ITV’s Ad of the Year 2011
ITV's Ad of the Year really is a quite remarkable conceit – a programme on a channel funded by advertising telling you how great advertising is. Interspersed with adverts.
It's fiendishly clever, in a way that the people responsible can only be baddies and must be machine-gunned to death by a 'double O' agent to make things right. That's probably unlikely to happen, so you'll have to settle for my efforts.
Ben Shepherd sells it like he's narrating a royal wedding; Lorraine Kelly does her level best to look like the stupidest person who ever existed; a parade of ad bods prove to be various shades of annoying.
The most interesting thing about all this is wondering how ITV comes up with these ads. Going through them I realised I've literally never seen about one in five of them.
I don't watch vast amounts of television, but you'd think if there were going to be adverts featured in a 'best adverts of the year' TV show, someone who blogs on adverts might have seen them.
Anyway, until we see ITV's working I think it's best if we all assume that there's some sort of financial bribery involved.
These are the top 20 best ads for 2011, according to a panel of ITV viewers. I'm with Sid Vicious when it comes to the man on the street.
The Sun - Football brought to life
Rotoscoping was invented by The Sun, apparently. Terry Venables dribbles a load of cliched footy waffle out.
"It was like an explosion but with the beauty of a dance," says Vegetables. What a load of shit.
It looks nice, but it's for vile hate-mongering filth-sheet The Sun, so it must be absolutely horrible. Go away.
Walls sausages dog thing
The dog who sounds like The Streets who apologises for useless men. Hated this from the outset.
'Behind the scenes' stuff in the ad included all sort of hideously banal details that would make you want to go out and nut a heron.
Dior - J'adore
Charlize Theron meets Grace Kelly, Marilyn Monroe etc. I have literally never seen this on television, so how did ITV viewers decide it was the 18th best ad of the year?
Bafflingly, the ad creators refuse to divulge how they shot the ad. Something involving time travel, presumably. I literally cannot think of any other way.
Lucozade
Like the concept; hate the execution. Horrible whiny-voiced band.
Kronenbourg 1664
Love these ads; don't care what anyone says. Music is great, ambiance wonderful; oddness intact, everyone love Suggs.
Weetabix
Kid dances with teddies. Another ad I've literally never seen before. What gives? Arlene Philips talks about the dancing teddies on the programme. Jesus.
Freeview
Corgis search for television. Literally never seen this. Lorraine Kelly think this ad 'very very good'. We get to listen to the owners of the dogs. For crying out loud.
Cadburys
Clothes dance. Literally never seen it. Arlene Philips lends vital – and I do mean vital – insight into what it's like to dance while dressed as a pair of trousers. The hair transplant man from a talent show was 'bowled over'.
Old Spice
This is a genuine classic. Razor-sharp lines that are totally on the button. Brilliant. Wonderfully pulled off. Mel Sykes basically reveals that she gets wet when this ad comes on.
Yell
The JR Hartley ad updated. Don't think this works. Not especially charming, though well done.
Heineken - the entrance
Despise this music, so can't like this advert. Yes, yes, well done.
People on the programme express amazement over the choreography. Pathetic.
Lynx - Sexy boy
Angels fall to Earth, remove halos in search of man who smells of gas. It's kinda the sort of thing that Lynx does. Whether you think that makes it brilliant probably depends on whether you read Nuts, or work in advertising. Smell is important, says Mel Sykes.
Hovis - Farmer's Race
Literally never seen this. Farmers run. Quite nice. 'Real farmers' were actually involved. Fuck me.
John Lewis - Through the ages
I genuinely don't get John Lewis adverts. They seem to work, but why? All they do is borrow good stuff from other people. Certainly there's a skill involved in picking music, but it's all such a shamelessly obvious tactic.
We're supposed to believe that everyone cries when they see these ads. Let's not overstate the case here – these are well-made ads but there's nothing novel about them.
"Brilliantly uses music," says Arlene Phillips. For the love of Christ.
Also, the ad ends with The Kooks, who are obviously fucking shit.
British Airways - The Aviators
Fuck right off. This is an absolute fucking disgrace. It's insulting. It's disingenuous. It's totally shameless. Despicable, awful, hideous. Dreadful. I'm not kidding. (Read my original post on this - the biggest wank ever wanked ).
Cancer Research UK
A powerful advert, no doubt. I like ads like this for charities that show you real lives – and show you the upside to charitable works.
Aldi Xmas adverts
Like these. Real people. In and out fast. Not too twee. Well done.
VW Darth Vader ads
Brilliant fun, really well done though I still struggle to connect the product with the ad. See if you can name the car. Bet you can't.
T-Mobile - Parking Ticket
Fake traffic wardens befriend motorists. The sort of thing that might raise a flicker of interest for four seconds during your lunch break. No doubt people in advertising will tell us how astonishingly clever this is.
I do like the actors in it though.
Cravendale - Cats with thumbs
Walking cats. Meh.
Last year I described this as drowning in warm bovril while Lorraine Kelly and Ben Shepherd coo in your ear. This year, more like a load of boardroom suits patting your fevered brow while relieving you of your wallet.
The worst advert of 2011: Results
Haribo then. It had to be really, even with the incredibly strong late challenge put up by Littlewoods (undoubtedly the worst Christmas ad of the year), who couldn't really have done any more to win the title of Worst Advert of 2011 if it had executed an old man in a Santa outfit live on air.
Haribo. It sounds like it stands for something. Ha-teful Ri-talin Bo-llocks? Ha-ve R-ubberI-sed Bo-ogers? Thinking on, that seems unlikely but it may as well as far as I'm concerned, it may as well. I hate Haribo, I think the sweets are horrible. But I hate their 2011 Supermix advert more for all the same reasons. Gooey, overly sweet, artificial and indigestible.
