So, dear Readers, once again democracy has failed us as a people.
But we will not allow such trivial matters keep us down. We will have a winner this month. The only way I can think to fairly decide this, is with a good old Guinness Snail Race. So here goes…. and the winner is Trident! Very well done for the appalling advert.
Even though the snails decided it in the end, thanks to all those of you who voted and keep it up.
Oh people! Aren’t they idiots? More stupid than your average door handle. Less memory power than the piece of chewing gum I trod in today. They couldn’t remember their own name even if it was “x” and it was tattooed on the insides of their eye-lids.
Because you see the great thing about Mars Planets is that you can mix them up to enjoy the great Mars taste your own way.
There’s chewy caramel. Heaven.
Who doesn’t like the soft nougat? Bring it on.
Oh and the crispy wafer. Woo mama!
What? No, hang on, there’s no crispy wafer in Mars Bars. No, no, you’re thinking of Kit-Kats. Or that Kinder Bueno. Or them there Maltesers.
Just how pig-ignorant do the advertisers really think we am?
Note to advertisers: If you didn’t think you could get away with selling us Mars Bars in a slightly different way without adding something to it, don’t just do it anyway and hope no-one notices. Let alone try and trick us in to thinking it’s always been that way.
It’s like you coming round to our houses for Sunday Lunch and having sex with our Nans on the table before we’ve even finished our prawn cocktail starters. Then denying you ever did it.
We saw you do it! It’s plain offensive! She’s 70 years old!
So listen advertisers: We’re not that stupid!
Although, you know what’s worse than “Mars Planets”? It’s those new “Bounty Islands”. Yeah, with the great taste of milk chocolate, dessicated coconuts and veal. Delicious!
Trident are back from the shame of having their last set of tv adverts pulled off the air due to, what some people thought was, racism.
And unless they’re selling bomber jackets, hob-nail boots, hair clippers, string vests, sovereign rings, and jeans with turn ups, being accused of racism goes down pretty badly with a company. So Trident had to have a rethink…
And who would have thunk it, the new adverts are actually slightly less ball-breakingly bad. But they insist on using that God-awful slogan still.
I mean, come on, it’s so unbelievably puerile it’s untrue (of course writing a blog about TV’s Worst Adverts isn’t puerile in the slightest…).
Now I’ll hold my hands up here and admit that when I tried to get my “Wank for World Peace” day off the ground, I kind of liked the shock element of the word “wank”. But it had a more serious overtone, namely World Peace. Apparently though very few World Leaders were prepared to admit to visiting a 5 digit disco so I hit rocky ground. Shame.
Hmm, I wonder if Trident also know that “chew” sounds like “poo”? Or that “gum” rhymes with “bum”?
In fact I’m off down to Tesco with my loud hailer, chain my self to the Postman Pat kiddies ride and shout “Have you got any of that Trident poo-ing bum I want to masticate with it” at everyone who walks past.
Oh, by the way, Trident’s Web site isn’t any better than their ads. It’s been Brantano‘d. I wonder how many in the advertising department have watched Look Around You recently?
I love food. There’s no denying it: I’m a food lover.
Whether it’s Birds Eye Potato Waffles, Findus Crispy Pancakes or a packet of Cheesy Watsits; I love it.
In fact sometimes I think that I might love food too much. Shall I have one more tub of Cherry Garcia or shall I stop at 4? If I could make a sandwich in the shape of a women, I’d marry it. Except before we got away on the honeymoon, I’d have to eat her (oh, and the law doesn’t allow it).
I don’t, however, love food so much that I break into tears just because someone has handed me a jacket potato with some butter on the top. The folks in the Clover Butter advert do though and it’s just a little disturbing:
Eva, the kindly sole who submitted this Bad Ad, to be fair finds it more than a little disturbing:
“It just makes me want to scream - and I do - “It’s BUTTER for God’s sake!”
What is the point of it? Do people who eat Clover lead such dismal, affection deprived lives that the little dollop of butter means “Yes! Somebody loves me!”?”
