Missy Elliot is known for her groundbreaking, cutting-edge musical vision, so anything she chooses to advertise will have to be similarly groundbreaking and cutting-edge - like, um, Doritos.
OK, maybe we're being unfair here - by appearing as the new face of Doritos, Missy Elliot isn't just selling out her creative ideals in return for a giant cheque and a few free snacks, because Missy Elliott isn't just the new face of Doritos. In fact, Missy Elliot is the new face of Doritos Collisions - a groundbreaking variation on old fashioned Doritos where each bag is filled with two different flavours of crisps all mixed up. You know what that means, don't you? It means Missy Elliott is the new face of pissing about with crisps the same way you did when you were three years old. She deserves that Doritos money, you know.
The semi-recurring feature known as Badvertising is hecklerspray's excuse to tear apart adverts that some poor bastards have spent months over. The creators of this particular advert have probably though that because it’s animated, it’ll obviously be hilarious. Add the kind of tune you hear buskers play on the high street, it all adds up to be become the Aquafresh advert.
Most adverts are particularly surreal, which is why we haven’t had Snickers thrown at us by Mr T while we play football. But the makers of the Aquafresh advert have tried to make it more realistic so we can all follow it and somehow relate to it. It basically sees a happy clappy family dancing and brushing their teeth at the same time and doing some odd shuffly dance. We imagine the Spice Girls will do the same on their upcoming tour.
There are so many things wrong with the Aquafresh advert it’s unreal. 1) No-one is ever that happy in the morning. Anyone who likes to get out of their warm bed with a big smile on their face has to be mentally challenged, 2) Bathroom time is precious and sacred. If anyone dares use the bog while we're in, we won’t welcome them with open arms. Well, unless our arms are covered in poo. 3) The family all look so perfectly groomed! When we get up, we look like we’ve been dragged through several hedges. with takeaway food glued to our grizzly chops. We aren’t the prettiest in the morning. 4) No-one dances in front of the mirror like that. Usually we’ll be slumped across it, wishing it was a soft cuddly pillow. 5) The family resemblance in all the characters in the Aquafresh ad is quite worrying. Something tells that this particular brother and sister are a little bit more than 'close'. 6) Are they all on some sort of drug trip? Not only is the tap bouncing, but the toothpaste is also having a merry old dance. They must need to brush up their nashers to hide all that cocaine, LSD and speed they took the previous night.
As rare as a full moon, hecklerspray’s badvertising feature returns to try and work out who is being paid stupid amounts of money to try and brainwash you in to buying their product or service.
This advert in particular doesn’t even belong in the category of badvertising. Instead it should be lumped in its own unique one of “Absolute dire trash that was commissioned after the person responsible realised he forgot to do it and needed to present the first terrible idea he had to the bored committee before he got sacked. Vertising” We could only be talking about one advert, Sheila’s Wheels.Sheila’s Wheels may seem like an odd choice for an advert to hack to pieces, but we do have our reasons. On the surface, the advert is basically telling you that if you don’t insure your car, you’ll be fucked if someone hits you. And the person to hit you will probably be a man as this company have got the silly idea that men are worse drivers then women! We beg to differ - for a start we don’t take five minutes to park in a gap the size of an airport runway.
Badvertising is a semi-regular hecklerspray feature where we take a current advert showing on British television and tear it to pieces for sport -even ones with serious messages, like today's exhibit. Ladies and gentlemen - the Think! Drink-Driving Barman ad.
Now, everybody knows that drinking and driving is dangerous, illegal, irresponsible and, above all, stupid; so stupid that Paris Hilton has done it, Nicole Richie has done it and Lindsay Lohan has done it twice - and who'd want to copy any of those bell-ends? But despite this, people still do drink drive. But Think! know how to stop people drink-driving - by showing them 30 seconds of a barman having a schizophrenic episode. The thing is, the Think! drink-driving barman advert doesn't make us want to not drink-drive - it makes us want to go and punch Robin Williams in the face.
