I've come to the point where I now cringe as my body contorts in pain when an advert for Boots comes on, because of that fucking song Here Come the Girls (gir-irls, girls, gir-irls, girls, girls girls). As earworms go, it is one of the more deadly ones. It's entire body is covered in sharp spines and poisonous barbs that it uses to lock itself on to your eardrum, destroying your sanity in a similar fashion to tinnitus. This song didn't only bang the final nail into the coffin that held the Sugababes credibility, but filled it full of breezeblocks and then drove it to the nearest harbour, then rented a boat and took it out to the deepest part of the Mid-Atlantic rift valley before tossing it into the dark crushing depths, never to be seen again.
When Keisha left the Sugababes, she should have done it before they re-hashed and released that tune. At least she would have gone with a reasonable amount of dignity left.
Another candidate: that lottery ad where a couple decide to take their clothes off and run into the sea, the voiceover explaining that the ad is 'dedicated' to all those who have the gumption to pay their money every week in order to win bigger sums, although, in reality, I could fucking well pay a life's worth of cash big enough to build a new hospital ward and only see a tenner back. The tone seems to infer that buying a lottery ticket is a bravura act of fearless personal individuality worth celebrating and that those who don't do it are dull bastards who don't deserve joy and happiness in their miserable lives.
Or maybe I really am a miserable git. It's bloody annoying anyhow.
At least it's not Christmas any more and all those perfume (sorry, fraagraance) ads have stopped. All those dozy looking fuckers finding their own narcissistic gorgeousness thrilling/burdensome/wearying and spending their days chasing kites down streets. The ennui-stricken woman staring into the mirror "I may be looking for something. I may be looking for nothing. I don't know but I'll know when I find it." (If you're looking for nothing, how?)
Awful, flatulent gusts of pretentiousness. Gah. They all turned into WeightWatchers ads once Christmas was over.
All perfume ads now make me think of this bit of Lee Mack material...
I must admit I've never heard these Halifax radio ads. What's the gist?
The most annoying adverts on the TV at the moment are the Homebase ones with that fuckawful whistled tune as an accompaniment, although Ant and Dec's Wii commercials run them close.
Speaking of which, why haven't Nintendo brought out a game where you can run around shooting annoying bastards from adverts? Just think about it - people would gladly pay a small fortune for a "sawn off shotgun" controller, and even more for the opportunity to virtually assassinate Barry from Cillit Bang, the GoCompare opera singer, and Ant and Dec themselves.
The Halifax ads take place in a radio studio, with three Halifax 'employees' doing a chatty, breakfast show-type promotion for a free fiver with one of their accounts.
It goes into an all-singing, all-dancing piece of absolute drivel.
I hope it is meant ironically, because if not, I have just read a new book named '101 uses of strychnine for advertising executives'.
Speaking of sound, that whistly little jingle at the end of McDonald's ads makes me flich and growl like a traumatised collie. I am not musical enough to analyse why, but I really can't bear it - it's better now they no longer sing "I'm loving it" though, but only marginally.
Oh for fuck's sake. My beef with the Redknapps doing Thomas Cook was that it was freshly seared onto my eyeballs and eardrum when I started this thread, whereas the Wii ones (not only with Ant & Dec) have been going a lot longer.
But yes.
They're excruciating. I can't work out what it is that makes me want to smash my father's television to pieces whenever they come on, and I think that is itself the most annoying thing. It might be the fucking goons they choose to put on them, it might be the fact that the whole thing is so obviously staged-yet-pretending-to-be-spontaneous, it might be the fact that even though I know the Wii to be a lot of fun, it's still quite a hard thing to take seriously when they come out with shit like Wii Fit and people actually buy it to keep in shape, rather than just... I don't know... take up actual real-life exercise, for instance.
What I mean is, I can see why they're not very good ads, but I can't work out precisely why they set my teeth on edge the way they do. They do it though, however it is.
The short-lived bus stop posters were just as bad. There was one featuring our friends Louise and Jamie along with Harry Redknapp and his wife (I assume) all pointing at the camera from their sofa, with Wii controllers (the obvious inference being that the Wii is located more or less where the poster-looker is standing), and the slogan 'Have fun like The Redknapps' or something similar. Same slogan for each of the gurning celebrities who did them, with the names always in bold. It was the imperative I found offensive, the fact that it almost seemed to be telling me to live like them.
The Guardian 'Hard Sell' column in the Guide touched upon this recently, but any ads, like those for mobile phone networks like T-Mobile, that bring together crowds of people in cities to become 'involved' in giant sing-a-longs and musical jams to create this supposedly happy, warm 'I'd Like To Teach the World To Sing' kind of world that, in principle, sounds a nice vision of a communal musical utopia where happiness reigns.