The more I watch the advert though the more I’m convinced that the people depicted in the ad aren’t actually crying because they’ve been given Clover. No, if you watch carefully, as Sir David Frost might have once said, the clues are there.
Scene One
The look the boy gives his mum, just after she delivers the jacket potato and Clover but just before he starts crying, says to me:
“I can’t believe I fancy my own Mum!”
Reason enough to cry, I think you’ll agree.
Scene Two
The women in a caravan, staring open mouthed through the plastic window as the rain hammers against it. The man puts the sandwich on the table, she touches her chest and smiles:
“35 years in this loveless marriage and all he’s ever given me is a caravan in Whitby and that bloody sandwich. Tonight, he dies!”
She has terrible issues.
Scene Three
The final scene seems to be the most talked about on t’interweb. Why is the man crying? Is he thinking “I work hard all day and you give me corn? Again?”? No I think he’s relatively happy with his life.
I put his tears down to a foul smell coming from the child’s nappy, and while he’s trying to eat.
This advert gets filed under the What the Monkey category. I’m going to ignore the *women love idle chit-chat* element of the advert and go straight to the I don’t get why fox striding round the silent world is just so posh.
“The life sized aristocratic fox is totally out of place, and why the hell is a giant fox and a man sat waiting in a hairdressing salon at the end?”
Judge for yourself:
It’s pretty clever though, you’ll have to admit; the website’s called Foxy Bingo and they’ve got a fox in their advert!
Here’s the results of a brain storming session I’ve just had on how they could make the advert more original.
They get a load of people all called Fox (Sam Fox, Michael J Fox, Dr Fox, Liam Fox etc) to play a quick on line game of bingo (this is only a 30 second advert after all). The winner has to sadistically kill a coop of chickens with their bare teeth then they get chased across the open country-side by, ooh I don’t know, Rachel Hunter on horse back and a pack of hounds until they are savagely torn limb from limb.
That has to be better than a giant fox in a hairdressers, wouldn’t you say?
Oh and freak shows! We love them even more than the grotesque. You know if it’s not midgets, then it’s the Elephant Man. If it’s not the Elephant Man then it’s Peter and Katie. We love freaks and we love it when they are in a show.
The League of Gentlemen tapped into this love perfectly. Creating a setting and a cast of characters that was horrific, disturbing and funny as. But what’s more the writers even managed to get you caring about some of the characters. I mean, who hasn’t got a little soft spot for Tubbs?
Advertisers have been trying to get on board with this for a few years now too. Most notably Phones 4 U. Their adverts are set in a seaside town where all the people are a little odd, except for a thoroughly too pleased with himself mobile phone salesman.
And, OK, they’re not the worst advert on TV but I have to close my eyes, stick my fingers in my ears and shout the German national anthem at the top of my lungs whenever they come on nonetheless.
My main issue with the ad is that the freaks and grotesques are absolutely rubbish. A man who has greasy hair and says “Yeah! Yeah!”? A chubby woman with slightly crossed eyes? A woman with a wooden hand and wait for it a beard? Yawn.
I suspect the reason for the half-hearted weirdos is down to Phones 4 U not wanting to frighten all of their customers away. Maybe these adverts already make you think “Yes, they may have the right deal 4 me, but it will make me an unimaginative freak if I shop there.”?
But I can’t help but feel that the adverts would be so much better if they were just a little darker.
Oh yeah, and if they didn’t have that smug phone bloke in them.
There’s a danger when your advert has a single idea or hook (regardless of how good that idea actually is) that it can very quickly become annoying. This has happened with Strongbow’s Total First Pint Refreshment advert.
Because although at first I thought it was mildly amusing, now whenever it comes on all I hear is the voice in my head screaming:
We had a bank holiday over here in the UK this week which means getting stuck for hours on a congested motorway, a visit to the seaside even though it’s minus 5 degrees and pelting it down, or going to one of the great bank holiday super-bargain mega-saver give-aways at the shops (or in fact, all three).
