The Worst Adverts of 2012
For those of you who are regular readers, keep taking the medication. But thanks for coming back to the site after it was laid low by a malware attack that I eventually traced back to the servers of a shadowy cabal of ad execs who get together once a week to snort coke off the body of a dead hooker.
Anyway, all of that meant that I couldn't do my usual round-up of the year's worst adverts. Which was a shame, but also kinda appropriate. Because I don't think there was a single 'worst advert' last year. Why? Because the worst advert of 2012 wasn't an advert. It was an idea.
This whole site is based on a kinda overplayed hyperbole, which can be roughly - and I hope not entirely accurately - summed up as 'this advert makes me want to kill myself - and other people'. Of course they do no such thing, but many adverts do make me feel annoyed, irritable and a little bit helpless.
And this is the point of the new generation of adverts. Liking these new adverts is no good at all. Being amused by them or finding them cute isn't enough. Being able to ignore them is a disaster. Being angered; being physically affected by these spots isn't just a happy by-product, it's the very raison d'etre: the hot flush of annoyance, the raised heart rate, the merciless vomiting and the Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
Just think about that for a while. The point of adverts is to persuade you to do something you might not otherwise do. To part with your money in such a way that benefits someone else. On a personal level this sort of transaction might be represented by asking a friend or family member to loan you a few quid, after buttering them up with a few well-chosen words.
Or head to a job interview and lie about how great you are, all the time smiling, grinning, nodding at the endless bullshit spewing out of everyone's mouths and shaking hands while dying inside. And what if you want to convince your partner to do something they might not do otherwise? Needless to say, chances are you'll do a lot more than shake hands.
This is all part and parcel of the way we lead our lives, as human beings and as animals. It's a basic transaction in life. Heck, if my cat wants something he starts rubbing himself up against me. But imagine if all of these transactions were solicited in another fashion.
I don't buy my mate a pint before asking him if he can advance me £50, I punch him in the face. I don't praise a potential employer's workflow system, I piss in his amusing Simpsons mug. My missus kicks me in the knackers and my cat claws me in the eye.
We wouldn't put up with any of these interactions, let along smilingly hand over our cash, job or bacon rind. Yet that's what we do every day when these 30-second adverts are beamed into our minds with the explicit intention of upsetting us. Where does this end? Unskipabble Confused.com adverts on the start of DVDs? Gio Compario popping up on cinema screens? Rickrolling by Barry Scott?
I don't know, but I do know this. Efforts to piss you off will only increase. And all the technical weapons that are available will be deployed. Email, mobile, behavioural targeting, contextual ads and whatever the current conglomeration of web/streaming/TV and on-demand turns into.
The reason for this is that there are now adverts whose only point is to make you aware of a service. Not like it, not appreciate the quality of it, not have any loyalty towards it – simply know of its existence. It doesn't matter if you hate it; in fact, it's better if you hate it.
This is why the likes of Confused.com can launch stupefyingly bad adverts at us that are both horribly annoying and objectively shite without it making a shred of difference. It's why Go Compare is inflicting some smugly reflexive adverts about its own awfulness on us. And why the meerkat and its spin-offs are everywhere - even breaking out into the real world in the shape of dolls and - for the love of everything that is good - books.
Along with MoneySupermarket, these services are identical. They do exactly the same things, with literally nothing to differentiate on from the other. Coke and Pepsi; Sky and Virgin, Ford and Vauxhall. All of them emphasise why they're different and better than the other. The comparison services do not care about such things. Awareness is the only factor.
This nascent tactic is gaining ground among betting websites, where there is similarly nothing meaningful to separate most companies. PaddyPower has ditched its amusing adverts promoting money-back bets and opted for a dog-whistling adverts that skirt the borders of animal cruelty and various unpleasant bigotries. The Ladbrokes one with the idiotic Chris Kamara (LOL! Legend!) just has a bloke screaming at the TV for most of its duration.
