The Worst Adverts Of 2022: Vote

Worst adverts of 2022

Hello, it’s been a while. I popped out for nappies and forgot who I was for the last three years.

I looked at the hellscape of 2020 and I wondered what the point was. Also I became a Dad, therefore trading sleep, inspiration and cognitive function for eternal genetic slavery to a mini-me that is comfortably the most disorientating, exhausting and expensive thing I have ever done that resulted from having sex.

With a pandemic to add to the equation, everything else paled into insignificance, especially the new Windows Direct advert. But I sensed, like Batman coming out of a particularly long sulk, that I was once again needed. I looked around and, bafflingly, things were even more shit than they were when I was juggling a newborn, a full-time job, and a non-functioning N95 respirator the government had paid Michelle Mone £36m for. I rose from the couch, groaned at my bad back and promptly sat down again. And then I started typing…

With Christmas barely farted out onto the sofa of “I’m not ready to go back to work yet’, it’s tempting to think of the modern Tory Party as a particularly awful Dickensian construct playing out the worst update of A Christmas Carol yet. If it were a Dickens character it would be called Obadiah Slyme. The UK still feels like it’s trying to shrug off the deathly hand of its very own three ghosts of 2022, only this time instead of trying to make a miserable person happy, they were… well, you can probably see where this is going.

Worst ads 2022
The ghost of Christmas Future pops up to let you know that everything is fucked

And what a trio they make. Johnson, the shambling old, sexually-incontinent duvet filled with pumps; Truss, the class dunce who think’s she’s actually headmistress; and Rishi Sunak, a man who embodies small dick energy by simple virtue of his height and, well, being a dick.

It’s perhaps no coincidence I started this blog in earnest in 2010 – and arguably it’s been more useful than the official opposition during that time. When Sunak and the last four Prime Ministers were asked whether they thought the Conservative Party had governed the country well over the last 13 years only 20% ‘somewhat agreed’ with that sentiment, with three of them going for ‘don’t know’ and a confused Truss simply writing “Liz Truss” on the ballot.

What’s this got to do with the adverts, then? For me it’s increasingly hard to distinguish where all the Bad Things start and end. Media, politics, war, Instagram, TikTok, OnlyFans, Jake Paul, Andrew Tate, Nigel Farage… we’re all advertisers now (also let’s pray that’s the last time we see OnlyFans and that braying, warm-beer-quaffing grifter mentioned in the same sentence).

Humanity seems fully signed up to the arms race of making everything baffling, unreal and terrifying because people are so much easier to control when they’re frightened (hello Verisure), stupid (hi Twitter) – or have literally no idea what to believe (that’ll be you, Asynchronous Warfare). The Northern Boys’ viral hit Party Time – with its exploration of rampant substance abuse, cheap sex and eventual suicide seems like the only sensible prescription for our current omnishambles.

top 10 worst adverts 2022
The only sane reaction to life in Britain in 2022

Advertising – and what all the world’s lunatics gleaned from it – is the most obvious weapon used against us. Black is white, up is down and Suella Braverman isn’t a fictional witch made real whose only genuine enjoyment in life is the fanny flutter she gets when a migrant boat capsizes in the Channel. Our dystopia is real and it’s now – and we’re swallowing it down with lashings of Deliveroo, Amazon and that stupid Youtuber drink.

Well I’m not buying what they’re selling. And – at the insistence of at least 30 people – I’m back, pending fatherly responsibilities. Here are your worst adverts of 2022.

Asda / Elf advert

If spaff-drenched incels can convincingly AI Emma Watson’s face onto a spitroasted porn star, why on Earth can’t Asda do any better than a BBC-era Red Dwarf approximation of Will Ferrell talking awkwardly to some of their zero-hours-contracted staff while discussing Cif?

The concept here is not new: you remember this, you like this, so we’ll destroy it for you. But why must this stuff look as bad as an 90s advert that photoshops Ian Wright into a Martin Luther-King speech?

Will Ferrell has probably got a fucking packet, but can anyone muster the semblance of belief that the unnervingly tall Hollywood superstar could even set foot in one of Asda’s glorified meat raffles without chundering directly into the faces of anyone within a radius of 50 feet?

Santander advert – Bank of Ant & Dec

Is this the year lovable scamps Ant & Dec jumped the shark? The fun-sized TV hosts have endured a rocky patch of late, first with The One With The Forehead going public with his drink problems, and subsequently the twosome overseeing what looked like a post-apocalyptic version of perennial favourite I’m A Celebrity on a wet weekend near Rhyl. Still, having offal dumped on your head at an abandoned castle in return for a half a cabbage and a dead pigeon felt like invaluable prep for pandemic-ravaged, post-Brexit Britain.