Nowhere in good old Blighty are these give-aways more prevalent than at sofa shops. And here’s the first rule of the sofa flogging game, if you want to succeed it’s important to have a name that’s an abbreviation but no-one must be allowed to know what it stands for. That’s why SCS (”Seriously Cheap Sofas” ??) and DFS (”Discount Furniture Store” ??) are the *big two* sofa players.
The second rule is when it comes to adverts you’ve got to have a dodgy rip-off of a well know song. And when it comes to dodgy rip-off’s of well known songs the king has to be the DFS’s Subterranean Homesick Blues rip off. A rip-off so bad, it has to be seen to be believed. (As far as I can tell from my extensive research, an advert that sadly has not been preserved for posterity. If anyone finds it, please post a link in the comments!)
The third rule is basing your advertising campaigns around the fact your sofas are half price, sometimes you even have to go as far as giving “Double Discounts”! In fact as far as I can tell their sofa’s are constantly at half price. I’d love to know how long you have to have an item advertised at full price for the them to claim the prices they advertise are actually *half price*. I’m guessing it must be somewhere approaching 1 full second.
If you do buy an sofa from either SCS or DFS at full price you must qualify for the title “Unluckiest Person in Britain”.
Here’s the fourth rule, and the reason why I’ve chosen to induct SCS into the TWA Hall of Shame, you’ve got to have a celebrity in your advret. DFS’s had Linda Barker but SCS have Steve Owen Martin Kemp.
Yes, Steve Owen Martin Kemp of ex-Spandau Ballet fame. Interestingly Spandau Ballet are are named after some graffiti seen on a lavatory wall, which presumably is where Steve Owen Martin Kemp also found the telephone number of his acting teacher.
As Martin Kemp Steve Owen in Eastenders, he was a cheeky cockney with a temper but a disarming smile and he wooed the nation. And just as his smile wooed us the public, so a big cheque from ITV wooed him (see what I’ve done there?). It was at this time that SCS decided to sign up Steve Martin as the face of their adverts, on what must be a water-tight, 25 year contract.
As for his ITV acting career Steve Martin appeared in some instantly forgettable drama (probably in which his child/wife was terminally ill and he needed to be cheeky but with a temper/sad but with a disarming smile) and was never seen again.
Except in the SCS adverts!
Oh and how he seems to love them. Delivering his lines through all but gritted teeth (whilst never losing his disarming smile) he knows his acting career is in a Spandau toilet. And no amount of discounting will get it back.
Woah! Talk about a hard sell. Alright it’s not like they’re pushing “Puppy Torturing” or “Stealing Children’s Sweets” but trying to advertise a chemical company is pretty tough work.
Chemicals, it’s fair to say, have a pretty bad reputation. And people who make and sell chemicals, well, theirs is probably worse. But, in their latest advert, BASF are trying to show us why they should be your favourite chemical maker and seller.
By the way, my favourite maker and seller of chemicals, ‘Crystal’ Steph, has just been busted for *dealing*. Free ‘Crystal’ Steph. No, no, don’t listen to me kids, drugs are bad…
And to make things even worse for chemical companies, the money spending public is increasingly tending to buy organic, natural and just not so chemically products (I’m not an expert on what people do buy but these are some buzz words I’ve heard, at least) which, traditionally, don’t contain that many chemicals. This must be a worrying time for the likes of BASF.
So maybe this advert is part of a fire fighting campaign by BASF to stop us going all Greenpeace on their arses because I can’t imagine anyone sit at home, sees this advert and thinks “Thank God for BASF’s invisible contribution!” let alone “I must buy some more chemicals”…
But then again, maybe people do. Maybe there just hasn’t ever been a place for them to say “Thanks” before…
I’m high-jacking this TV’s Worst Advert post and turning it into a place where we can say “Thank you, BASF. Thank you for all those cassette tapes you made, and all the mix tape memories I’ve got from them. Thanks for your invisible contribution.”.
So go on, join me. Leave a comment and say “Thanks” too!
(4.7)