The Drum asked Haribo exactly what they were playing at with the Supermix advert, to which they replied with the following:
“The new advert is certainly attracting a great deal of attention. We intended that it would be a fun, memorable and catchy karaoke style sing-along, which is exactly what it is.
Let's examine this statement. The advert, Haribo concedes, is attracting "a great deal of attention".
That's a fairly coy statement in relation to the torrent of hate the ad generated, including a staggering 1,849 dislikes on Youtube, dwarfing 'likes' by around six-to-one. The average ratio of likes to dislikes is around 20-to-one on video channels.
There's at least three Facebook groups set up to disparage the advert. A forum called Britain's Biggest Cunts has a section on the ad called Haribo Chewing Cunts. It certainly seems reasonable to suggest that the advert is attracting a great deal of attention.
What next? Well, agency TBC Inc says it's a "fun, memorable and catchy karaoke style sing-along". Memorable and catchy? Yup - in the same way that a particularly unpleasant dose of dysentery is memorable and easy to catch.
Karaoke-style singalong? Well, if it was a particularly hellish karaoke in a David Lynch nightmare, perhaps.
"Haribo is a family brand and we have a mass market audience and appeal, at the heart of everything we do is fun, whether that’s tongue in cheek or playful.”
At this point I could mention the allegations, levelled at Haribo, of using forced Jewish slave labour during the Second World War but that would be a bit crass, albeit quite amusing.
Does this have mass-market appeal? It's certainly on the radar of a lot of people, but whether putting out an advert that's universally despised is good marketing is a moot point (and one I've mused on before here).
What's more interesting is whether this is supposed to be "playful or tongue-in-cheek". Which is it? The former, an earnest attempt to make something 'playful'? Or the latter, a deliberate attempt to make something awful? I'm plumping for the latter as I don't believe even the most simple-minded savant could feasibly come up with something as artless as this.
What is more interesting than the ad itself is what happened to it. All of a sudden it was missing from the schedules and the previous ad – Interrogation – was back on the telly.
Did Haribo decide, all of a sudden, that their karaoke-style singalong was not just annoying the very tits off people, those tits were orbiting the Earth at a very high level of the atmosphere, as far distant from their owners as Haribo sweets are from being delicious sugary treats? Surely not something so fun and playful? Who's to say.
Suffice to say I thought it hideous - adverts that set out to put me in a bad mood frequently make me feel that way. It's nauseating, bizarre, shrill and - worst of all -affected.
Yes, I think it's the fact that this is all so arch and post-modern and deliberately inane that makes it so terrible. I thought some of this year's worst ads were more egregious on an aesthetic level - and others more misguided - but certainly this is the most purely annoying.
Don't take my word for it though - Haribo was streets ahead of its nearest competitor, in numerical terms, by the end of the vote despite duking it out with Littlewoods for a while.
AdTurds readers have spoken - and they have spoken of their displeasure at "Oh so smooth, love them soft" (an I didn't even get around to those vile pornographic subtexts).
Internet justice - the most useless, fulminating, empty, unreasoning and fleetingly-satisfying justice of all - has been delivered. Fuck you, Haribo. Fuck you all the way to Hades.
Now let us never speak of it again.
Read the original Haribo AdTurd
The rest of 2011
Littlewoods gave Haribo a great run for its money, as did Gillette, which kept falling away then regaining lost ground. I suspect that little man's voice from the latter, reverberating around living rooms, became something of a Pavlovian stimulus to many over the year.
Further down were Wonga.com - a particular dislike of mine - perennial overachievers Halifax and Marks and Spencer for its X-Factor ad. I didn't dislike the latter that much, but I thought it a terrible idea. I'm still surprised that it registered so highly though.
Confused.com's horrible adverts were next up - and then the BMW Lund one, which were probably the genuine worst adverts of the year for money, in terms of what I reckon they did for the brand.
All the others got a good few votes each, apart from Eurostar with a single vote.
'Others' - for there was the opportunity to vote for one's own bete noir - did pretty well too, with quite a few suggestions. Go Compare fared well here, as did a late run for the Argos alien sperms - along with a couple of others such as Pepsi Max that has somehow escaped me over the year.
Still, a new year and all that. I can barely wait to be irritated by an all-new crop in 2012. Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
Other choices
Go Compare
Compare the Market
Head and Shoulders / Jenson Button
Cadbury Dairy Milk - The Final Countdown
Pepsi Max Office Men
Mazuma Mobile advert from March/April
Game - Babies
j20 glitter berry camp lock-in
argos
Lynx
Boots "Here Comes The Girls"
Heineken "Bassanova" Utter turd
That PlusNet fat bastard
Worst celebrity ads of 2011?
Not a list I've compiled, this is something Campaign has done - so don't shoot the messenger and all that.
I've reproduced them below as they bear some analysis. None of the worst Xmas adverts of 2011, many of which feature celebs, made it but there's some degree of crossover with my worst ads of the year list.
1. Head & Shoulders, Jenson Button
Campaign says: "Cheesy monstrosity"
AdTurds says: Don't blame Button; blame the freeform poetry about Dandruff shampoo written by a non-English speaker.
2. BritBingo, Gavin Henson
Campaign says: "...the only way Henson could demean himself even further is if he starred in a dodgy Channel 5 reality show in which he embarked on an embarrassing search for a new girlfriend."
AdTurds says: He's the next Matt Dawson
3. Eurostar, Jarvis Cocker
Campaign says: "...a mess... random."