In the Think! drink-driving barman ad, a man approaches a bar at which point he's set upon by the world's most ghoulishly unprofessional barman. After asking the drinker what he'd like, the barman lurches into a crosseyed impression of a whole range of hilarious characters which we've identified as…
A brusque police officer,
Dame Maggie Smith explaining how over the limit the terrified drinker is,
An unsympathetic employer who's either Scottish or from Yorkshire or a big cartoon gorilla,
Old Man Steptoe presenting a weird gameshow about cars, and
A slightly higher-pitched Old Man Steptoe whining that he hasn't got a job
…before the barman appears to become possessed by some sort of terrifying demon like Zordrak from The Dreamstone and the drinker grabs his coat, runs to another bar, downs drink after drink to banish the haunting image of the barman's mental breakdown from his mind, drives home drunk, crashes into a tree and dies.
That last bit isn't shown in the Think! drink-driving barman advert but, well, that's probably what we'd do in the same situation.
Gary Lineker - big-eared sportsman and one-time panellist on 'comedy' show They Think Its All Over - has had his latest Walkers Crisps commercial briefly pulled off the air.
Quick bit of exposition for any non-Britons reading this: Lineker is an ex-footballer who now makes a living by presenting sports programmes and - whenever he gets a spare moment - advertising packets of crisps to bewildered audiences. Many have argued that using a sporting type like Lineker to flog junk food might be a bit hypocritical, but they need to lighten up - the whole shebang has been pretty much commonplace ever since Muhammed Ali advertised Doritos, yelling to camera: "You know, when I'm not reflecting on my epic career, I like nothing more than to shovel handfuls of additive-coated corn snacks into my eager boxer's mouth."
We've all seen those ads for L'Oreal Paris Telescopic mascara where Penelope Cruz walks around with eyelashes so long that it looks like an evil scientist has jammed two giant squids into her eye sockets as some kind of sick joke.
And, upon seeing the L'Oreal advert, we all thought the same two things, which were 1) Penelope Cruz's eyelashes are so ridiculously long that we can't imagine anyone actually wanting to look like that anyway and 2) Surely L'Oreal Paris Telescopic mascara can't be that effective. And now it appears that it can't. The Advertising Standards Authority has attacked the L'Oreal mascara advert because it's turned out that Penelope Cruz was wearing fake eyelashes to achieve her long-lashed look. As punishment, the ASA has ordered L'Oreal to make it clear when models wear fake lashes in future, and also to change its slogan from "Because I'm worth it" to "Because I'm a massive fucking worthless liar. And Sahara was shit."
Computer games have been going through a tough time of late.
Ultra-violent new release Manhunt 2, for example, has been banned in several countries, with censors citing its horrific violence, utter immorality and dark twisted atmosphere. Obviously this has made hecklerspray want to get hold of a copy more than anything in the world.
Mind you, we have grown more wary of seeking out banned stuff in our old age. That Driller Killer movie was banned for years, and quite frankly we'll be darned if we haven't ever seen a more boring pile of donkey bollocks. And 'controversial' 1920s tome Lady Chatterley's Lover really isn't a patch on that All-Anal Sluts Volume 12And 13 boxset that Santa bought us for Christmas.
Still - maybe Manhunt developers Rockstar should take a leaf out of Nintendo's book. They've decided to make video games sexy (kind of), by hauling in flame-haired Australian actress Nicole Kidman to front their advertisements.
We all find it hard to look in the mirror sometimes.
You know - during those moments of self-loathing where you've said something really stupid to someone, or made a really embarrassing mistake in front of your work colleagues, or killed your third hooker of the day and forgot to burn off her fingerprints before you buried her.
Imagine, then, if someone took a picture of you in a less-than-dignified moment and used it for a witty advertising campaign. That'd be pretty bloody annoying, right? And you know what would make it even more annoying - if you were the vagina-flashing hitmaker behind Oops I Did It Again, that's what.
A Florida radio station has been in a spot of bother with young Britney Spears and her lawyers, mainly due to the fact that they used a big picture of her during her recent snarly shaved-head phase for comical effect on a bunch of billboards. Which actually quite worries hecklerspray: if the lawyers are cracking down on people who find Britney's insanity hilarious, then we're pretty much up shit creek without a paddle. Or canoe. Or water wings.
Sometimes advertisements can be genuinely surreal.
Take the new Cravendale milk campaign, for example - a series of sketches featuring a footballer, a pirate and a cow getting into all sorts of downright baffling scrapes. Still, at least everyone knows what milk actually does. Imagine a campaign that told you virtually nothing about the product.
