Some things seem to be a fact of life these days; things we hate; things that add a little spot of irritation to our lives; things that just make us want to punch the nearest face until it’s just a bloody pulp.
Traffic jams, road works, premiership footballers, Piers Morgan, X-Factor, train strikes, the News of the World, Kelvin MacKenzie, Kay Burley and… adverts.
Were adverts always designed to annoy us? Probably, watch any selection of ads from the 50s and there are catchy jingles, overenthusiastic actors, glitzy sets and repetitive slogans. All there to burrow into your consciousness like a parasitic wasp on a caterpillar.
But it’s only recently that adverts have become actively hard to escape. Sure, the way we watch television these days means we consume more adverts than when it was just the good old BBC, cheap’n’cheerful ITV and young upstart Channel 4.
But the way we consume across a number of media means there are more routes of attack for advertisers. Print, radio, online, cinema, mobile, interactive… All are simply roads into your consciousness, ready to be exploited.
And what roads. The absurd thing is, you choose to watch them. You sit, supine, while they sap your will to live.
You even seek them out on the internet to confirm how much you hate them. Advertisers must be frotting themselves senseless.
What else to make of people who come to this blog seeking to watch an advert that drives them around the bend? An advert that could almost be pitched at kids, it’s so ridiculous.
An advert that draws LOLz and ROFLz like it’s a dramatic chipmunk. Only the dramatic chipmunk never wanted you to fill in your car insurance details on its site in order to save twenty quid. It’s sheer, evil genius.
Go Compare seems to annoy people much more than any other ad on the TV. Sure it’s annoying, but it doesn’t actually bother me as much as many others.
Readers searching for the ad and ending up here seem almost driven to homicidal rages by it; here are some examples of what AdTurds reads have been searching for:
go compare ad fuck
i fucking hate go compare
go compare ads fucking shit
go compare advert racist friday
go compare arse
go compare died
i fucking hate go compare adverts
Who’d have thought Gio Compario could stir up such ire. But it’s not Gio’s fault. We watch them; we seek them out; we Google them; we buy the t-shirts.
We created him; we nourished him; we sustain him. It pains me to say it, but we get the adverts we deserve.