AdTurds says: Utter Euroballs
4. Just for Men, Luis Figo
Campaign says: "new low... cheesy spot"
AdTurds says: Love a Figo role
5. Bernard Matthews, Marco Pierre White
Campaign says: "centred on turkey"
AdTurds says: If MPW can do this for cash, he'll bum a turkey for cash
6. Flora, Vernon Kay
Campaign says: "awful"
AdTurds says: Invites the reading that Kay is now living with his mum after Tess kicked him out over TextGate. Ad should have ended with him rubbing one out to a woman's bra on his mobile.
7. Venky's, Blackburn Rovers
Campaign says:bad performances this year, but this one was the worst of the lot.
AdTurds says: Think Blackburn Rovers: Think machine-recovered chicken bits
8. Schweppes, Uma Thurman
Campaign says: "uncomfortable"
AdTurds says: Hard to believe that bending over, spreading her buttocks and saying "I love Schweppes... in al the wrong places!" would have been much more embarrassing for Thurman.
9. Very.co.uk, Diana Vickers
Campaign says: "cringe... patronising... very long time."
AdTurds says: Who?
10. Isme, Lynda Bellingham
Campaign says: "Could Bellingham stoop any lower?"
AdTurds says: Could stoop any lower? If Campaign means 'could she stoop any lower than making an inoffensive advert?' I'd say the answer is yes.
The worst adverts of 2011
In Roger Corman's portmanteau of Edgar Allen Poe's short stories, Masque of the Red Death, Vincent Price - as Prince Prospero - explains that his father once locked a man in a yellow room for a year to see what would happen. When Prospero was done with him the man was half-mad and unable to look at the colour yellow for the rest of his life.
The most hated man in the country?
Having watched eleven months of adverts that could drive the calmest man to knuckle-biting angst I know how he felt. What would happen, I wonder, if a man were made to watch price-comparison website adverts non-stop for a year? My bet would be a fate from another Poe story, namely being reduced to a puddle of foul, stinking, steaming pustulation in a matter of minutes.
2011 continued where 2010 left off, with a number of big names - chiefly price-comparison sites, financial sectors and high-street names - doing their level best to put you in a bad mood. In a marketplace where brand recognition is paramount, an advert equivalent of a hair-pull is good work.
Reanimated corpses
Let's consider, for a second, the utter absurdity of price-comparison adverts. Short, aggressive messages that cost tens of millions of quid to create and distribute; designed to make us use a website that shows aggregated prices for financial services. And to make us use them they try their damnedest to make us feel angry - it's utterly barking mad by any rational standpoint. Welcome to advertising.
So it should come as no surprise that price-comparison site adverts usually constitute a significant degree of 'worst of' lists. Go Compare and Confused.com anyway. In my wholly scientific price-comparison site advert survey earlier this year readers disliked them the most. CompareTheMarket continues to show that price-comparison sites can be tolerable, enjoyable even, but the majority of ads in this pester-power genre have all the subtlety of a South London racist tram rant.
I've left Go Compare off this year - I think we can all take it as read that we hate it - and the Patrick Stewart MoneySupermarket ones haven't quite piqued my anger yet. Confused.com is, of course, because I absolutely despise it.
Dreams pictured not coming true
Alas, there's nothing we can do about any of this. You want your Corrie, your I'm A Celebrity, your X-Factor, your E4, your More 4; you pay for it. By buying Corn Flakes, Anusol, Mattesons smoked pork sausages, Muller yoghurt, KFC and Volkswagen Crafters. By submitting your details to MoneySupermarket and Go Compare; by banking with Barclays and Santander and Halifax. By doing your Xmas shop at M&S, Tesco, Iceland and Littlewoods.
You pay for these adverts to be created. You have created your very own monster. Stacey Solomon's gangbang of cheap food and families. Jamie's Oliver increasingly piggy face smirking over some brussel sprouts. Freddie Flintoff headbutting pork pies. And, lest we forget, Cara Confused pulling unfeasibly large items out of her vagina.
The only, tiny, infinitesimal thing you can do is to boycott the products of the ads you despise; an act so futile it's up there with shouting at the telly and blogging about adverts you hate.
Vile pornographic subtexts
But you can strike a blow for humanity. You can, in your own way, blow Gio Compario's brains out; throw an anvil at the Halifax choir or kick that "Wooh! Hello buddy, how's your shave?" twat up the arse forever by delivering swift internet justice.
Vote for your worst advert of the year here - and send a metaphorical horse's head to these people. It's the one chance you'll ever get to fight back. The war was lost long ago but, briefly, the boot is on the other foot. And it's a foot of righteous anger.
Deliver it to the knackers of evil - and rejoice.
The worst adverts of 2011 - shortlist
Marks and Spencer Xmas ad
An advert that is so brazen in the lie that it is telling even Tony Blair would baulk at delivering it. Honey-voiced cannon fodder line up to tell us that your dreams can comes true even as they're being edited out of the ad, week by week, as theirs die in the pages of tabloid and shopping centre ribbon-slicing Hell.
And let's not even mention Frankie...
• Read the original Marks and Spencer Adturd
VW Think Blue ad
I've never included an advert on these lists before simply because the soundtrack is so irredeemably awful. The visual concept is quite nice - albeit not exactly original - but this rendition of Wouldn't It Be Nice - a truly beautiful and lovely song - is so stomach-knottingly awful with its whiney delivery that this may be my most despised advert of the year.
• Read the original Volkswagen Adturd
British Airways' massive wank
It's possible that this advert opens up a small rip in the space/time continuum every time it's played, so up its own backside is it; like an Ouroboros serpent burrowing into its own rectum, rather than swallowing its tail.
Several people have already been sucked into some sort of existential Mobius strip, as reality struggles to orientate itself with this new level of awfulness.