This is because these companies want to be at the forefront of your mind when you make some soul-crushingly banal life decision such as "I'm going to start betting on the internet" - the sort of decision that indicates that you've probably given up on life and settled for a warm, unthreatening existence of DVD box-sets, football, pizzas, wanking on the sofa and worrying about immigration.
Need car insurance? Write down what initially comes into your head. Blocked sink? Inexplicable desire to place a bet on the Stoke / Sunderland game? What did you write? I bet, to your surprise or horror, that you were able to immediately jot down a few brand names you didn't even know were swimming around in your grey matter. Your own personal spam software isn't working anymore - you turned it off without even knowing it.
Advertisers will do anything to get in your head. And your slavery to the television opens the door to them. When idiots complain about the licence fee and profess that the other channels are 'free' just think about this spirit-killing exchange we make in order to get our 'free television'. This is where our witless defence of the right to choose has led us – a cowed acceptance of brainwashing; complicity in our own alienation, exploitation and subjugation. The tyranny of choice has never been so clear.
If the current state of affairs has taught us anything, it's that we can't be trusted to make our own decisions. If you want a vision of the future imagine a stupefied man drowning in pizza boxes, coke cans and Pringles tubes, the reflection of a Confused.com advert dancing in his eyes, forever.
This is the future we've chosen; it's the one we deserve. Happy New Year.
When you’re in a hole stop digging
You know what the ridiculous thing is? Advertising doesn't seem to have much impact on price comparison websites anyway.
This is unpleasantly ironic, as they're routinely the most awful ads on the telly - burrowing into your psyche like the grub of a parasitic wasp sitting in the belly of a paralysed caterpillar, being slowly consumed from the inside out. At least if there was a point to it, it wouldn't seem so utterly ghastly. Well, perhaps.
The thing is though, Gio and Cara and Aleksandr aren't about making you rush over to the PC to rush through some car insurance quotes, they're about embedding that brand, that name, that URL with the promise of cheaper car insurance, which is why there's always a 'dot com' added to the end of every mention of them.
Think of a Russian meerkat - think of car insurance. Think of an annoying fat tenor - think of cheap car insurance. Think of (recently-replaced) Omid Djalili insulting unlikely celebs - think of cheap car insurance. Think of Cara Confused - think of a dating site run by a slack-jawed tramp with an extra-dimensional clunge. Well, three out of four ain't bad eh?
Someone came on the site the other day to tell me how great the ad was and how it was working cos it's so shit, or something. I saw some figures on Brand Republic (AdTurds is still hanging onto its Brand Republic Top 200 blogs position by the skin of its teeth) that suggested the opposite a few weeks ago so I thought I'd have a look at how Confused.com's £25m ad spend has benefited it.
The unfortunate truth is: not. Confused.com remains last or dead last in a PR Week poll of the four main price comparison sites to determine which were the most memorable, easy to use and cheapest in terms of quotes provided - though it's important to determine which is reality and which perception; in the case of the ad it's the latter that counts (for the record MoneySupermarket came on top in each with CompareTheMarket second).
This poses interesting questions for all the featured sites, but it should focus the mind of Confused.com and GoCompare.com most. For my money the latter at least has the advantage of a clear, unified campaign and regularly features in 'most remembered' lists along with the meerkat.
Confused.com doesn't - people think it's a dating site and are distracted by bizarre gynaecological swerves - and it recently got told off for it's misleading and nonsensical '20-million strong' claim. What's more it recently introduced a advert that's just based around reiterating its name - pretty much an admission that your previous wares weren't really doing their job.
What's more a recent interim report from owner Admiral says that turnover is 'flat' and 'margins remain under pressure' - suggesting no upwards movement since they spunked £20m on multimedia campaigns featuring Cara. Operating profit is down following Cara's debut - from £8.8m in H1 of 2010 to 8.2m in H1 of 2011.
It's hard to see how the ad campaign can be judged to have been a success in light of these metrics, though the obvious response from advertisers is that profits and brand penetration would have suffered even more without the exposure. My rejoinder to that would be that, with a better campaign, Confused.com would be doing better than it is at the moment.
