certainly annoyed me - the Ice Ice Baby one particularly drove me to turn the television off on at least one occasion - but they seemed to drive AdTurds readers to frothing, spasming apoplexy. Some of the keyword queries and comments were actually chilling to behold.
It's easy to see why these ads have irritated people so. Their very raison d'etre is to annoy anyone who sees or hears them. You know it. They know that you know it. You know that they know that you know it. It's like a restless tween asking you the same question over and over again simply to get on your wick.
Halifax is pretty much alone in the banking industry in deploying these tactics in its advertising, which have been widely adopted by price comparison sites; a kind of carpet-bombing of your consciousness with concentrated naff. These weapons are not laser-guided, they have no precision. They are the advertising equivalent of daisy cutters and there will be collateral damage.
The point of these adverts, certainly for price-comparison sites, is simply to embed a name and impression in your mind so that when you need to insure your car those Go Compares and meerkats and Omid Djalilis are right at the front of your mind. There's little customer loyalty in these most volatile of markets or much to differentiate one offering from another, which is why they must resort to pester power when it comes to putting their brands out there.
Banks have normally eschewed these tactics, with most preferring to put themselves over as rather stuffy, slightly dour but eminently trustworthy places to keep your hard-earned; think of the old-fashioned image of the stuffed shirt bank manager. NatWest sticks out in my mind as attempting to engender some sort of affection among potential customers with ads decrying the transition of bank buildings into trendy winebars and its recent - rather silly - customer charter adverts.
TSB liked to be the bank that said yes; Lloyds had its black horse; Santander has Wild Beasts and Lewis Hamilton; HSBC has those Gambon-voiced efforts that place it firmly as a global banking behemoth, which it is.
But Halifax has thrown off any attempt to make it look respectable, trustworthy, serious or even worthy of affection. It's going out of its way to annoy customers and potentials alike; displaying its staff as blithering twats and incompetents as if they were working in a shit leisure centre in a sitcom.
Clearly Halifax thinks this works as they've been ploughing this furrow since they launched Howard Brown onto an unsuspecting world a decade ago.
What's even more remarkable about Halifax's effort to place it as the Ryanair of the banking sector is that, a couple of years ago as part of HBOS, it nearly went down completely partly due to mind-boggling exposure to its own incautious lending, taking the rest of the UK banking sector and the national economy with it. At one point, no-one knew whether cash machines across the UK would dispense any money come the following Monday. A shotgun marriage to Lloyds followed, along with tens of billions of public money.
How has Halifax - admittedly only part of what's now an enormous toxic-bank clusterfuck - responded to nearly destroying, erm, money? Not with a mea culpa, or an element of contrition notable in things like NatWest's 'customer charter' adverts but with its most annoying advert yet.
This is our reward for bailing out the banking sector. Something that's beamed into your home on a daily basis with the express intention of putting you in a bad mood. The alternative to saving the banks may have been unthinkable, but the idea of societal apocalypse seems almost preferable when viewing the Halifax adverts.
Worst advert of 2010 - results and analysis
As mentioned, Halifax ran away with it in the end, but it looked like an equal three-way tie for a while, with Go Compare and Iceland performing strongly until the last week of voting. WeBuyAnyCar made a strong late surge too.
If this were any kind of serious attempt to find the most hated ad of the year, it would require some effort to measure the frequency of the ads and peoples' exposure to it through scheduling times - and determining the channels on which they were broadcast.
As it is we can probably afford slightly more bile towards some of the more obscure ads as, presumably, they were much less viewed than others.
The thing of it is, the results for the top four - if not a majority of the adverts featured here - will be seen as a positive for the brands the advertise, as they're exclusively of the 'exposure through annoyance' genre. By voting for them, you've validated them. Sucks, huh?
'Other' answers suggested by readers included the following:
Sainsbury's double points
LLoyds TSB
Comparethemarket.com
Funky Pigeon
The Times online
Talk Talk
Shots’ ten best vids of 2010
Shots is a bit like the Face magazine to Marketing Week's Financial Times of the advertising industry, though it's not exclusively on ads. Assorted virals, music vids and trailers also feature in what is mainly a look at cool stuff and creativity within the industry.
It's a bit wanky (they've got their own embeddable vid players for crying out loud - these people are serious multimedia nodes) but it does appeal to the part of me that admires adverts and the like as unique, intense art forms that can be absolutely superb. Shots compiled a top ten, well, things of 2010 - some of which are adverts.
No Go Compare, Halifax or Iceland here - though some old favourites and old enemies do rear their heads at some point.
Old Spice: The Man Your Man Should Smell Like
AdTurds approves. Brilliant campaign, executed superbly.
OK Go: This Too Shall Pass
The latest iteration of Honda's Cog advert. Impressive, but they didn't exactly get there first.
Puma: Hard Chorus
Mmmmm. Juxtaposition. Well done.
Philips: DarkRoom
Stunning, but what the hell is going on? Little Blade Runner riff, more than a tad on the edge. Cool. But is that enough?
John Lewis: Always A Woman
No, no, no, no, no.
Nike: Write The Future
Soccergasm #1.
Dulux: Let's Colour
I like stuff like this. Don't care what anyone says.
Adidas: Cantina
A stilted, awkward cashgasm that's not original in the least.
Nokia: Dot
Lovely little piece that combines nice visuals with showing off the product. Wonderful.
Levi's: Ready To Work
Mmmmmmmmmmm. Not sure. Nice idea, now convinced by the execution. Next up: Phileas Fogg tries to turn Consett into something other than a shithole, using mignons morceaux.
Is it Morgan Freeman on the Morethan adverts?