An elbow to the nose of anyone who's attended Heathrow; to anyone who's been through a body scanner; to anyone who's looked forlornly at a notice board to see a row of red where their flight details should be.
• Read the original British Airways Adturd
Wonga.com
Wonga got into trouble last year for making adverts deemed too flippant to sell an eye-wateringly high money-lending service, so what did it come back with? Three grotesque hyperannuated puppets, gurning and twitching around, explaining various 'payday loan' scenarios.
Adverts to give you nightmares, if not for the crippling APR, then the disturbing mannequins - like marionette corpses given life once more in the pursuit of selling ill-advised loans.
Would you buy money form reanimated cadavers, twitching around in their ghastly parody of their former lives? Did you know that Wonga.com actually uses reanimated corpses to staff its call centres? Of course you didn't. But you do now.
• Read the original Wonga.com Adturd
Eurostar
I have no inherent objection to ads that try something else; cock a snoop at received wisdom. I like Jarvis and Gondry; some of my favourite adverts are utterly batshit crazy, but this is simply idiotic. No-one knows who these three people are; two-thirds of them are hard to understand; the concept is confusing and unengaging.
The most ridiculous thing of all is that this is an advert for Eurostar that's using London 2012 as a hook. It is quite conceivable that Europeans might be lured to Eurostar by the promise of Olympic sports to the other side of the channel.
But it has exactly zero relevance to anyone in the UK - unless they're planning to fly to Paris and then get the train back to London in order to get to a lake in Slough. Just a bad, bad idea.
• Read the original Eurostar Adturd
BMW Lunds
BMW tracked to two brothers and interviewed them about their empty lives: cue instant hatred.
How could it ever have been otherwise? Everything about this advert is dripping with a smugness so cloying it's a relief when the television doesn't dissolve in a warm, self-satisfied fart and start oozing into the carpet.
The Lunds themselves may be nice people, but if BMW had made it their target to make themselves, and the brothers, look like the biggest cunts in the world they couldn't have done a better job.
• Read the original BMW / Lunds Adturd
Haribo
I'm still not exactly sure what happened here? Is this the confused result of an ad simply gone very wrong? Or, more likely, an attempt at a deliberately bad advert. A bad advert so bad that it made Halifax and Go Compare look like an indoor firework compared to Haribo's Tunguska?
Are there any vile pornographic subtexts here? Almost certainly not - but that doesn't mean I'm not going to imply that there are. And it's really hideous stuff. I mean it. Sick, just sick.
Can you image if you actually, in real life, saw the events in this ad take place? The utter horror of that - your world turned totally upside down. Either you had lost your mind or, or...
The alternative is too hideous to contemplate. But I feel sure the Haribo family would start moving towards you. No smiles, dancing or singing now. Just pure, unfettered blood lust. The horrifyingly blank eyes, the hungry mouths, the chittering noise as they gnash their teeth...
• Read the original Haribo Adturd
Harvester
This, on the other hand, is rather more straightforward. It's utterly hideous on a much more prosaic level; the result of a creative brief just going more and more wrong with each successive iteration.
There's a decent idea behind all of this; it looks glossy enough. But it's annoying. And it's utterly inept. Why the heck was a rap about salad included here? And why crowbar it into the ad is such an unwieldy way? "Help yourself to salad [three second pause]... all the salad that you want." Dear Christ.
I refuse to believe anyone associated with the ad was happy with this. No-one put this to bed with that sense of satisfaction of a job well done; just a weary shrug. The problems, the lack of direction, vague brief, 'the best we could do'.
I imagine the director, driving away from the shoot at a Harvester on an industrial estate near Daventry; Five Live is on but he's not listening. He misses his turning but just lights a cigarette and just drives and drives and drives...
• Read the original Harvester Adturd
Barclays
Stephen Merchant always seemed like the nice one when set against Ricky Gervais, didn't he? You could imagine Ricky Gervais actually physically abusing Warwick Davies - but not Merchant.
He may not actually step in but would linger in the background, distaste writ large on his face as Gervais' high-pitched hyena-ish laugh rang out, another blow raining down on the dwarf's back.
"Come on Ricky," he'd offer, a weak smile on his lips. "That's enough now. He's had enough for one day."
Gervais would stop; his fun forgotten, for now.
"What did you say? 'Stop'? Stop what?". His voice is calm and sounds reasonable, but there's a dread stillness to him now.
Suddenly Warwick shrieks in pain as the riding crop connects; another withering blow on his lacerated buttocks.
A nervous rejoinder: "The, er, the whipping. Stop. You've gone too far." Merchant swallows hard.
"Too far? I've gone too far?" A high-pitched giggle, baring those oddly pointy teeth. "And who are you to tell me I've gone too far, you gangly Milky Bar... Cunt."
Gervais approaches, flicking the riding crop absent-mindedly, unblinking.
Merchant spots a squirrel dashing across the set and point it out, hoping it will lighten the mood.
"Squirrel there, oops, he's off," pointing at the squirrel disappearing through a door; another nervous smile.
It's not working - and he can tell Ricky is getting tumescent with the thrill of the violence that is to come.
"No, come on, you've had your fun Ricky. Let's write some more lines, eh?"
"'Write more lines'? Oh, I see. You want some of this too. Is that what you want?"
Spittle flecks the lips and Gervais is clearly nursing something that isn't vertically challenged in his pants.
"You want to talk to Mr Whippy too? I'll write some lines - across your back!"
Ricky is now pointing at Stephen's face with the fun-size whip. Stephen backs away, but Shaun Williamson grabs him from behind and holds him steady.