The Geordie Geuo have been pretty careful to avoid advertising anything much over the years – beyond their hair transplants – no doubt being mindful of the value of their capital. In a poll of ‘most trustworthy celebrities’, Ant & Dec beat off competition from the likes of Captain Tom, the Ghost of Terry Wogan and even God. So the tykes must have thought long and hard before committing to this tortured Bank of AntandDec campaign, which sees them pretending to run a bank or something.

Santander says it has made customers 3% more likely to not brick their windows. The question is, is this the moment the country starts falling out of love with the Tyneside twerps? No-one stays at the top forever, after all.

Ant – it must be said – must be finding it increasingly hard to pull off the ‘cheeky youngster who is escorting your daughter to the Prom’ shtick, increasingly resembling a sad Toby jug topped off with a mound of sculpted chocolate ice-cream that’s adorning an out-of-reach shelf in a country pub. Only 25 more Jungles to go, lads.

Schofield / We Buy Any Car advert

I’m utterly impervious to the supposed delights of Phillip Schofield, a man I have detested since his broom cupboard days, when he ruled the airwaves as a frightening combination of hospital radio disc jockey and President of Plymouth University’s LGBT Conservatives club.

Schofield is, of course, one of those people you’re not allowed to dislike – much like Olivia Colman or Willy Wonka. But his reinvention as some sort of ironic television legend sticks in my craw. Whether he’s sharing a selfie with Boris Johnson, pretending to corpse over a carrot shaped like a cock on This Morning or being a knob to Carter USM I find the man deeply irritating. And that’s before the last five years of adverts for the much-hated WeBuyAnyCar (a company whose entire value proposition is that it pays you under the odds for your car) that pitch him somewhere between Yoda, Buddha and Eusebio.

Still, 2022 wasn’t all bad. Having jumped the queue to stare at a corpse, he was swiftly dumped by WeBuyAnyCar for a TikTok personality – perhaps the only job title more damning than ‘local character’. Schofield – or Supreme Lord Schofe as we will all be forced to call him in whatever Hellish dystopia 2023 has in store for us – has 4.4 MILLION followers on Twitter. Reflect on that and tell yourself we’re not totally fucked.

Ian Botham Revitive advert

With the quiet determination of a man intent on shitting over whatever’s left of his legacy comes Lord Beefy Botham of Brexit, lumbering across a field with all the elan of a concrete sumo wrestler. He’s here to extol – or not – the possible advantages of the Revitive Circulation Booster, a device that could stop your legs hurting. Or not.

Quite whether a man who is clearly morbidly obese is the best person to extol the advantages of Revitive is up to the company, though they might have expected him to deliver his lines with slightly more panache than an Ikea Billy bookcase. And to anyone who has followed Botham on Twitter, it’s certainly not obvious that he needs any help with blood circulation.

Marc Jacobs / Daisy advert

Is there a less deserving smugness that’s the unearned self-satisfaction of perfume adverts? They all give the impression of being on on a massive joke you’re not invited to be part of – and indeed they are. Because you could throw a dart into any of those shelves at the local B&M and hit a bottle that is more expensive by weight that enriched uranium. That’s the joke – there’s this smelly stuff you don’t actually want that costs more than a 2kg tub of Flora that you’re going to end up buying anyway. You’re not in on it because you’re the mark. The Marc Jacobs advert makes it explicit: they’re laughing at you.

I’m reminded of Matt Hancock – the man Harold Shipman would’ve aspired to be; the man who invented the most harrowing bushtucker trial of all, namely to be immunocompromised in a care home and then have hot Covid poured over your head – basking in the soupy embrace of I’m A Celebrity, nourished by the empty validation of telly-poll voters spattering all over his hairless, underdeveloped chest and childlike but still thinning pate.

You just know Hancock – a man up to his neck in stuff a lot more filthy than wallaby bell-ends – will take his meagre outback triumph and parade it as justification for his entire way of life, his party’s disastrous handling of Covid, a whole ideology. He’s never going to have that smile wiped off his face, no matter how unjust, how utterly unfair, that is. And that’s what makes this Marc Jacobs advert so infuriating. There will never be any comeuppance, not for Matt Hancock – and not for whoever came up with daisy, daisy, daisy or the hordes of idiots who exist in the whole wretched industry.