Figuring out what makes a better campaign than your existing one is easier said than done, of course, and who's going to critique your latest campaign when your own management and marketing teams came up with it? Short of sacking themselves there's nowhere to go with Confused.com's current advertising strategy - which means they stick with Cara or perform an embarrassing 'mea culpa' and get some people who know what they're doing to do it. Hell, I'll do it for a flat fee of £10,000.
Confused.com had mixed fortunes with previous agencies, and the existence of this blog shows that getting in the so-called experts can have mixed results - but a lot of the evidence suggests that Confused.com may have made a mistake as big as its mascot's vajayjay.
Your favourite price comparison website advert is…
Is there such thing as a 'favourite price-comparison website advert'? It's a bit like 'favourite dictator' or 'favourite plague-carrying creature' really isn't it? The least of several evils or somesuch.
Still, I was curious as to whether it was possible to create something memorable and reasonably enjoyable - or 'reasonably not irritating' at least - so I created a poll to find out the UK's favourite price-comparison adverts, and form what would almost certainly be the most incisive, wide-ranging, in-depth and analytical, er, analysis of the ads ever prepared - ever.
Something that works for the advertiser and doesn't drive viewers to murderous, visceral hatred. Let's face it, creating a price-comparison advert that doesn't drive people to uncontrolled defecation several times a day is a massive win in these stakes.
With the number of votes nearing 100 I decided that the time was right to analyse the results. Well, that and the fact that I was quickly losing interest in the topic.
I had a feeling one would be way out in front, with the other three rooted to the foot of the table (to borrow a phrase used by every sports commentator when discussing Premiership football), with a sprinkling of 'Fuck you! They all suck!' responses - which are entirely reasonable under the circumstances - fighting it out with Confused.com and Go Compare.
But while I was correct on the first count - there was a runaway winner with over half of the vote - I was surprised that one of the competitors pushed the leader close for a long time before taking second place with almost one third of the total vote.
What does this tell us? Well, firstly it seems to tell us that people are indeed amused by - and fond of - Aleksandr Orlov, the Russian meerkat perpetually frustrated by idiot internetters mistaking his rodent-prostitution website for a price-comparison website.
For what it's worth I think the CompareTheMeerkat adverts are by far the best of the bunch, with a clear message and clarity of brand and purpose. And a neat, amusing pun to boot. Well done to agency VCCP for achieving the seemingly impossible.
Runner-up was Omid Djalili's efforts as Haggle Hero for MoneySupermarket adverts, a bonkers Iranian mithering unlikely celebrities for not trying to get better deals on their insurance.
I found the Nigel Mansell and John Prescott ads pretty good the first couple of times I saw them - the ads settling into a comfortable routine after some initially dubious first efforts - and the fact that Djalili's arrival heralded the departure of that Peter Jones berk and his series of embarrassing ads raises it even higher in my eyes.
As Germaine Greer reportedly said of the Jones adverts: "I thought being rich meant you didn't have to suck that kind of cock." Nice one Germaine.
Third place was taken by Confused.com with its brilliant set of adverts featuring a swivel-eyed bouncing-breasted fruit loop warbling bad karaoke that makes everyone think it's a dating service.
My thoughts are well-documented, but I will recount a conversation I recently had with someone who works at Confused.com - the gist of which is that everyone at Confused.com is well aware of how awful the ads are apart from the marketing department. Make of that what you will.
Second to the bottom were a series of responses that would normally comprise the 'Don't know' option, but in this case comprised a kind of 'Fuck you! They're all shit!' option. Fair enough.
And in last place - somewhat surprisingly to me - was poor old Gio Compario, the fat tenor, who finds himself in a series of unlikely situations singing operatically about price comparison websites.
Sheer overexposure? Is it time to kill off Gio? Hardly - while it's possible to read something into the good results for CompareTheMarket.com and MoneySupermarket.com it's less clear to discern whether people actually dislike the Confused.com or GoCompare.com adverts.