Gervais raises the whip above his head, Merchant knows that to struggle will only make it worse. Warwick Davies is sobbing across the room - still wearing the leather chaps and waistcoat Gervais insists on - a look on his face that says 'thankyou'.
At that second Johnny Depp enters the room, and it's as if a light has been switched on. Gervais drops the riding crop, Barry wanders off in search of cream cakes and Merchant relaxes, slightly.
He fingers the scars on his face and neck; flinching at Ricky's high-pitched whinnying. At least Warwick survived.
This time.
Once upon a time you might have looked at Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant and imagined a dynamic between them a bit like that. But no more. This set of Barclays adverts are so awful I find it impossible to look at him in anything approaching a positive light any more.
I'm sure Ricky Gervais does not whip dwarves with riding crops, just as I'm sure neither man is actually evil. But whenever one of these ads comes on I think of Merchant brandishing an Ewok figurine and throwing it at Warwick Davies. Really hard. And laughing.
• Read the original Barclays Adturd
Gillette
This is a genuine search query, typed into a search engine today, resulting in a visit to AdTurds:
Is there a bigger cunt on tv than the twat in the gillette pro-glide ad?
The answer to the question is 'no'.
• Read the original Gillette Adturd
Confused.com
...and still they come. Confused.com adverts are certainly memorable - for featuring a weird cult with massive bouncing breasts and a multi-dimensional muffed leader singing about what is understood to be a dating service.
If Brian Blessed were to shout FAIL from the moon for eight years it wouldn't be sufficient to describe this deleterious misfire.
• Read the original Confused.com Adturd
Paul Whitehouse / Aviva
Can Paul Whitehouse tapdance? Is Paul Whitehouse dead? Has Paul Whitehouse bought a house in Tuscany? These ads seem to really confuse people, who don't seem to be able to tell fiction from reality.
They confuse me too, mainly because they're so strange. They're just like Fast Show vignettes, but somehow there's a message for insurance in there too. I never really receive that message because I'm too busy writing WTF? all over my skin in felt tip.
A very unlovely, aggravating, baffling and truly weird series. In't Aviva brulliant? No, no it's not.
• Read the original Paul Whitehouse / Aviva Adturd
Littlewoods
Quite probably taking victory at the last minute, for my money, this Christmas advert for Littlewoods is not content with simply being an entirely new shade of awful, it's killed off Santa too.
I'm not really sure why Littlewoods felt the need to dispossess children of their youthful innocence quite so abruptly and violently, but there you are. Perhaps because Santa Claus is now deemed an obstacle to accessing the true meaning of Christmas - children's pester power - to be tolerated any longer.
Perhaps they should have gone further; explaining that their parents will die one day, anything they truly love will be taken away from them and there is no God.
Start firing off Littlewoods credit cards emblazoned with 'THIS IS THE ONLY THING THAT TRULY LOVES YOU' once they get to 12 months, I say.
• Read the original Littlewoods Adturd
MoreThan
Idiotic - if nicely shot - drivel that made 53,000 people come to this site over the course of the year to try and find what the hell was going on.
I don't have the energy to talk about it again. Suffice to say that the guy doing the voice was NOT Morgan Freeman.
• Read the original MoreThan Adturd
Colmans
I always hated this song, but imagine how much more I hate it now that it's being used to advertise cow paste, using a reanimated cow skidding around on a dinner table.
I mean, at least Wonga waits until people die to use their corpses to run their UK operations, but Colmans relies on cow's being killed to make its beef gravy. That's right - a creature loses its life for this to be made possible.
That's all well and good, but there's no need to shout about it - or make a hideous, distasteful advert about it. It would be like Wonga using their bodysnatching teams on their adverts.
• Read the original Colmans AdTurd
Halifax Choir
Halifax won last year's worst advert poll with its bank-employees-as-idiotic-regional-radio-disc-jockey ads.
Having dispensed with the services of DLKW, who were responsible for the radio station adverts, it's now up to Adam & Eve to rescue Halifax's reputation; battered by poor performance as part of Lloyds and its hated ad campaigns.
This one is noticeably less egregious; it's not actually trying to cause you mental distress, which is always a bonus. The people in the choir are actual Halifax employees and they're trying to convey messages such as Halifax's Saturday opening and so on.
But still it's horribly annoying. It may be the misappropriation of the songs - I don't want my bank telling me they'll 'be there' or that I've had a 'hard days night', but it's OK 'cos the bank's open in the morning.
What next? 'It's OK not to be OK'? 'You are beautiful in ever single way way'? 'What I got you gotta get and put it in ya'?
To try and bolt such garbled messages about savings accounts and the like to these twee little ditties is simply rather grisly. It's like a door-to-door salesman spending hours cooing over your family snaps and lovely crockery, only to open his briefcase in the last ten minutes and try to sell you a 'little piece of paradise'.
You kinda wonder if all the preceding stuff is just a big pile of bullshit, don't you? And, you know what, you'd be absolutely right. Banks exist to make money from you - don't forget it.
Also, bonus hatred for the guy who does a little first pump in the bottom left-hand corner at the climax of one of the ads - for some reason not present in any of the ads on Youtube. I bet the people who made the ad would make out that it was "just something he did on the day" and that they "decided to leave it in".
Lucky that he was positioned in one of the two places that would be really noticeable, then, eh?
Now vote for your most hated ad of 2011
You've seen the candidates - now you have to pick one. And only one, mind. None of this multiple voting shit. I know it's hard. You may have to think long and hard and about - agonise over whether your vote goes to Wonga, Littlewoods, Barclays or one of the others.
Either that or clear your cookies and vote again.
