There are plenty of reasons to hate television advertising. The very fact that six Hoxton-finned bastards in two grand suits get paid six-figure salaries to ?touch base? and talk about the best way to con you out of your pocket money should be enough.
Stylistically, the most common reason that you'd hate an ad at the moment is probably that the ?creatives? have cynically designed it as a thirty second blast of brain-shredding torture which instantly lobotomises you. The kind of Clockwork Orangesque propaganda that leaves your brain wiped of reason, emotion and love and replaced with a jingle.
Or a catchphrase from a fucking meerkat. You know who we're talking about: GoCompare, We Buy Any Car (dot com!), Compare The Market, that sort of guff.
At the other end of the irritability scale are the adverts of high pretension. You've got Nicole Kidman or Scarlett Johansson or Josh Hartnett… and they're prancing around at a movie premiere on Jupiter, flashing you their bums and shooting diamonds out of their eyes. In the background there's some ridiculously fashionable Parisian dub-jazz that you should?ve heard before, but you haven't because you're not as cool as Nicole Kidman or Scarlett Johansson or Josh Hartnett. You can't really relate to any of that lot as you watch from your bedsit in Egham, can you?
But perhaps the biggest offenders in Badvertising are those adverts squarely in the middle. The dull ones. Ads that respect you. They?re set in the real world. They know about the problems YOU face day-to-day. They don't need fancy talk, music or graphics; they've got that c*nt from My Family in them:
Well, at least the BT ads do anyway. A running narrative in an ad can be a nice device, like when Him Off Buffy and Trevor Eve?s Missus flirted over Nescafe Gold Blend during the late eighties. But when it's That Ugly Twat From Love, Actually and Some Woman From Something Or Other It Might Have Been Spooks Or One Of Them Programmes drearily living their lives, it's not quite as effective.
So ineffective in fact, that I actively avoid using any BT product or service for fear that I may turn into a massive, blonde, Robert Lindsay-bothering tool who doesn't take his role as a step-father seriously enough and bases all his major life decisions around his landline fucking telephone bill.
And it's been going on for five years now! On and on and on? The one where they get together, when the ex husband comes round, the dodgy haircut one, when he goes to Cornwall, nightmares about expensive broadband, watching the telly at his mate?s house, blah blah blah blah blah?
Think about it; which is more insulting ? The Crazy Frog or a telecommunications-based soap starring Kris Marshall?
At least The Crazy Frog can look at himself in the mirror.*
* He can't really, he's a fictional, animated frog.
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DAVE says
If you take another look at the BT ads with the fanny from My Family and cast him in the role of creepy weird kiddy-fiddler who’s only shagging Mum so he can groom the arse off the kids his cold soulless bug-eyed gaze is the most chillingly erotic thing on the idiot box since the Women’s Curling at the Winter Olympics
JMTaylor says
Bit late with this, but nice one Dave!