There’s nothing worse than having to sit down and read loads of words. Especially if you’ve broken your leg or had your eyes ripped out by a sexually aggressive crow. That’s why we like to help you out by making some videos for you every now and then.

It doesn’t mean they’re good- as you can see Dep Ed Michael & ‘Spray scribe Euan have very, very shaky hands. That doesn’t matter though because, for your viewing pleasure, they’ve had a think about what Lawyers do when they’re not out chasing ambulances.

OI! FATTY! IT’S JANUARY SO YOU’D BEST GET ON THE TREADMILL! Is what I’d be shouting at you if I wasn’t one of you; a Festive over-indulger that left a world of salad and steak for one populated almost exclusively by Toblerone and Terry’s Chocolate Oranges. We’ve all been there and now you’re probably sitting clutching your list of New Year’s Resolutions desperately trying to convince yourself that you’ll achieve all of the things on it.

You won’t.

Why should you? You’re your own person and you don’t need a list of goals to tell you that you should probably crack open a bag of cress every now and then before you start to resemble Michelle MacManus & Rik Waller’s illicit love-child. You don’t even need a list of goals to tell you that it might be time to get yourself on a dating website and meet someone new before you fall into the arms of an ex-lover because you’re horribly lonely.

None of that matters though because there’s always something better than a list and in this case adverts are willing to take on the role of your conscience and the New Year ad schedule is packed with sanctimonious bullshit designed to get you out there into the world looking svelte and feeling amazing thanks to some pro-biotic yogurt.

That’s the thing about adverts, isn’t it? They play up to an accepted norm about the society that you live in. Take the hideous Morrisons advert in which two middle-aged children discuss the recession and the need for people to ‘tighten their belts’ in January. You think this is fine because they’re Northern but they’re actually creating a sickening dystopian vision of a world where children are no longer free to be children and have to think about food vouchers and Freddie Flintoff’s bath of gold doubloons. Of course, Morrisons are trying to add an innocent expression onto something that responsible adults seem to talk about all the time whereas some ad campaigns are just cynical.

Take a moment, shut your eyes and imagine a meeting room where six people are sitting. None of them are wearing suits or any kind of formal business attire and one is wearing a pair of tattered brogues with no socks. One man fiddles nervously with his spectacles as he examines the stoney faces around the room. They’ve been given the ultimate contract; a weight loss brand that needs a change of direction.

One woman in the group suddenly rolls back in her ergonomic back-supporting office chair and makes a loud exclamation of joy. “I’ve got it,” she shouts, “why don’t we show overweight people that if they follow the Weight Watchers plan, it’ll make them thin?!”

There is a stunned silence in the meeting room and the glass walls begin to de-mist as their collective breath is held. Everyone looks to the man wearing a rugby shirt at the head of the table. He nods sagely and the room erupts in applause. The creatives have done it again! Fat people can be thin and they will show them the light!

“Wait though!” Cries the man with no socks. “How can we convince our target audience of saturated fatties that they want to be thin and beautiful?” The room falls silent again: all that can be heard is the nervous tapping of pens on the table.

“What about writing a song and getting a pop star to sing it?” The quietest woman suggests. “We could make the lyrics really motivational so that they really speak to our target market?”

There is some muted discussion in the room. It’s too quiet for us to hear but we all know that they’re discussing who to have sing it. Rik Waller and Michelle MacManus are busy making babies and Craig Colton from last year’s X Factor is far too shit. They need someone that people can aspire to be like. Someone sassy and respectable that will quite literally sell their soul for money.

If only there was someone that fitted the bill. They have a long conversation and seem to come up with nothing. They’re standing up to leave, presumably off to think about it over some champagne and oysters when a Britain’s Got Talent judge walks into their office, looking for scraps.

“Hark!” They cry in unison as this fictional account becomes alarmingly Dickensian. They’ve found their woman. A sassy, respectable woman with a big, idiotic face who would quite literally sell her soul for money. They don’t even need to negotiate with her. Alesha’s shaking hands with them all before they even name a figure. Her only stipulation is that she doesn’t have to touch any of the fatties and that she doesn’t have to rap. She’s moving in a new direction.

Now you know how the Play Weight Watchers campaign came into being, aren’t you a little more open to its message and its 3 minutes and 14 seconds of bad miming, worse dancing and sanctimonious ‘body positive’ thrust? Doesn’t the sight of these people who, you’ve got to hand it to them, look great inspire you to go out there and go to meetings, living by a strict ‘point controlled’ system which requires you to lose weight by emptying your wallet?