Just take a look at HeadOn.
American readers may think we're being a little slow on the uptake here (yeah, yeah, but we bet that Cravendale reference had you stumped, didn't it? And if we even so much as uttered "Charley says never talk to strangers," betcha you wouldn't have a pissing clue what we were waffling about).
HeadOn, you see, has developed a cult following for being the most vague and annoying commerical on US television. Just check out the number of spoofs on YouTube - but not before you've treated yourself to the brief and frankly Orwellian original.
Basically, we reckon - through evaluation of the product graphic - that HeadOn is some sort of marvellous headache-soothing stick-thing. Why are we left guessing? Because all that we're eerily instructed to do is "apply directly to the forehead."
Over and over again.
Christ. For all we know HeadOn could be a tagging system put into implementation by the New World Order. Which - while admittedly quite unsettling - still wouldn't be as painful as those nasty tattoo barcodes, would it?
Courtney Love has spent over a decade trying to gradually edge out of Kurt Cobain's shadow, but that was hardly likely to happen when all the while Kurt Cobain was prancing about on a cloud in heaven in a pair of lovely Doc Martens, was it?
A set of adverts featuring an image of Kurt Cobain looking a bit glum in heaven wearing Doc Martens has enraged his widow Courtney Love, who is understandably upset that there are pictures around of her husband flogging overrated goth shoes. But, after a monumental PR snafu, Doc Martens has backed down and withdrawn all the adverts from circulation. It wasn't so much that nobody asked for her approval, Courtney Love says, more that the picture in the advert is inaccurate - after all, if Kurt Cobain did go to heaven his face would be blown apart with a shotgun wound, not all intact like the advert says it would be.
You know what we're like here at hecklerspray - a cynical bunch of 'seen-it-all-before' types who probably wouldn't raise an eyebrow if a tidal wave annihilated a nunnery.
Yet sometimes something leave us absolutely speechless. One of them - and we've included in it our regular Badvertising feature for good reason - was this commercial for a highly questionable Super Soaker water pistol.
It's called The Oozinator. And - from the looks of this godforsaken TV spot - it's the kind of thing Gary Glitter could only dream about.
Badvertising is a semi-regular hecklerspray feature where we take a current advert showing on British television and tear it to pieces for sport - and by the love of Christ are we ever kicking off with a doozy. Ladies and gentlemen - the Dulco Ease ad.
If there's one thing that girls like, it's Sex And The City. In Sex And The City, all sorts of dumpy women from around the world watched four women - a slag, a bitter ginger woman, a half-woman half-horse hybrid and another one - sit around a coffee shop table and discuss having it off and shoes and stuff. Sex And The City was popular because girls like talking about sex and shoes. They don't like, say, sitting around a coffee shop table talking about all the rock-hard shards of impacted shit jutting into the side of their bowels all the time. Someone probably should have pointed this out to whoever made the Dulco Ease advert.
Dulco Ease is a product that you gobble down when you can't shit. But instead of Dulco Ease advertising itself the normal way - for instance, a grinning rake-thin man saying "I took Dulco Ease when I was constipated and it made be gush out a hot jet of liquid shit so violently that my toilet has been completely obliterated" - the Dulco Ease advert imagines a weird parallel universe where cosmopolitan women can show each other how urbane they are by openly discussing the amount of uncomfortably solid fecal matter that's wedged up their arses.
In the Dulco Ease advert, the Cynthia Nixon strides back from the toilet and loudly tells the Kim Cattrell that there are all sorts of diamond-hard crap-daggers poking into her guts. Luckily Kim has just the answer - Dulco Ease - and she discreetly informs Cynthia about this by waving a giant box of Dulco Ease around the cafe like some kind of hyperventilating pensioner in a nitrous oxide-filled bingo hall.
A quick "men are a bit like constipated shit-husks" joke - Sex And The City, remember - and the Dulco Ease advert is over, leaving the viewer to pick up the pieces of their now-tattered life. We don't even know if Dulco Ease is very good - we've got Bobby Brown's telephone number, so we guess we'd never need to bother with it.
Missy Elliot is known for her groundbreaking, cutting-edge musical vision, so anything she chooses to advertise will have to be similarly groundbreaking and cutting-edge - like, um, Doritos.