Domino’s advert

In this blog’s heyday the airwaves were packed with adverts that were explicitly designed to annoy. That trend seems to have largely disappeared, but there’s always one, eh? Domino’s Pizza – pound-for-pound the most expensive material in the known universe after anti-matter – fulfils the same function in my life as service stations and Wetherspoons toilets: usually something related to my stomach and only when absolutely unavoidable.

This alleged takeaway business, which seems largely in the business of delivering cold food matter incorrectly and several weeks late, certainly has chutzpah. In this latest advert featuring the infuriating Domino’s yodel – a sound even worse than listening to Julia Hartley-Brewer achieve orgasm – the company delivers some steaming hot pizza to three castaway guys at the mere sound of the summoning cry.

To anyone who has waited, fruitlessly, for their very expensive pizzas from this company to turn up only for it arrive colder than the icy heart of Dominic Raab and all squashed against one side of the pizza box like Harry Redknapp’s face, the yodelling adverts where piping hot pizzas show up faster than Tommy Robinson at a terrorist atrocity are like corporate trolling in ad format.

Hyularonic acid / L’Oreal advert

“It’s just a word made up to make shampoo important,” howls Simon Pegg in Spaced (still the definitive record of my life from 2000-2003) when Jessica Hynes mentions PRO-V. Look it up and Pantene has a web page swooningly describing how ‘Swiss doctors’ stumbled upon the miracle cure for, er, dirty hair in the 40s and now it’s used by every single female in the world, including Miriam Margoyles.

Fast forward to 2022 and we need a new PRO-V, in case we forget how important shampoo really is. It’s hyularonic acid, the secret weapon in encouraging 33-year-old women to shell out a monthly EDF Energy bill’s worth in dollar pounds in the hope that their personal trainer looks up from his Insta account while forcing them toward their 50th squat.

In this ad the phonetics of hyularonic acid are explained in just the same way the supposed health benefits aren’t by a collective noun of 30-40-something American MILFs who look a couple of drinks away from explaining exactly why Trump was right about the Mexican wall all along.

Arla milk advert

There’s a very good reason why we don’t tend to enjoy the sound of real people singing, and that reason is that is that most people are fucking shit at singing. But in these relatable times we’d rather hear a tone-deaf junior accountant from Runcorn hailing the dubious delights of washing liquid than, say, Hayley Westenra because few of us can imagine an opera singer puzzling over whichever setting on the washing machine might be cheaper than a holiday to the Llŷn peninsula whilst also ensuring their bra doesn’t bobble.

It doesn’t matter that ‘real people singing’ is a phenomenon less inviting than a Piers Morgan column on unisex toilets, because we’re all tired of experts now. So we have to suffer through these ‘real farmers’ guffing something even worse into the atmosphere than the stuff from their cows’ arseholes that will condemn us all to societal collapse. Thanks a bunch Michael Gove.

Halifax advert – Stand By Me

Remember when banks weren’t our friends? When they were like austere headmasters who would just as soon give you a slippering then lend you twenty quid? Frankly I preferred them that way – you knew what you were getting – rather than the gaslighting friend who pretends they actually like you, rather than being a useful crutch when their favoured pals are away on holiday.

The creepy ‘let’s hang out’ vibe of modern bank adverts is the most overt manifestation of the shameless dishonesty of describing a relationship that is more akin to serf and robber baron: the banks fuck our economy to make their bosses richer – and we pay for it. In that context these ads are akin to a emotionally manipulative fair-weather friend sliding into your DMs late at night offering empty platitudes and vacant promises of commitment that you’ll read in the full knowledge they will ghost you the second you suggest going out for a pint because your relationship has ended.

Lloyds advert

Again with the genuinely sinister bank adverts. This one for Lloyds has the gloss, the swelling music and the total lack of awareness of a North Korean vanity project – all it’s missing are a million goose-stepping soldiers, a nuclear missile and a dubious wig. Nevermind the fact that Lloyds’ recent history is sketchier than Kanye West’s, the bank seems under the impression it is about as beloved as David Attenborough to the British public rather than reality of, say, the bloke who runs P&O Ferries.

I’ll leave it to Craig Ferguson, over on Facebook, to sum up the utter ghastliness of it all: “…[T]he sheer, unadulterated psychopathy of a sterile, profiteering dead-behind-the-eyes monolith attempting to manipulate you into thinking it’s your friend. It’s fucking terrifying.”