Or does it still make you want to tear your own eyes out and stuff them into your ears so that you don’t have to see or hear this abomination ever again? What’s it going to be, fatso?

By now the haze of Christmas parties is bound to have worn off and you’ll be sitting there with nothing to show from the festive period but a photocopy of your genitals and an unplanned pregnancy; you’re probably looking back on the month or so preceding this and thinking, “Where did it all go wrong?”

That’s simple. You’re one of these people who gets so excited about the concept of Christmas that you vomit all over your facebook with excitement the first time you see that terrible Coca Cola advert.

SO YOU’VE PROBABLY ALREADY GUESSED THAT I’M GOING TO RUB IT IN YOUR FACE WHILE YOU RUB YOURSELF AND WONDER IF YOU MIGHT HAVE CRABS.

After all, that’s what Christmas is all about.

Let’s talk turkey (aha!), the Coca Cola advert is an unmitigated disaster zone of hackneyed ideas and 50s’-style ‘buy this, it’s good for what ails ye’ advertising. The fact that so many people see it as a sign of the festive period beginning is enough to make any sensible person run out into the street with a bolt-gun to start euthanising children before their parents manage to indoctrinate them into believing that advertising has anything to do with the start of the Christmas period.

Of course, I wouldn’t do that as I’m far too afraid of the brutal honesty of children to ever go near them whether I’m armed or otherwise.

Regardless of that fact, the Coke advert signifies the beginning of Christmas to many people who like to pour onto social networks proclaiming, “OMGCOKEADVERTITZTOTALLYCHRIMBOYAAAAAALOLMAO.”

The obvious question is ‘What has Coke ever done for Christmas?’. That is, aside from inventing Santa Claus in his current form and covering up your relatives’ alcohol problem on Christmas day. Coca Cola isn’t a particularly festive drink and therefore they’ve taken to disguising it with picture-postcard, Werthers Original style visuals and a song that is, I’m afraid to say, worse than Cliff Richard’s Millenium Prayer.

Coca Cola doesn’t bring the joy of the season and the idea of millions of people suddenly rushing to put their trees up when the Coke advert comes on fills me with a sense of dread usually reserved for a nuclear holocaust and a new Michelle MacManus album. Have you ever actually seen a Coca Cola truck like that? Are they like TV License Detector vans? There’s only one and it spends its life on a thankless PR dirge around the country?

Yes, Coca Cola invented Santa Claus, the red suited jolly version at least and we’re supposed to be infinitely grateful to them for allowing us to use him in our children’s folklore. Of course we should be! Thank you Coca Cola! Given the size of the company, they could easily charge you royalties every time you put out a mince pie and a glass of sherry on Christmas eve.

But wait. If we are to assume that the ‘accepted’ version of Santa Claus as the big, jolly red-coated gent that we see today comes directly from the marketing bods at the Coca Cola Company* then we might as well be telling the children of the world that their presents will be delivered by Ronald McDonald or those dickheads from the Pepsi adverts. Christmas owes nothing to Coca Cola and the mere suggestion that it ‘marks the beginning’ of festivities is often made by the same people that complain when there’s Hallowe’en costumes in supermarkets in mid-September.

Still, if you are one of the bleating sheep that rely on Coca Cola to tell you when you can start being nice to people then think of it this way: when you’re a kid, you believe that Santa Claus is real and maybe you believe that he’s directly responsible for delivering Coke. Then you grow up and you find out Santa isn’t real and you actually have to go out and buy gifts for the people you love. Maybe you want to cling on to part of that Christmas magic and the first sight of the Coca Cola trucks gives you that sense of wonder and joy that you’ve been lacking since you hit puberty.

It’s a nice thought isn’t it? It still means you’re being manipulated into feeling an emotion by an advertising company though. Maybe that’s what Christmas is all about after all.

Still, Merry Christmas an’ all that.

*In fact the depiction of Santa Claus in his ‘current form’ predates the advertising of Coca Cola but given that Father Christmas is essentially a series of lies to build the hopes of children and amuse the dull lives of adults (much as Hecklerspray do), we thought we’d keep the lie going. You’re welcome. Merry Christmas.

Christmas is a time of giving and it’s also a time for making so much money that to view it all packed into one room would melt the mind of anyone from the working classes while simultaneously destabilising the economic security of a developing African country.

Of course, anyone with 70 pence and a reasonable idea of how to sell a Twix to a starving man can turn a profit in this world and if you keep scaling things up then eventually you’ll be left with enough money to buy Greece, pump it full of fake snow and turn it into a Winter Wonderland theme park in time for next Christmas but that doesn’t mean that Christmas is all about clawing at cash.