Best and worst 2011 Christmas adverts
Time was we'd judge the start of the Christmas season by the appearance of crackers in shops; nowadays it's the appearance of the first Christmas adverts.
With fully 50 days before 2011's Yuletide there were Christmas adverts on our tellies; filmed in the unseasonally pleasant September and October across the country. Freddie Flintoff in a duffel coat, surrounded by fake snow, santas and mince pies. In St Albans. In September.
So, what festive delights await us this year? M+S had ditched Twiggy and Danni; the Sainsburys ad constitutes Jamie Oliver's swansong; what would John Lewis come up with this time?
Absurdly, Xmas adverts for the big supermarkets and department stores have become event television. But how big - and shit - have these events been this year?
By my money they've mainly got it right. Iceland has backed away from the insanity of last year's Donovan adverts; Marksies has ditched its middle-class smugathons; the overall tone is of restraint, when compared to last year anyway.
It's not all good. The Boots girls are still coming - perhaps due to the entry of Ann Summers into our advert marketplace - and there are still two truly diabolical efforts here.
Familiarity - and you can bet you'll become very familiar with these ads - is sure to breed contempt, even fury. By the fifth time you've seen the new Littlewoods or Toys R Us ads you'll be ready to hurl your chestnuts at the telly.
But with any luck this year's crop of Christmassy ads should leave you relatively unmolested come Christmas morning. Just pray no-one has a Halfords-style reaction when unwrapping presents.
John Lewis
Celebs: None
It seems to be John Lewis' modus operandi to make viewers cry these days, with their ads ploughing a fairly shameless furrow that seems to work for them.
I think the strategy pretty canny. It's a rich seam of nostalgia, sentimentality and general warm fuzziness - all the stuff that makes Christmas what it is.
Next year's advert will apparently feature a sickly kitten being stroked in front of an open fire by Terry Wogan for a full 120 seconds, while Gary Jules' Mad World plays in the background.
Turd rating: One
Sainsburys
Celebrities: Jamie Oliver
"Goto Sainsbury's for a magical Christmas feast," says this last effort from Jamie Oliver on behalf of the upmarket supermarket.
Nice idea, nice execution. Minimum Oliver. Good work.
Turd rating: One and a half
Iceland
Celebs: Stacey Solomon
Where was there to go after last year's Xmas Iceland offering, featuring Jason Donovan as a perverted ringmaster? Well, back to basics really. Christmas parties, finger food, Stacey Solomon's enormous face - I'm fairly unsure Stacey and her family will be tucking into gammon over Xmas, mind.
I take exception to the horrible new Solomonised recording of Driving Home For Christmas - a song I always make sure I have on a CD when actually heading home on Christmas Eve.
Not especially egregious then - and a thankful step back from the Lynchian horror of last year - but I doubt any celebrity would ever be seen dead entering Iceland, which seems to be ever closer to some sort of underclass shopping experience every time I hazard upon one.
Turd rating: Two
Waitrose
Celebs: Delia Smith, Heston Blumenthal
I'm a bit nonplussed by this one, featuring Delia and Heston. It hinges everything on four distinct products and doesn't really compel me to find out more.
It looks a million bucks - a bit Downton Manor via Heath Robinson and Tim Burton - but it doesn't feel especially cosy.
A bit chilly, all told, like a Heston artichoke and air-dried Haribo truffle in liquid nitrogen.
Turd rating: Two
Morrisons
Celebs: Andrew Flintoff, Bruce Forsyth
Hmm. Jury's still out on this one. I suppose Freddie still has enough goodwill from the Ashes in 2005 and 2009 to get away with this - and some good decent, honest, thick Lancashire shtick probably doesn't do any harm, although it's a bit much that they actually correct Flintoff's awkward delivery.
Nice cameo from Brucey at the end and a fairly strong message - Freddie like pies! Legend! Meat! Christmas! Pastry! Brulliant! - unlike many of the ads featured here.
Turd rating: Two
Marks and Spencer
Celebs: X-Factor cannon fodder
It's fairly apparent that M+S and John Lewis are competing to be the winterval shopping experience and Marksies has really wheeled out the big guns for this X-mas effort.
Riding the X-Factor bandwagon has brought its own problems that rather trouble me (the singers either got a paltry £3K each or nothing, depending on who you listen to - Merry F'ing Xmas) but as an ad in itself it's well executed and reasonably inoffensive.
I just find it hard to shake the feeling that we're all implicit in an evil plan to make berks like Simon Cowell even more filthy rich than they are already. From somewhere in Brighton comes the sounds of Johnnie Robinson gently weeping.
Turd rating: Three
Argos
Celebs: None that I'm aware of
A novel, decent conceit but I'm not sure why a family of sperm are striding around shopping centres looking for Christmas presents.
There's one extremely strange - and rather disturbing - aspect to this. "Mmm, eggnog," says Father Sperm, Homer Simpson-style, absent-mindedly.
"Mmm, Bieber," says Ma Sperm, appreciatively. Actually, more than appreciatively. Lasciviously, you could almost say.
Now, I suspect Bieber is legal, but probably only just. What's more he looks about four. Just imagine the Dad lusting after Hermione Granger and see how you feel about that.
Mmm, Granger...
Turd rating: Three
Halfords
Celebrities: None
Nice idea, nice execution but this is a terrible assault on the senses - the sort of thing the CIA used to blast at Manuel Noriega.
Turd rating: Three and a half
Boots
Celebrities: None that I'm aware of
I find it hard to believe that the Here Come The Girls tattoo doesn't have some sort of Pavlovian effect on half the population these days - its very presence like the foreshadowing of some horrific catastrophe.
Personally I'm inclined towards punching myself in the neck, but voiding of stomachs, noses, bladders and bowels are all empirically-proven side-effects of hearing this tune.
