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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The Worst Adverts Of 2018: Vote

worst adverts of 2018

Well, the last year flew by eh? Seems like just a few weeks since we were ready to go to TUI headquarters brandishing flaming torches and defaced copies of their brochures. And here we are again: time for the worst adverts of 2018.

Over the last year work and lifestyle changes mean I’ve watched less and less television – and so fewer adverts. That has the effect of insulating me from much of it, but being so much more aware of how dreadful some adverts are when they do make it through the mental shields I’ve developed over the years. Suffice to say over on Facebook and in the reader comments I am kept well abreast of the latest disasters.

Diet Coke Mango Advert

2018 was perhaps the year when I felt most people in the country were able to understand the madness I have fleetingly experienced over the last ten years. As I write the government is stockpiling food and medicine – and spending £4bn on planning for a disastrous no-deal Brexit that it could simply rule out if it wanted to. Even the Leavers I know think the government has gone mad.

Welcome to the world of AdTurds; a world where you can’t quite believe that no-one else seems to appreciate how insane everything is. Where you want to grab people in the street, shake them and scream in their face that they stop eating at Nando’s, buying those stupid plastic coffee pods seemingly designed to pollute the world for ever, calling radio phone-ins and all the million-and-one other things that seem to speak of certifiable insanity.

Well, maybe they have a taste of my universe now. And if you don’t, well the next 3,000 words on the worst adverts of 2018 might give you an insight into it. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. Enter at your own peril – for there may be no way back.

Worst Adverts Of 2018

Wrigley’s Extra advert – Tom

See Chewing-Gum Tom in his bare-chested glory. He has just finished fingering your daughter. See him chewing mint-flavoured gum. See his fashionably floppy hair. See him standing only in his boxers, which hide a penis <...hmm, penis…> that was until a few minutes ago interfering with your offspring in a particularly intimate manner.

Chewing-Gum Tom has already usurped you in the stakes of your child’s affections. Now he openly challenges you, with his flat stomach and well-developed chest. < Perhaps you are attracted to Chewing-Gum Tom on some level? No, no – there is only the Oedipal challenge he now presents. Forget about caressing his rock-hard abs >.

You must destroy Chewing-Gum Tom, like Saturn devouring his own son. If you do not strike now he will stand metaphorically astride your broken body, wielding the testes he has symbolically removed from your nether regions, steadily meeting your gaze and willing you to voice a breath of discontent at the terrible, unspoken subtext that passes between you < …sinking into those eyes like limpid pools of cool, cool water…. >.

Chewing-Gum Tom owns your Princess and his vigorous manhood < oh dear Christ his penis, his erect penis…> is going to be at her like a frantic piston during a rash B-road overtaking manoeuvre – and there’s not a damn thing you can do about it.

Kill Chewing-Gum Tom < …kiss Chewing-Gum Tom…>.

KILL HIM NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE!


Diet Coke Mango – Superbad advert

Perhaps the one thing that made the idea of imminent climate change apocalypse seem like it might not be such a bad thing, the Diet Coke Mango advert is truly a piece of appalling stupidity not even Nathan Barley could have gone there.

Maybe Diet Coke focus-grouped what vlog-loving, gibberish-tweeting, LOLing teenagers talk like and it happened to be as bereft of meaning as if they had just written down a load of old shite for a man wearing a 90s denim jacket to say anyway.

And maybe the people who took receipt of that research, having read its findings, realised that the game was up. That it had all been for nothing and that humanity was on the downward slope of a bell curve, skiing gleefully towards Idiocracy like a farmer voting for Brexit.

If the rise of Millennials has coined the term ‘dawn of the dumb’, this Diet Coke Mango advert is their simpleton soundtrack.

• Read the original Diet Coke Mango advert entry


Sainsbury’s Christmas advert

The sound of children singing is horrible. Children are shit at singing. Wiring plugs, claiming housing benefit, driving articulated lorries. All things kids are shit at – but we don’t make them do those things do we? So why do we have to make an exception for the little fuckers making a noise scarcely less awful than Donald Trump dragging his fingernails down a blackboard… then sexually molesting it like he would any given woman within lunging distance?

What’s that? You like the sound of your own kids singing? Course you do. You’re a slave to hormones in the same way those ants who’ve been parasitised by fungus are. Your kids could probably singing Catfish and the Fucking Bottlemen backwards and you’d wee yourself a little bit.