Worst adverts of 2022 – vote

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worst adverts of 2022

The Worst Adverts Of 2019: Vote

blue ideal boiler advert

Well, did anyone think we’d make it this far? By which I mean 2019 full stop, never mind the annual rundown of the Worst Adverts Of 2019.

In 2016 I went a bit mad. Well, more so. Brexit, Trump and the Tories had done my nut in – and advertising seemed to small-fry in comparison. If only I knew what fresh horrors 2019 would bring. Not just climate change, cunts still running the world and the quite hideous face of Michael Gove, but the Peloton advert.

Adverts can be bad in a variety of ways. They can be naff, smug, simply annoying. They can desecrate your favourite thing, they can stick in your lugholes like a particularly annoying bit of earwax, they might make your bite the inside of your cheek in some reflexive, masochistic instinct.

I’ve never quite got there but I can totally believe that advertising has drawn people to physical violence, meted out on their hapless television like a punchbag made of plastic and whatever that gooey stuff they put in modern TV screens is.

But advertising is more than that – not simply annoying, stupid and intrusive. It’s an engine for acquisition, consumption, fear and anxiety. It sets unrealistic standards, unattainable lifestyles and promises you that if only you buy that Renault Kadjar you can be free of that gnawing sense of existential futility. We buy, so we are.

When we know that our world is on its last legs – thanks to all the things we buy, eat, throw away and burn – the role of advertising doesn’t seem like a vague irritant, it’s appears more sinister than that throbbing vein on Dominic Raab’s temple.

In that spirit I have collected what you told me were your most hated adverts of the year. Some housekeeping first: the Meerkats have been elevated to a grand hall of fame and many suggestions actually originated in previous years.

Needless to say everyone has their own personal gallery of Hell when it comes to the ad break: the Nationwide ads, Marks & Spencer Christmas jumper advert, Lorraine Kelly, Jet2, Chanel No. 5, Deliveroo were all in the mix too. Let’s just consider them consigned to a particularly obnoxious Pandora’s Box. And while Blue’s boiler cover advert is truly appalling, the primary emotion it evokes is pity.

So somewhere between you and me, we collected what I consider to be some of the worst adverts of the year. As ever the final decision is not mine, but yours. I have set out my arguments below – and in doing so probably saved myself thousands in therapy.

Now choose from the worst adverts of 2019 – in this batshit year it’s probably the only meaningful way to strike a tiny blow against the forces of despair.

Worst Adverts Of 2019

Muppets Portal advert

Portal is like something out of Black Mirror, so the fact it’s advertised by The Muppets just serves to make it more sinister – and even more like an episode of Black Mirror. We all know that Facebook wants to monetise and weaponise our own personal data against us and it’s bad enough when they know where you shop, your favourite films and most frequently-browsed categories on Pornhub.

But just imagine what Facebook will be up to with the videos it will deny Portal records, saves and mines for information, before admitting that it does, promising to do better and then keeps recording, saving and mining that shit anyway.

Setting up a Facebook-connected webcam above your TV set is basically the technical equivalent of inviting a Bluetooth-enabled Julian Assange into your living room to record everything you say and do, while paying for the privilege.

Muppets Portal advert

So bringing the Muppets into this just seems like a deliberate act of pure malice, like Donald Trump co-opting children’s fiction’s most famous asylum-seeker, Paddington Bear, to be the brand ambassador of his plan to build a huge wall to keep all the brown people out.

Fozzy Bear is a tech bro who is selling your browsing data; Bunsen and Beaker work in a Russian troll farm. And you thought the Cookie Monster was only interested in biscuits…

Muppets creator Jim Henson, of course, departed this mortal coil some decades ago, meaning his most famous and lovable creations have been whored out to anyone willing to throw enough money at the entertainment Borg Cube that is Disney – including dismal brandfucks such as Barclays, Three and Fucking Warburtons. The Muppets, by the handy virtue of not being real, have no say in the matter of course.

Annoying, a bit depressing? Sure. But matching kids’ TV things to tech-brands that increasingly control our lives and know more about us than we do is even worse – it’s tinged with genuine dystopia.

Peloton advert

When the apocalypse comes the Peloton Gang will be ready: poised on their stupidly expensive bikes, awaiting their instructions. These delusional sweat chiefs are clearly in training for such an event and will surely take to their bikes and rule the post-apocalyptic landscape, calves bulging and heads swelling.