Since this one has a clear Great Escape theme to it I'm hoping there's a bonus ad that involved them all being taken out to the woods and machine gunned.
Turd rating: Four
Matalan
Celebrities: None
I wonder if the Wachowski Brothers ever thought that their revolutionary Bullet Time trick photography invention would ever be used to shill a discount supermarket chain in a bizarre Christmas advert.
I'm guessing not, just as I'm guessing that no-one would have foreseen the inclusion of a mind-spinning Inception-style telescopic reality setting for an advert selling trouser-vendors.
I just find this confusing - and I don't get what it has to do with Matalan. Presumably all the people feature in it are asleep, bald, pale and nude - possibly in a gigantic monster-feeding embryo chamber.
Turd rating: Four
Toys R Us
Celebrities: None
Why, when you have a much-recognised and much-loved Christmas advert in the form of the ageless "There's a magical place; We're on our way there; With toys in their millions; All under one roof" ad, would you piss all that brand equity down the drain with a vile American rap waffling on about coupons?
Appalling. Inexplicable. Appallicable.
Turd rating: Four and a half
Littlewoods
Celebrities: None
An absolute fucking disaster, unless the aim was to reposition Littlewoods as the most low-rent outlet on the marketplace.
The ASA has actually been moved to an issue a 'we don't like it, but we have to go along with it' rebuttal to complaints that this ad is killing Santa. And replacing it with what? A bloody credit card.
If this were Japan some ritual boardroom suicides would be going on about now. Possibly metaphorical, possibly not.
I never want to see this ever again.
Turd rating: 245,835,585,299,001
So, there you have it. A rotten bunch to be sure, but this could have been so much worse. No-one would ever pretend that Fukushima was a good thing - but the alternative doesn't bear thinking about.
And, just in case you think I'm overcooking things somewhat, take a look at this - and never, ever forget.
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
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
The worst adverts of 2010
It's been a fruitful year for the AdTurds, with much more material that could be covered in the end. The Suggest an AdTurd feature is brimming like one of those huge tanks in the American midwest that's full of boiling, gaseous pig shit.
Go Compare ran away with this one in 2009 and like Cliff Richard, he's a very good bet for this year's gong too, despite stiff competition from Confused.com, WeBuyAnyCar, BT and Halifax.
There are dark horses too. Who saw the VanCompare advert coming? Or Bing's heroic attempt to take on Google with some monkey noises? Or the total horror of Jamie and Louise Rednkapp 'laaaahvin iiii...'?
And what about Spotify? That came from nowhere eh? But how many people who heard Jack Davenport's infuriating Alfa Romeo MiTo advert will ever forget it?
What has emerged is the likelihood that a genuinely hated ad is likely to find its way back on your box again and again. If people dislike it, they probably remember it; if the remember it, it's probably on the screens all the time; if it's on the screens all the time it's probably disliked. Hence your most hated ad is back on the telly again and again. QED.
That's unfortunate if you're driven to twitching fury by such adverts, but it seems increasingly clear that it's how ad agencies work. Bad adverts are, if you like, a necessary evil. But this is concentrated evil. One drop of that could turn you all into hermit crabs.
Read on! Weep! Vote! Smash yourself in the face with an iron! Watch again! It's the most annoying, most shit, most terrible adverts of 2010!
Halifax adverts
Effortlessly the worst series of adverts since, well, the last lot of Halifax adverts. While truly appalling, these adverts don't quite make me fear for the human race. They're like the Mumford and Sons, Tesco or Microsoft of bad adverts. Always there, always disliked, always shit (or mediocre at any rate).
But there are, to my mind, worse evils in the world. AdTurds readers seem to disagree, so expect this to go straight in at number one in the poll below.
Full disclosure: AdTurds has a bit of a thing for the blonde in the Lucky You advert.
Read the original entry: new Halifax adverts and Isa Isa Baby adverts.
Confused.com - Somebody to Love
After several failed attempt, Confused.com finally hit upon a character of its own designed to annoy the shit out of people everywhere. Only this isn't just annoying, it's also inept. A confused (ahem) message only serves to leave a bemused WTF rattling off the walls.
Imagine Confused.com's squiggly drawing thing being rather indelicately spitroasted by Gio Compario and Aleksandr Orlov and you have a pretty good metaphor for how their respective campaigns have panned out.
Read the original entry: Confused.com Somebody to Love
Marks & Spencer's Xmas Turd
Hard to believe now, but there was once something vaguely canny about these M&S adverts, before they fell in love with themselves so massively it's a surprise they don't simply have the cast frotting themselves on cashmere jumpers and gift packs of bubble bath.
This festive effort swith Peter Kay, Twiggy, Danni Minogue and some other people too dreary to mention is so smug that Piers Morgan thinks it's a bit much.
Read the original entry: Marks & Spencer Christmas advert
Thomas Cook Redknapp horror intersection
AdTurds has some inside information on this effort from Thomas Cook that suggests that it was responsible for more complaints than anything else the travel company has ever done.
That may or may not be true, but what is true is that Thomas Cook has a huge effigy of the gruesome Redknapps (who seem to exist purely in advertising these days) in its reception, no doubt now defaced by people driven to violence by Louise and Jamie's vile, whiny estuary voices.
Read the original entry: Redknapp Thomas Cook adverts
Bing clutch bags
Tasked with apparent no-win scenario of designing an ad campaign to humble Google, ad agency JWT struck a canny line with the 'information overload' line but went on to present it in the most annoying way possible.
I always thought it would have been better to have the information overload people spouting a load of gibberish about hot Asian babes too.