Perhaps they just don't make as much of an impression; perhaps the adverts are disliked, though that doesn't say much of their penetration; perhaps people are overfamiliar with them. And perhaps the people who are more inclined to like it are less likely to stumble across this website and vote for all sorts of reasons. They don't use the computer; they don't search the web; they didn't find this website; they don't search for bad adverts websites; SEO; blindness; mental derangement.
What I'm saying is that this is hardly scientific. Having said that I'm going to pretend it is, because a spot of own-trumpet-blowing never did anyone any harm.
So there you have it. Aleksandr Orlov - aka CompareTheMarket.com/CompareTheMeerkat.com - is the winner. Imagine the CGI meerkat receiving a golden turd mounted on fist with a single, middle, upraised finger. And Djalili getting a silver one. And Cara Confused having her stupid goggle-eyed head cleaved in two by a giant scythe.
And understand that I still hate them all.
Gio, Cara, Hagglehero, Aleksandr: Vote for your favourite price comparison site advert
As we've already discovered, people think that Confused.com is now some sort of dating site thanks to its latest weird-ass ads featuring a swivel-eyed mentalist thrashing around on the screen.
After the swivel-eyed loonie warbled and wailed its way through Somebody To Love and Chain Reaction, making everybody believe that the price-comparison outfit had ventured into some sort of lonely hearts website for crazy cult members, there's now an advert out trying to reiterate the point that it's actually a website about comparing insurance quotes - something about ten billion miles away from a strange karaoke with a load of weird squiggles bouncing their tits around.
Too little too late? However annoying the meerkat, Go Compare and Moneysupermarket ads are, there's an undoubted clarity of purpose to them. The new Gio-in-space and John Prescott Money Supermarket ads suggest that these memes have a lot further to run, so I thought I'd do a poll to see which are peoples' favourites of the price comparison ad wars.
Vote for your favourite at the bottom. Before you get there, here's a reminder.
Cara Confused thing
See more Confused.com adverts
Meerkat thing
See more ComparetheMarket adverts
Omid Djalili thing
See more Moneysupermarket adverts
Fat tenor thing
See more Go Compare adverts
Vote now!
2010′s ‘best-loved’ adverts
These were, apparently, the best-loved adverts of 2010, according to some kind of complicated algorithm from Nielsen.
The research includes 1.5 million votes cast by British viewers on the 'likeability' of various adverts and how much they remembered it.
On this basis, the ubiquitous meerkat adverts came out on top, with a 'likeability index rating' of 256; 2.56 times more popular than the average new commercial during 2010.
Second was an advert for Magners, one of many overwhelmingly Oirish adverts that blighted the channels over 2010; while utterly forgettable adverts for the likes of Maltesers, Cushelle and Velvet were also ranked in the top ten.
So, what does all of this mean? Very little, beyond the redundancy of many tracking metrics deployed in advertising and marketing to reassure advertisers and marketers that they're doing a top-hole job.
These adverts may have been ranked as memorable and likeable, but it's hard to read anything more significant into these figures. Are these good adverts? In the main, no. Did they give a return on investment? There's no data here to suggest they did. What was the penetration? Who knows? Did they raise the profile of the brand? Perhaps, that's the easiest conclusion to draw from this bizarre set of data, though how familiar and fondly thought-of the brand already is is debatable; as is how memorable they after after a year; while how these adverts automatically become 'best-loved' is beyond me.
No doubt Nielsen would love to tell you more about its advert rankings and audience research - for an absolutely whopping fee. I'd be more than happy to give rather more succinct views on the adverts below, for a much smaller one.
'Best-Loved' Adverts Of 2010
(Descriptions in italics are Nielsen's; in plain are mine)
1. CompareTheMarket.com
Story of meerkats fighting an army of mongooses in a snowy landscape
Meerkats uber Alles.
2. Magner's Irish Cider
Clonmel home of Magners Cider; lorry over golf course; through brick wall
Begorrah, bejoisus, becroikey. Fucking champ. Patronising Oirish drivel.
3. Maltesers
Two couples watch a movie; girlfriends position boyfriends so that they are cuddling
Meh. Variation of the stupid-Dad meme.