More Than's 'Morethan Freeman' adverts, which riff off Morgan Freeman's folksy voiceovers from such films as The Shawshank Redemption, have inspired a lot of attention recently.
The most vexatious seem to be whether the voice in question is Morgan Freeman (it's not) and whether More Than had to seek the permission of Freeman to copy his voice (apparently they did).
AdTurds spies suggest that not only was Freeman's permission sought, the drawling actor also - allegedly - received a hefty lump sum for his (lack of) trouble.
And someone apparently from More Than helpfully popped up on the site the other day to explain that of course More Than sought permission before 'blatantly ripping off' his voice - their words, not mine.
My beef with the advert, which I quite like up until the last bit where the cheap pun and trying meme become horribly apparent, is that it plays on the borrowed interest from Freeman, and allows - if not invites - viewers to believe that Freeman is actually doing the voiceover.
A few people have poured scorn on this suggestion, pointing out that it's clearly that little fella at the end of the ad who is called 'Morethan Freeman' which, I think you'll agree, sounds nothing like Morgan Freeman.
Here's what fretful AdTurds have been typing into their search engine in droves (about 20K) over the past week. Again, I'm left to ponder whether this is a genuine happy accident for More Than.
Morethan Freeman search queries
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Top ten AdTurds of 2010
Here are the top ten AdTurds of 2010, by traffic. They don't really reveal how searched-for the ads were - the VanCompare advert is only so high because several outraged Sweet fan forums linked to the site, urging other Sweet fans to attack me - but as a good rule of thumb, these ads must have stood out from the crowd.
That may be because people loved them, hated them or just wanted the chance to see them again. Either way, with certain caveats, these ads made an impression. Make of that what you will.
2. Bing adverts
5. BT - Adam and Jane 'What Happened Next' results
6. WeBuyAnyCar
7. Carlsberg's World Cup advert
Clever and hilarious print ads?
This list of 'best print ads' includes the most '20 Most Hilarious And Clever Print Ads Ever' according to the Business Insider site, or '20-of-the-most-hilairious-and-clever-print-ads-ever-2010' according to the URL - thus becoming the first article to break known laws of time.
There are quite a few old favourites in here but there's a good amount of newbies too, including several from some glass-cleaning product manufacturer called Windex, the best of which is below.
My favourite is one for insect-and-bug-killing spray Raid, showing an arm presumably belonging to everyone's favourite friendly neighbourhood Spiderman. Subtle, witty and memorable. Just don't tell Marvel.
There are a few genuine funnies, including ads for Pepsi Twist (a lime urinating lime juice - presumably - into a can of Pepsi); one for Bose noise reduction headphones (man rows obliviously towards waterfall); Timotei (bouffant lion); clothes softener Softlan Ultra (a wrestler enjoying the feeling of his opponent's vest); Chupa Chups (ants avoid lolly on ground).
There's also one for diamonds that suggests that buying a girl an engagement ring will mean you get to open more than just a joint account. It's rather unpleasant, and reminiscent of Family Guy spoof of De Beers' adverts.
Inevitably a few are neither clever nor hilarious, including one for Sheetz (sauce on chip) and Aquafresh. Amusingly, Hugh Cornwell out of The Stranglers seems to put in an appearance one of the glass-cleaning ads too.
Anyway, a few of my favourite are below. Head over to Business Insider for the full list.
Campaign blows wad on top ten ads features
The Campaign website - the title that focuses on advertising at the sprawling Brand Republic empire - has gone top ten ads of 2010 crazy, with a veritable smorgasbord of best, worst, most surreal and celebrity-themed listy link-bait stuff.
Since it's presumably staffed by people who presumably have their ears to the ground in the world of ads, rather than venting spleen on a blog, and features a hefty industry-based community it's interesting to see what those in the industry think of last year's offerings.
Nike's vaguely hysterical Write the Future spot for the World Cup absolutely reeks of cash but I couldn't get particularly excited about it (though I did like the smaller Rooney spot, which had much more charm and wit). Whoever's writing the ad copy for Campaign virtually spunks over it in two different lists. Ho hum.
Big hitters such as M&S, John Lewis, John Smiths and Virgin seem to go down very well in Campaignland, while the lower ends of the market - the Go Compares, Icelands and ComparetheMarkets of this world - get nary a look in.
I don't really agree with many of the choices of the supposed best ads as they mainly seem to comprise cash-heavy, celeb-heavy tie-in ads - Christmas and the World Cup most obviously - that are heavy on spectacle and clearly cost an absolute bomb.
The John Lewis ad is again described as an advert that made adults cry; a claim that seems, to me, to be totally without foundation that has passed in to some sort of folklore.
Where things do get interesting is the worst celebrities list, which doesn't flinch at sticking the boot in, heavily. Jedward, the Redknapps, John Cleese, Barbra Windsor, Peter Mandelson's ghastly Third Man spot and the genuinely baffling Derek Jacobi Xmas Sony ads feature in the list, among quite a few that are new to me.
Among the ones I haven't seen before is this one featuring charmless footy-and-lager goon Tim Lovejoy wooing a Mediterranean beauty with some pasta. It's a bit creepy and very rubbish, because Lovejoy shows himself to be perhaps the worst actor to ever grace a loft apartment.
Finally, AdTurds has a spot of advice for whoever compiled the top ten surreal adverts - without including this slice of fried gold by ad/film/doco genius Tony Kaye, made for Dunlop in 1993.
If this isn't surreal - and bear in mind it's advertising tyres - we don't know what is.
Campaign's advert top-ten-athon
Campaign's top ten worst celeb ads of 2010