If T-Mobile really wanted to create a world of musical brother and sisterhood then perhaps their board of directors could drop everything and intervene in world affairs, bringing swift ground-breaking solutions to all the world's ills like starvation, climate change, war and terrorism, which would indeed create the environment for a happier world instead of gathering bunches of camera-hogging proletariat joining along with dull bands playing crap songs solely in order to flog their phones.
I'd be quite happy if they just turned a machine gun on the bunch of gormless mouth-breathing OMG mother-fuckers as they gathered together for their Bonnie Tyler sing-a-long.
Another candidate: that lottery ad where a couple decide to take their clothes off and run into the sea, the voiceover explaining that the ad is 'dedicated' to all those who have the gumption to pay their money every week in order to win bigger sums, although, in reality, I could fucking well pay a life's worth of cash big enough to build a new hospital ward and only see a tenner back. The tone seems to infer that buying a lottery ticket is a bravura act of fearless personal individuality worth celebrating and that those who don't do it are dull bastards who don't deserve joy and happiness in their miserable lives.
Or maybe I really am a miserable git. It's bloody annoying anyhow.
(Taking my cue from a cartoon strip I saw, the other day...)
I think it would be amusing if the couple, just as they were about to run naked into the ocean, were first savaged by a polar bear and then a grizzly bear, demonstrating a sequence of events with (allegedly) the same likelihood of happening as that of winning the lottery.
There's a gigantic poster of David Cameron next to Finsbury Park tube. It's the most distressing, obnoxious thing I've seen in a public space for a long, long time.
So bad, Jurgen, that YouTube told me three times that it couldn't load the video due to a malformed URL (or something) when I clicked your link. I assume it's the babies one. It's both very creepy, and very annoying. The central thrust of it seems to be that people will love it because everyone loves babies.
I don't. They're annoying noisy selfish little shit producers, and the idea of them acting in an adult (or rather teenage) manner is deeply sinister. If that's what Evian does, I'm sticking to Buxton (or, indeed, drinkable tap water).
Yes, I've seen it and it is a bit on the creepy side. I think it's one of those ads where the makers of it and the product believe that it'll imprint itself on the mind so much that it can't help but shift units of lovely spring water. It won't. It'll just have people like me spending more time than I should thinking 'what the living fuck is that supposed to be about?'
The Redknapps' Thomas Cock advert is awful on many levels but 2 things that really bug me
They are clearly not on Thomas Cook package holiday. It sure looks like the sort of holiday that (as someone said upthread) they have one of their people arrange for them.
They've used Morcheeba for the music.
A band I've enjoyed for years and now every time I listen to them I'm gonna have a picture of the Redknapps smug faces in my head to spoil it....
"There's a gigantic poster of David Cameron next to Finsbury Park tube. It's the most distressing, obnoxious thing I've seen in a public space for a long, long time."
Oh yes, I'm flicking the Vs at that one each and every time I drive past it.
That Hallmark advert "dedicated" to that one bloke, telling us all we can personalise cards for people can toss off. It's even worse than that fucking moonpig one that does the same service.
There's something odd about those Moonpig ones though. The first time they took out a TV ad I watched it all the way through about five times (not deliberately, I mean it was on during TV I was watching) and was left none the wiser as to what the product was. Nor did I feel motivated to check out their website and find out.
You've just saved me the effort, Phoebe, so thanks for that.
I found an advert I quite like. That Renault Twingo one with the mother and daughter pulling up at lights by a poster of the daughter as a stripper. The model playing the daughter is absolutely stunning and I even like the music (a cheery number by Sporto Kantes). It won't end well; the last advert song I liked led me to buy Pepe Deluxe's album, which wasn't all that.
What I mean is, I can see why they're not very good ads
From Nintendo's perspective, they're spectacular ads. I was reading some analysis the other day saying they're one of the most successful campaigns in videogame history. And you only have to look at the UK sales charts to see they're doing something right.
The most recent chart:
1 Just Dance - Wii
2 Wii Fit Plus - Wii
3 Wii Sports Resort - Wii
4 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - Xbox 360
5 Army of Two: The 40th Day - Xbox 360
6 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 - PS3
7 New Super Mario Bros Wii - Wii
8 Mario Kart Wii - Wii
9 Forza Motorsport 3 - Xbox 360
10 - Army of Two: The 40th Day - PS3
Mario Kart is two fucking years old and it's still in the top 10.
Anyway, if you think the Ant and Dec ads are annoying, wait till you see the new Rock Band/Guitar Hero/Band Hero ad.
New Barclaycard ad doesn't annoy, it's just not as good as the last one. A waterslide and the Bellamy Brothers has been replaced by a rollercoaster and Boston. So much for originality.
I don't want a credit card, but I can't get More Than A Feeling out of my head as I type this...
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