EVEN THOUGH IT IS.

Some things at Christmas are more traditional like made up folk tales designed to force children to stop behaving like entitled little shits. No, not Santa. You’ll find that the Nativity story’s a pretty good moralising tale if you’re looking to instill the magic of ridiculous claptrap into impressionable youngsters from the moment they’re old enough to whimper the word “materialism”. If you don’t instill the wonder and merriment of Christmas into their soft-spots then they might turn out to be dribbling morons with less chance of interfering with the genitalia of the opposite sex than George Michael has of seeing in the new year with a glass of Asti Spumante in a public lavatory.

You know- like these people:

I had always assumed that it was the prerogative of retail companies to make their staff out to be the last bastions of good taste and intelligence. No doubt because retail workers are so often portrayed as being affected, surly neer-do-wells with all the wit and charm of a rim job from Piers Morgan.

Or at least they are in the sitcom I co-wrote which starts on Channel Whimsydoo on Monday at quarter-past-fucking-never.

Anyway, the point is that it’s very rare to see a retailer portray their staff as dead-behind-the-eyes shut-ins as opposed to the informed, sensible and professional dickheads that you catch thwarting Darth Vader in PC World adverts. Which is why the Christmas offering from The Range is so bloody surprising.

Their staff are apparently all lobotomy patients while it appears that their advertising team necked back a couple of bottles of vodka before declaring an entire country hilarious. You see, if you’re going to “reverse market” (don’t look it up, it’s not a real thing) then you could do worse than actually picking a product that doesn’t imply you sell spadeloads of tripe but that this particular national stereotype is a step too low even for barrel-scrapers like yourselves.

The Range claim that they sell pretty much everything you could ever need. I will wait with bated breath to see the reaction when someone nips in for some anti-venom to treat a particularly hideous cobra bite. Although, putting semantics aside for a moment, coupling your stores policy of selling everything ever invented along with staff that look like the forgotten victims of genocide and a racist megaphone that imparts the same wisdom as a Tickle Me Ku Klux Klan toy is a sure-fire way to find yourself being picked on by a keyboard bully with an outlet and bloodied stumps where his fingers used to be.

That’s me in this scenario.

The worst part of it is that this isn’t even the worst part of the advert. Two minutes of what I laughingly call research taught me that this dancing berk, who depicts- with alarming accuracy- the childish excitement of every retail manager I’ve ever come across, actually has a name and a back story.

You don’t believe me? This is on The Range’s Facebook.

Well HAR DEE BLOODY HAR. What a loveable nerd created almost entirely by committee to be a hideous amalgam of every character from The Office. Aren’t The Range a clever bunch for creating such a memorable and thundering cock to be the figurehead of their campaign. There’s even a video on Youtube where you too can learn to dance like Malcolm in an attempt to become as ironically cockish as he is. I’m not going to link to it because it doesn’t deserve any more hits. It’s had one too many. One.

So aside from cultural references to Star Trek and the fantasy genre as well as, for some inexplicable reason, reggae what is it about Malcolm that’s so wrong? Is it the fact that he’s closer to the image of an everyman that he almost becomes real and therefore comes out from the television until he’s tugging at your flacid genitals like some kind of penile necromancer? No!

It’s because the whole thing is so forced and foetid that it’s like being a fly on the wall in Chris Moyles’ studio. Not only the humour but the whole idea of the ‘viral character’. Remember the insufferable arsepiece that spouted the word ‘Wonga’ in a mockney accent before returning to his Hackney Cab? He wasn’t supposed to turn into the must have merkin attachment that he did, it just happened. Advertising companies are now trying to force these personalities down our throats until we’re left spewing up name badges and crying out for the end of days.

It’s become clear while writing this that although The Range’s campaign might not seem that bad on the face of it, it’s one of those ones that actually becomes significantly worse if you try to apply a little logical thought to it. Is The Range’s Christmas campaign one of the worst of all time? Probably not but it’s trying really hard and you have to give it some credit for trying to be so offensively crap that it might drive someone to suicide.

Probably me.

There’s nothing better than the smell of a burger chargrilling over an open flame. That is, unless you’re vegetarian or can’t eat pork for religious reasons. Maybe you don’t like burgers. Okay, so there are several things that are- in reality- better than the smell of a burger chargrilling over an open flame but we can assure you of one thing, a fast food burger is not one of them.