“All hail the Two-Wheels!” will be the cry of the masses too stupid or unfit to be able to cycle for 60 seconds on full intensity. And from the Peloton Studio our new ruler will dispense inspirational soundbites, lycra sleeping bags and hot laser death.

Peloton advert

Finally the true purpose of Peloton will be revealed and it will be like Day Of The Triffids or 28 Days Later, only with exercise bikes. We don’t know what it will be but something to do with anal probing seems likely.

In the meantime these people continue their journey to nowhere, knowing they are indeed righteous – and with a BMI significantly less than it was 18 months ago.

Aaron500, your life is a cruel veneer of success masking an empty abyss of a human being.

Just Eat advert

The Just Eat advert – indeed Just Eat’s entire business – is less of an advert and more of an imperative. Just eat. Now and always. Until your legs are so swollen with gout you won’t be able to escape the rising tides lapping at your door as you listlessly watch another rerun of Family Guy and masticate on another cold Domino’s.

Eating out used to be a rare treat, now it seems to be almost the default position for young people, many of whom seem to barely comprehend the concept of a gas stove, tin opener or cabbage.

Just Eat advert

We all claim to despise single-use materials but the growth in takeaway-to-your-door seems to be the ultimate expression of single-use living: use, discard, repeat – whether it’s Tindr or Just Eat. Somehow food has infected our brains, become an addiction – like the grubs that want to be eaten by birds so they can reproduce. It’s mind-control through our stomachs.

The fact all of these takeaway services – thriving on zero-hours contracts and the modern-day slavery plantations that many British takeaways consist of – take care to align the idea of fast food with watching television is, of course, not a coincidence. When the invasion finally comes we’ll all be so bloated and unfit the only resistance we’ll be able to threaten is a zero-star review on Tripadvisor. Just after we’ve ordered our latest KFC anyway.

Tom Hiddleston Centrum advert

Tom Hiddlestone is, of course, a sexual deviant who breaks into your house and gaslights you into thinking he’s your partner – and brambles with fried eggs is a perfectly normal meal. Don’t believe me? Simply watch this video, masquerading as an advert for multivitamin nonces Centrum but secretly a cry-for-help from the deeply disturbed actor.

Not really of course (although I am leaving the door open to this interpretation) – this is Hiddleston’s Japandering nightmare made real – an advert so ludicrous it’s designed only to be seen by foreign audiences who don’t give a crap if you delivered a landmark Hamlet at the Old Vic.

Tom Hiddleston Centrum advert

The Hidd, as he is not known, is of course one of those unthreatening actor types that make women go all fizzy in the knickers, so it’s a mark of this advert’s true awfulness that it manages to make him look less like the new James Bond and and more like a deeply awkward, creepy, shaggy-haired estate agent with a raging coke habit and erectile dysfunction.

• Read the original Centrum Adturd

Get ready for Brexit

“Get ready for death” struck me as about as useful, welcome and cost-effective as these ridiculous slogans, appearing in your eyeline more often than Claudia Winkelman for much of the Autumn. But get ready how? Do what, exactly? Start praying? Detonate your relatives? Build a new ten-lane motorway through Folkestone at the weekends?

Since we all knew Brexit wasn’t going to happen in 2019 they struck me – at a cost of one hundred million pounds – as rather wasteful, amounting to an already-debunked bluff: a man trying to play poker with a privet hedge using Whot cards.

Whatever you think of the politics of the matter, a campaign urging everyone in the country to prepare for things completely unpredictable, fundamentally unknowable and ultimately impossible was rather like expecting the British people to have a contingency plan for a gas giant hitting Wrexham.

Mariah Carey Walkers crisps advert

“Think Walkers Crisps; think Mariah Carey.” That’s at least how I imagine some addled exec pitching this ‘which American celebrity is available to advertise something about which they truly give zero fucks?’ televisual infected gland.

It’s now illegal to not like All I Want For Christmas Is You, a song by Mariah that represents the quintessence of her soulless brand of R’n’B and has now found its way into the Carols From Kings service. Mariah herself, of course, died sometime in the Noughties and now runs on cosmetic surgery, Evian and regular infusions of blood from Motown orphans.

Mariah Carey crisps Walkers advert

So naturally she’s the obvious choice to advertise fried potato slices from Leicester, wheeled out to pretend she’s actually a nice person and would deign to dirty her fingers with something as vile as a Pigs-In-Blankets flavoured Walkers crisps. To watch her fingering one of the snacks is like watching someone trying to defuse a nuclear bomb, on which several people accidentally ejaculated.