4. Santander Bank
Family driving in car; boy falls asleep with red legos; featuring Lewis Hamilton
Everyone likes lego; kids probably like Lewis Hamilton (though probably don't do a lot of banking).
5. Snickers Candy
Mr. T doing pushups; listen up, suckers; get tough, one-fingered push-ups
Hard to ignore, hard to forget, hard not to like - at first at least.
6. Cancer Research
Race for Life this summer, beat cancer, enter now
Don't remember ever seeing this.
7. Marks & Spencer Christmas ad
Come on girls first positions; featuring Peter Kay, Twiggy and Dannii Minogue
Noisy, unloved-celeb cluster-fuck.
8. Velvet Paper Towels
Boy in suit points to where trees should be planted in forest; adults hold trees in pots
Quite like this, couldn't connect it with a brand though.
9. Cushelle Bathroom Tissue
Cartoon koala bear leaps and hugs pack of tissue; new name (previously Charmin)
Eh?
10. Pepsi Max
Professional footballers, including Lionel Messi, play kids for a Pepsi Max
Cash-spunking corporate obligation pay-day.
Josh T-Mobile advert
There really are some awful PR pitches out there, with the rush to utilise aspects of social media into ad campaigns resulting in some pretty horrible creations.
And this. This is the Daddy of them all. I don't really think that many PRs or journos or marketers really understand social media, or at least how best to utilise it. This is a perfect illustration.
The power of social media is in creating something of value that has the potential to zip around the web across multiple platforms. If you do this well then members of Joe Public will do the work for you.
I don't have any inside information, but I'm willing to bet that CompareTheMarket.com has done pretty bloody well out of the CompareTheMeerkat.com campaign. It's captured imaginations, is fluffy and potentially amusing. It's perfect for social media platforms.
These Josh T-Mobile ads have not, because its fundamentally a pretty uninspired idea that smacks of lots of other bits and bobs out there at the moment.
'Create a band by roaming around the country holding jamming sessions with oddballs' is a cracking pitch only in the mind of an ad exec (and are all of those people on the bus really Josh fans, rather than paid-for actors and musicians?).
And if it were to ever take off it would only be due to the magnetic personality and shimmering talent of the individual fronting it.
Josh is not this person and, while probably a decent chap, cannot carry a massive multi-platform campaign on his thin, backpacking-around-India-during-a-gap-year shoulders and weedy one world wifflings.
Chuck in some awkward elements where Josh is required to suck some corporate cock in the form of some ill-fitting soundbites about how great T-Mobile is and the final nail in the coffin is hammered home.
I've said before that I don't object in principle to stuff like this, but when it's backed by a massive corporate outfit it's never possible to see past the real reason it exists in the first place.
And that's enough to turn it from something twee and rather nauseating into something genuinely awful.
Confused.com stupid rubber Yoda thing
Confused.com is a suitable name in that it describes the company in question's current advertising strategy. It wasn't five minutes ago that they'd ditched the cheap and cheesy approach and as Robin previously noted, settled on friendliness, reliability and ease as the key values they were attempting to get across.
ling (and clever) rival campaign from CompareTheMarket.com, which stars an amusing Russian meerkat called Alexandr, a rushed new advert from Confused.com has been cobbled together starring a disgusting rubber thing called Confucius. (I'm assuming this name is a stab at a pun on the word "Confused" but who's to say.)
It's becoming obvious that Confused.com is a fundamentally rubbish name for a mature price comparison website. It certainly seems like they're struggling with anything approaching a coherent brand identity and are lumbering from one daft idea to the next as they attempt to escape the tedious "bloke pulling his hair out" motif of yesteryear.
As to the content of the advert, you'll notice Confucius can barely move his mouth and is thus perhaps not the ideal brand ambassador. He looks in pain and isn't funny. They've got him reading a magazine called What PowerBoat, presumably to convey some kind of wackiness. And his way of speaking sounds like someone doing a really poor Yoda impression.
All in all, not entirely a success.