It's also problematic because the Bing engine isn't any better in displaying relevant information that Google, Yahoo, Ask or any other search engine in the entire world.
Read the original entry: Bing adverts
Dell treats Lollipop
On the face of there was nothing too annoying about this advert for Dell's laptops first off. But the sheer carpet-bombing ubiquity of the first few bars of the Chordettes track - particularly when it invaded Spotify - rendered it simply unbearable; and almost certainly used as a torture device in Guantanamo Bay.
Lollipop Lollipop Oh Lolli Lolli Lolli Lollipop....
Read the original entry: Dell treats advert
Josh T-Mobile
Pity poor Josh. Basically used and abused by a massive multinational in their doomed marketing campaign like a Thai ladyboy by a second-hand car salesman from Romford on his annual sex holiday.
Awful music, crap idea, poor chinless Josh. A powerful mixture of pity and contempt.
Read the original entry: John T-Mobile advert
Citroen DS3 John Lennon
The Citroen DS3 might have been the most enjoyable car AdTurds thrashed this year, but this ad featuring Lennon pondering the shitness of nostalgia and retro - in an advert that was all about nostalgia and retro for a car that was all about nostalgia and retro - was one of the least enjoyable ads.
Bonus turds for the affected out-of-synch footage too.
Read the original entry: John Lennon Citroen DS3 advert
VanCompare advert
The post that provoked nothing less than death threats, legal action threats and the infinite wrath of seemingly every Sweet fan on the face of the Earth.
All of that ended in a détente with the actual chairman of VanCompare and a message of good wishes to Andy Scott, believe it or not.
Still, this is possibly the most inept advert every to grace a television. Sweeeeet!
Read the original entry: VanCompare advert
BT family adverts
Perhaps the most unloved TV couple since Sam Fox and Mick Fleetwood, Adam and Jane seemed to reach a climax this year in the 'is she or isn't she?' interactive campaign. Sadly the options didn't involve death or divorce, but whether Jane was pregnant or not (AdTurds readers suggested their own ending).
In the most stultifying spot of television ever, the answer was revealed as yes and somewhere in Scotland came the noise of John Logie Baird and Alexander Graham Bell softly weeping.
Read the original entry: BT advert - what happens next?
Go Compare adverts
AdTurds can't really find it in his granite heart to hate Go Compare. Annoying, yes, but no more than any Little & Large sketch from the 1987.
To complain of the rampant repetition; the sheer inescapability of Go Compare ads would be to complain about the ubiquity of grass, water, why the very air itself.
Still, a guaranteed big hitter in this year's poll - and maybe they'll finish it off with Gio exploding in gas, fat and hair after one 'whaffer thin mint' too many.
Read the original entry: Go Compare advert
Ladbrokes World Cup ads
Two of the most annoying people on television gibbering and gurning like idiots; an appalling campaign; distasteful subject matter; a soundtrack used in at least two different ads over the last couple of years.
Without Wright and Kamara is would be awful. With the charmless pundits it enters a new circle of Hell.
Read the original entry: Ladbrokes World Cup adverts
We Buy Any Car advert
Few adverts are genuinely hateful, but We Buy Any Car managed it this year with the advertising equivalent of having Fern Cotton blast an air horn into your face for 60 seconds several times a day.
Pretty much the nearest thing to a sonic weapon - a non-lethal weapon designed to disable victims by provoking vomiting or 'uncontrolled' defecation - that you'll ever see on television.
Read the original entry: WeBuyAnyCar advert
Alfa Romeo Spotify advert
Sadly, or fortunately, I've been unable to track down the audio of this bad, bad ad. Suffice it to say that this advert on Spotfiy was generating hundreds of tweets a day on Twitter, and none were positive.
Actually drove me to a Spotify Premium account. I've yet to work out whether this is sheer genius on the part of Spotify; sheer idiocy on the part of Alfa Romeo; a combination of both; or simple ineptitude. Either way it's abysmal.
Read the original entry: Alfa Romeo Spotify advert
Iceland 201 Christmas adverts
It was an oversight of massive proportions that Iceland's 2010 Christmas adverts, featuring Jason Donovan, were not originally included in this list, but an ad break that featured four or five versions of this ad recently convinced me of the error.
There's something genuinely unsettling about all of this. The insistence of it, the repetition and noise and the fact that the food all looks so horrible.
This isn't just an annoying advert. It;s an advert to give you nightmares.
• Read the original entry: Iceland 2010 Christmas advert
Vote for the worst advert of 2010!
Vote for your most hated ad of 2010 and we'll go an pelt the ad agency who wins with rotten fruit. And very hard stones.
Worst ads of 2009: results
Predictably Go Compare, the current Death Star of shit TV adverts, ran away with this award.
Over a third of you voted the chirpy tenor straight to the top of the year's most awful, annoying and smug adverts. And Christ was there competition.
My own bete noir, the Samsung Fucking Jet ad, spoke to me on a much more fundamentally disturbing level, as if I were looking into the very eye of some form of abstract quintessence of evil.
On the other hand the Duffy Coke ad showcased what a duck would look like if it went on a by-law flouting bicycle trip to a supermarket in search of some fizzy pop.
Frankly, they're all fucking terrible. I expect when Samsung takes over the world I'll be strapped into a chair, Alex DeLarge-style, and forced to endure them forever. Ho hum
Full results of the shittest advert 2009 poll:
Go Compare - 33.5%
Samsung Fucking Jet - 20.5%
T-Mobile - 11.4%
Duffy Coke - 11.4%
Gillette Phenom - 8%
Natwest - 5.1%
118 118 - 4%
Pot noodle - 2.8%
Red Driving School - 2.3%
Direct Line - 1.1%