At least you can imagine Gary Lineker actually eating crisps or Nigel Farage actually hating foreigners, but the notion of Carey eating mass-market British crisps is so fundamentally dishonest it’s like Greta Thunberg advertising Rustlers Double Decker Cheese Burgers.

Oral B advert

Is there a more gratuitous use of a jiggling lady arse and crotch than this advert for… toothpaste? Following painstaking study of this actress’s backside over multiple freeze-frames, it even appears her leggings are translucent – revealing a pretty skimpy thong. Eh?

Stick some of these shots into a 70s sitcom and it would appear on one of those You Won’t Believe This Cleavage And Racism! programmes that litter the festive airwaves on the less-visited Freeview channels. It’s only a surprise we don’t get a gasped “Tits!” as she works her breasts in some wholly dentally-relevant exercise that involves a close-up of her bristols wobbling up and down.

Oral B advert

I think what annoys people most in this Oral B advert is the baffling claim that the lady in question “didn’t even know Oral B made a toothpaste”. Toothpaste being pretty much their entire raison d’etre, this seems akin to claiming you didn’t know the Nazis did fascism, The Daily Mail peddles hatred or Piers Morgan is responsible for more flatulence than a medium-sized dairy herd.

Over ten years of writing this blog I’ve come to realise that some of the things that annoy people most of all are dishonesty, treating the audience as if they’re idiots or what amounts to a kind of trolling via absurd claims. The Oral B advert ticks all three boxes: a dismal trifecta of advertising detritus more irritating than a lump of gristle between your teeth.

Lavazza Real Italian Coffee Advert

Sometimes an advert isn’t hideous, genuinely angering or deliberately irritating – it’s simply inept, poor, crap. In trying to stake some sort of claim to being the only coffee of note, Lavazza has thrown the kitchen sink at this messy advert that tries to make us believe that Premiership footballers care – or even know – what coffee is.

The very idea of ‘real Italian coffee’ is, of course, about as genuine as ‘proper English tea’ and it taps into a kind of tiresome snobbery that circulates around coffee, wine and whiskey. And we’ve gone properly bonkers over coffee. Buy some from any outlet these days and you’re basically paying more by weight that you might for gold, caviar or enriched uranium.

Lavazza advert

Quite what the sort of people who might spend €200 imbibing 17 espressos in an Italian cafe – the equivalent of drinking a tasty eggcup of coffee grounds the consistency of tar, more potent that injecting ketamine into your eyeballs – might make of instant coffee is anyone’s guess, but I have a feeling they might repeat the words ‘real Italian coffee’ with rather more puzzlement or contempt.

One reason I do like this Lavazza advert is it that its unintentional hilariousness reminded me of an intentionally hilarious compilation along very similar lines from the excellent Harry Hill. Picture them mouthing an incredulous ‘ear cataracts?’ and you’ll probably be a lot happier.

Amazon advert

An advert attempting to reposition one of the most famous hideous employers since the Roman army into a place of rainbow dust, pixie farts and beatific joy is one of the most sinister rebrandings since social media dickheads turned Auschwitz into the backdrops of their latest #livingmybestlife Instagram posts.

The sheer brass neck – not to mention brass balls, brass spleen and brass nipples of this – bears some consideration: Amazon is under fire for multiple deaths of its contract workers, not to mention repeated suicidal crises and numerous workplace injuries at its sweatshops piss-strewn “fulfilment centres”, described by one former worker as “isolating colon[ies] of hell where people having breakdowns is a regular occurrence”.

Amazon advert

Amazon, as we all know, contributed £87.50, some cardboard boxes and a DVD boxset of Young Sheldon in UK taxes during 2019, despite earning over twelvety trillion dollarpounds per second. So its reimagining as a purveyor of festive delights via a workforce who would only be too happy to work for free, such is their devotion to transporting GHD hair-straighteners to your door, is a work of such obscene propaganda that George Orwell momentarily came back to life, gave a Christmas lecture on the redundancy of his entire body of work and threw himself into an Amazon carboard-shredder in protest.

It’s not simply a bad advert, nor a mere body blow against human decency, it’s a kind of evil so pure it should be confined to a jar and guarded by a gang of priests in a church crypt. And that’s before I get to that fucking singing kid.

OK, you’ve heard my thoughts. It’s over to you. Choose from the worst adverts of 2019 below – and may God have mercy on all of us.


Vote: worst adverts of 2019