No, children cannot sing. But they can shriek feel-seeking emotional missiles straight at your cry glands. Sainsbury’s know this – so that’s what they have served up for your Christmas dinner: emotion raw as sushi, with lashings of sentimental sludge and a side-serving of the vague unease we rightly feel when we make precocious children sing and dance like adults.

Now off you go to buy your Taste The Difference goodies like the good little ants you are.


Halifax Ghostbusters advert

This Halifax Ghostbusters Advert is the advertising equivalent of defecating directly onto the faces of everyone involved in the original film. Here Bill Murray is replaced by Gareth, the stout Welsh chap who, not content with vomiting all over the Wizard Of Oz, now seems to be embarking on an all-out cultural rampage that will presumably end with him painting a cock into the Mona Lisa’s mouth.

I’m guessing that it’s no coincidence that Bill Murray is not involved – a man who, unlike Dan Akroyd, seems to be unimpressed by money and frivolity when it comes to his work. Harold Ramis, of course, did not have a choice whether he appeared in this genuinely upsetting spot, by handy virtue of being dead. There’s an irony.

If you accept that some things would be beyond the pale on virtually any level – let’s say dropping Gareth into Schindler’s List to discuss life insurance, for example – then you accept that all such judgements are questions of degree. And if you have any sense you’d concede that everyone’s red lines are set at different levels. Who are we to judge other people’s red lines?

To see adverts like this is to look through your memories, the repository of stuff you like, and realise that every single bit of it is up for sale. And whether you like Ghostbusters or not, that’s a frightening thought.

• Read the original Halifax Ghostbusters advert entry


Flo & Joan Nationwide advert

People literally begged me to make this advert stop, like when you see women in films who are so desperate to save their children they offer their bodies to Nazi soldiers. Flo and Joan are probably lovely people and in the right place – a Radio 4 comedy programme or some godawful hipster cafe I hopefully never have to visit – I have no problem with them.

But stick anything on television again and again – even Salma Hayek pouting or Tom Baker laughing or the Blake’s 7 theme tune – and it’s going to become hateful very quickly.

And if your song about a house is so twee it makes people pull the same face as when they bite on a lime segment, then expect hatred so strong it rivals Toby Young’s utter hatred of himself for being a snivelling little cunt.


Boots – She’s Me Mum advert

This Boots advert features something more and more prevalent in Christmas adverts: a relatable Christmas message (you hate your own mother) and relatable (ie. terrible) singing.

With lyrics that would unite the DUP and Sinn Fein in mutual hatred (“It was her; did you see? Standing there; by the tree”) and with a voice scarcely less awful than Boris Johnson grunting his way to verbose orgasm, it’s a truly grisly prospect.

Instead of Scrooge, we have a brat who remembers not to hate her mother once a year thanks to Boots. Thank God we have private-equity owned multinationals to tell us what, how and when to feel.

• Read the original Boots advert entry


Vodafone ice-skating advert

There was at least something going on in the initial Martin Freeman Vodafone adverts. Some semblance of the everyman character Freeman always portrays, railing against the inanity of modern telecommunications contracts and clumsily romancing a young lady through the medium of data-allowance banter.

In some respects it was, I guess, vaguely relatable and not completely obnoxious. But like a mince pie discovered at the bottom of a bread-bin long after Christmas is over and done with, this series seems stale, over-familiar and thoroughly unwanted.

The repetition is one thing, but this advert is possibly the least inspired 60 seconds that has ever had the misfortune of being committed to a memory card. Not even a regional disc jockey could find this amusing; not even Freeman’s wife could muster an iota of respect for him going through with it; surely even his young children must openly despise him for what he’s done. Benedict Cumberbatch will surely slap him right across his oh-so-rich-now face when next they meet.

Freeman strikes me as one of the least annoying celebrities on the overexposure circuit (cf. Lauren Laverne, Ben Wishaw, Olivia Coleman) but this utterly uninspired advert – what’s it even about? something about no coverage, then he goes ice-skating? – is so bereft of even the most infinitesimal iota of inspiration that it’s basically an insult to the very idea of advertising, storytelling or Torvill & Dean.


That fucking dilly dilly Budweiser advert

This one is pure concentrated evil. It’s for Bud Light, a drink only MAGA-hat wearers actually imbibe, once everyone else has grown out of drinking this sugary piss at the age of 14.

The ‘makes stuff turn into product’ idea has, of course, been mined by Skittles for years now so it seems odd to lift the idea. And not just the general concept. Even the theme of this superpower being akin to some sort of curse to be endured is repeated wholesale here, just in a way that isn’t remotely funny.