It’s not for us to tell you the problems with fast food and to preach to you like grimy facsimiles of Nigel Slater would be hypocritical. We’ve all been drunk, hungry, in desperate need of an escape from the rain that we’ve been in one of the American burger giants- there’s no denying it. Find us someone who’s never been over the door and we’ll point and gawp in sheer amazement.

We can however, tell you the problems with fast food advertising. After all, that’s the entire point of this column. You see, fast food chains suffer from the same problem as booze peddlers: when all’s said and done, they’re advertising something that’s bad for you.

So how do you dress it up?

It’s relatively simple and you’ll be familiar with the way it’s done almost instantly. Groups are the usual ones like the KFC adverts where, on a lovely sunny day instead of having a barbeque, a group of family and friends have opted to share a feast of KFC delights that must have cost somewhere in the region of £13,000 to put on the table. They’re laughing, larking about having a great time. Why? They’re sharing that grease around. Bargain bucket for one? Why not make that for four and quadruple your lifespan?

It’s easy.

However in recent years McDonalds- the last bastion of the seedless bun- have opted to show as many demographics in their restaurants as possible to prove that McDonalds is a classless, raceless, genderless outlet designed for both everyone and no-one in equal measure. It’s much like their customer service model.

They’ve moved away from gaudy luminous furnishings and away from the restaurant model that they began with in the 50s’ as a car-service diner. They’ve replaced most restaurants with a dull green ‘eco-cafe’ which is designed to “remind” their customers that what they’re eating is actually 100% beef that can be traced right the way back to the cage it came out of.

Their latest advert takes these values which they have espoused from on-high over the last couple of years and turns them into implied values, perhaps the most dangerous of the values.

This particular ad shows a loner. A cheery loner, we’ll grant you that but a loner nonetheless. It’s quite a concept to spend most of an advert for fast food with most of it spent wandering the streets of (what we assume is That London) and not focussing on the burgers and how full of meat they are. They’re implied values though. Wide demographic of people, home-spun, clean-cut chap doing some walking. He’s picked up a paper (probably The Mail) and is singing a song about being on the street where his sweetheart lives.

Nice, isn’t it?

“On The Street Where You Live” is a song which was originally used in the musical ‘My Fair Lady’ and has since been covered by a huge range of artists from Bobby Darin to Steve Hogarth from Marillion and is, largely speaking, quite a romantic number. Isn’t it the perfect song to sing to your sweetheart?

It’s not a huge leap of logic to assume that the young man in this advert is singing the song to the Big Mac which he is about to sink his teeth into. He’s about to eat the object of his desire. He’s fallen in love with a burger that he’s then going to devour. It’s a one minute tragedy.

If you’re to believe this advert, you’ll believe that McDonalds encourage the love of burgers with a strange serenade from a lovestruck 20-something. Does it make you want to eat one of their heavily-salted treats or vomit into a happy meal box? Either way it doesn’t matter. Where you stand on McDonalds, their products and their advertising is of little to no importance in the grand scheme of the Happy World of the Golden Arches. All we’re trying to say is; bring back the Hamburglar.

There is a definite trend of companies recycling their expensive adverts of yesteryear in order to save themselves a bit of cash. To be honest, there isn’t a lot we can say as a criticism of that. Times are tough and if your product hasn’t changed very much then why bother going to the effort of making a whole new advert to extoll the exact same virtues.

While there’s nothing wrong with it on the face of it, some ads remind us that they were completely awful in the first place and, like last week, we’re looking into the murky, sugar-loaded world of soft drinks.

Are they a bargain? ‘Cause everyone loves a bargain, and don’t try to pretend that you don’t. There is evidence to suggest that we are more likely to buy things if they are on some kind of offer, be it ‘buy one get one free’, ‘two for the price of one’ or ‘buy six and get thirty free pictures of stick-men in various sexual positions’.

However sometimes getting two for the price of one isn’t as good as it may seem.

Take this prime example from Fanta:

Let’s not waste too much time on this. Why are these cuddly cartoon characters partying it up with Fanta? Fanta with no alcohol in it. Perhaps it’s a very British attitude to have but alcohol is party juice. We’ve never had a sip of Fanta and felt compelled to crowdsurf, unless it was to crowdsurf to the Coca Cola Company’s HQ and tell them that it doesn’t taste as good as it used to and ask them if they’ve tried Orangina.

Still. Perhaps this ad will teach us the best way to recover from awkward social situations at parties. This las recovers using mime as a form of modern dance. MIME! If you used mime as a method of recovering from an embarrassing door-face-interaction you’d be laughed out of that party into the waiting arms of a junkie who would promise to take you back in time to 1936 when that move was cool.

