Ads that SUCK / badvertising

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 But, after a monumental PR snafu, Doc Martens has backed down and withdrawn all the adverts from circulation.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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

'Major pumping required'?

Unbe-fucking-leivable.

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.

Video courtesy of tellyAds  

Adverts are usually rubbish.

You know the sort - Jamie Oliver gurning away about how Sainsburys is the best thing in the world, or brundlefly-with-tits Jordan urging you to buy this week's News Of The World as you can read all about how she's shat out another mewling halfwit baby or something.

They're cack, make no mistake about it. Yet sometimes an advert comes along that is so sensationally bad it literally redefines the very concept of awfulness, possibly doing a full 360 degrees and coming out the other side as 'legendary.' Until now hecklerspray had considered shouty cleaning-fluid seller Barry Scott as the king of that particular castle - until we saw this commercial for the 'Montgomery Flea Market.'

And couldn't believe our fucking eyes.

Or ears. 

Of all the chocolate bars, Snickers never really enjoyed the same ultra-gay reputation as counterparts like Mars Delight and the gone but not forgotten Secret bar - but thanks to a Snickers Super Bowl advert about two blokes snogging, that could change.

Or at least it would change, if only squadrons of gay activists hadn't called for the gay Snickers Super Bowl commercial to be banned forever for being offensive to homosexuals. In the Snickers advert - which we've got for you after the jump - two burly mechanics share an accidental gay Lady And The Tramp-style kiss while sharing a Snickers bar, then attempt to make up for it by yanking out clumps of their own chest hair - and that just isn't acceptable in today's cosmopolitan society, say gay rights organisations. In real life they'd have probably done a bit a rimming first or something.

Read the rest of this entry »

There are good and bad sides to every situation.

Take Nicole Richie's predicament, for example. She may have a debilitating eating disorder… but at least she'll fit into that summer bikini just fine. And - hey - just think about good old Michael Barrymore. True, certain allegations may have effectively destroyed his career… but we just bet those pool-cleaning bills are a fraction of what they used to be.

Jack White is also going through a similar ambivalent streak. On the plus side, he's just received a nice shiny cheque for his hard work scoring the latest Coca-Cola commercial… Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a scene we’ve all grown aware of: Ben Affleck - complete with all three of his facial expressions - going about his day getting all kinds of female attention, to be trumped by a lift attendant who smells like a schoolboy.

We’d almost forgotten how much the Lynx ad annoyed us until we saw it at the movies, on a big, inescapable screen. There he is, the smarmy looking guy with his all American good looks, wearing a gooberish smile on his face as he gleefully counts each attractive woman’s curious glance on his clicker.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever noticed how it’s always the most preposterous people that have the worst sense of humour?

Slipknot (CDs), a metal band made up of rockers in frightmasks whose stage antics include inhaling the fumes of a liquefied dead bird in a jar until they vomit, are apparently outraged that Burger King might have stolen their image for a series of American commercials.

Read the rest of this entry »

Lately, the advert industry appears to have started saying that bad manners are OK. First, there was the cripplingly bad KFC ’singing with your mouth full’ campaign that attracted a record number of complaints for saying that stuffing your fat cheeks full of Zinger Burger and howling a tune was OK.

And now, a Fanta advert that shows lots of people spitting had received 272 complaints.

Read the rest of this entry »