And then ‘dilly dilly’: a sort of medieval ‘Wasaaaaaaaap!’ for genuine morons to rally around – whether ironically or not – when they meet in the sort of IKEA-fitted bars that actually serve shite like Bud Light, to bring together their few, meagre sugar-soaked brain cells and talk shit about sport, cars and how Brexit would be going alright if it only they’d put Boris in charge.


Oral B advert

On the face of it there’s nothing of the nuclear-level awfulness to compare with the rest of this list in this Oral B advert. There’s a couple of very gratuitous shots of the actress’ bum and of her jiggling about a bit – and yes there’s the usual simpering smugness that goes with toothpaste adverts. But next to Diet Coke, Boots or Halifax? No, simply not in the same league.

That’s until you get to the line ‘I didn’t even know Oral B made a toothpaste’. And it’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this is so aggravating. Perhaps i’s the fact that everyone knows Oral B makes toothpaste and the rank disingenuousness of pretending anyone in the mind might not know.

What, exactly, are Oral B known for, if not for toothpaste? Pizza? Price-comparison services? Over-50s life insurance? And what, exactly, does the name Oral B suggest beyond dental hygiene? No, don’t answer that.

Perhaps what’s so annoying is that truly no-one on this planet gives a fuck whether Oral B do make toothpaste or not, nor does anyone care what Oral B get up to. They can shove toothpaste up their arses for all I care – and for all I know, they do.


Sun Bingo Advert

If fairness the couplet ‘got fake tits? / but are you gonna bingo’? is perhaps the most on-point bit of work ever seen in an advert. And what an advert it is. It’s worth bearing in mind that this is an advert for playing online bingo – on your own, in your bedroom on a fucking mobile phone – on The Sun’s website. The tragedy of that mental image.

Sun. Bingo. Is it hard to imagine a more disastrous confluence than those two words? Chernobyl McDonalds? Jacob Rees-Trump? Piers Morgan? An appalling meeting of minds between the mindless: a profoundly, proudly stupid newspaper publishing content halfway between The Beano, Pornhub and Mein Kampf; a pastime that requires the mental faculties of a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

To be fair, as a proud Northerner, I don’t really have a problem with bingo. It’s that S** bit. Stick that word in front in front of anything and it conjures up a Coldwar Steve world of terrifying awfulness.

Sun Orgasm. Sun Holidays. Sun Heaven. See? Even if you can’t really discern what they might involve you just know it will be awful: a warm-lager, faded-seaside, racist-by-instinct, smartphone-nudes, fast-food, homophobic, GMTV, zero-hours, Primark version of anything you can imagine – with a guffawing cockney soundtrack.


Amazon Christmas advert

I don’t know why Amazon don’t simply have a video of Jeff Bezos touring around the third world torching everything organic he comes across with a flamethrower. That’s all I can see whenever I see a box with Amazon branding, or their horrorshow website – the very concept of a world based around buying crap for the sheer hell of it. ‘Shit for cunts’ as one meme I’ve spotted on the internet has it.

The fucking nerve of Amazon whitewashing the genuine hideousness of working in one of their George Orwell workhouses, where people piss themselves because they’re so afraid of getting sacked for having a toilet break, genuinely beggars belief.

Still, so much of our concept of Christmas is based around Victoriana, so it makes sense that the pre-eminent business of our time is merrily bringing back working conditions that could only be described as Dickensian. If that doesn’t make you feel genuinely upset and a little bit frightened then I’m worried for you.

Maybe that’s just life in the Broken Britain of 2018 – but pretending that Amazon warehouses are some sort of winter wonderland is the most grotesque dishonesty I’ve seen in Adland this year.


Diet Coke advert – Yurt and athleisure

“If you want a Diet Coke, have a Diet Coke.”

That’s it? That’s the pay-off to this sequence of dissonant Millennial brain-shart? Is this what William Shakespeare died for? Is that what a medium-sized Colombian cocaine-harvest produced? ‘Have a Diet Coke – because you can’?

In this Diet Coke advert, filled with meaningless, unconnected phrases that still manage to come off as deeply affected and hatefully hip, what appears to be a similar dynamic has birthed perhaps the most obnoxiously dumb 30 seconds in existence.

More nauseating than Trump boasting of grabbing women by their parts; more smug than Piers Morgan announcing he has won the Euromillions rollover; more thoroughly awful than Nigel Farage laughing while doing a shit in your bath, the Diet Coke advert is a Soho/Manhattan nightmare of vacant stupidity that literally has no meaning. You are trapped in it and there is no escape.

• Read the original Diet Coke Yurt advert


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