Boys don’t like to be phantom-lassoed. Just a hint there, ladies.

Demographically, the first part of the advert is confusing. This party infested by Bieber/Jonas-ites (similarity to parasites withstanding) who don’t want to drink or have crazy sex at a party but just stand around and drink Fanta. Who’s the demographic for this advert? Is it only being shown on the Disney channel?

We thought that this train of thought might peter out but then we popped on to Fanta’s official website and saw The Fantanas; a girl band manufactured to sing songs about the beautiful taste of Fanta.

Is it too much to hope that Miley Cyrus and Demi Lovato will be sharpening their bitch-sticks and trimming their mullets ready for some kind of gimp-pop showdown with these girls? Coming to Disney Channel Pay-Per-View soon!

Still, let’s move onto the tagline, shall we?

“MORE FANTA. LESS SERIOUS.”

More Fanta, less serious is the entire tag to this advert. Less serious about fun, less serious about taste, less serious about music, less serious about styles of dancing that aren’t entirely anachronistic, less serious about advertising.

Possibly the thing that irks us the most is the fact that it’s not over yet.

You probably don’t want to buy a bottle of Fanta yet so let’s have an entirely different advert with an entirely different feel. Why they did this, no-one knows, but we can only imagine that the graphics people were on a roll and just launched straight into a new advert.

They’ve taken the most boring situation possible, some kind of lecture where the lecturer stands in silence, reading the latest Dan Brown novel and ignoring the class. They’re bored of the lazy, untalented writing style which oozes from the page like a noxious gas. This putrid, useless pile of paper is scarcely worthy of propping open the door of this classroom. The door through which the class are about to rush out of into the Friday sun to their friends and Fanta and a complete lack of fun or entertainment.

The clock dings (helpfully, it says Friday so it saves you having to climb inside the television and consult a calendar) and suddenly the room is transformed into a club. A club. It’s 5 o’clock on a Friday! Go home and get changed. Have some dinner or something! Responsible drinking kids. Drinking Fanta in excess will make you all gassy.

“GRAB A TASTE OF FRIDAY.”

Answer us this, ladies and gentlemen. Does Fanta taste like Friday? Just because it’s alliterative? Of course it doesn’t. For a start, we’ve seen one of these things on a Tuesday. What are they saying to us?

“You still have most of the week to get through before you’ll be able to lick any surface and it will taste like Fanta! Ha!”

How dare they.

What’s a true taste of Friday? Revomitted vodka. Get to work, people.

This week’s Badvertising proves that the really piss-poor elements of advertising live longer in the memory than the really good ones. What do you remember most? Those Nescafé ads where Anthony Head gets his end away or that insurance advert where Michael Winner tells people to calm down before disemboweling them with a rusty fork? We can’t even remember which one’s meant to be the bad one in that comparison.

What we’re trying to say is, this isn’t a new advert that we’re picking on today but the minute you see it, you’ll remember it.

Fizzy drinks. People like fizzy drinks. We know in a health-crazed culture where everyone’s going out of their way to look like some tanned bell-end from The Only Way Is Essex, it’s not fashionable to say that. Why not have a smoothie instead? Piss off. The people want sugar and strychnine!

That being said, these drinks are popular and force global drinks conglomerates to diversify and look for other opportunities and markets. That’s a good thing if you like to pop open a can of fizzy juice and get all hiccupy of an evening.

That being said however, it’s always been a struggle to sell the ‘great taste of Pepsi Max’ when in reality it tastes like sucking sweetened chicken-vomit through cheese-cloth. That’s why they tend to go in more for adverts which appeal to the EXTREME element of calling a product MAX which will appeal to MEN!

MEN LIKE EXTREME THINGS! It’s true.

Gentlemen, the next time you go to the supermarket, take a look at the deodorants. Many will say EXTREME, ULTIMATE, INDEFATIGABLE (well, maybe not), UNBEATABLE, MAX etc. That’s because the manufacturers want you to feel invincible as result of using the product. We can say with some degree of certainty that if they could have an image of a man surviving a nuclear holocaust, shielded by an eerie white shroud as a can design then they would.

Much in the same way that if they could get off with making an EXTREME toothpaste that tasted like metal filings, we’re quite sure they’d go for that too.

Surely this is the kind of thing that Badvertising should be looking at, we hear you scream (silently)! Well, yes but in an effort to stick to the formulaic nonsense that we confine ourselves to, we have to look for an advert that accentuates those elements. Oh…

It’s probably best to set up an overview of the advert in the minds of the advertising executive. A Pepsi Max account exec definitely didn’t say:

“The Asteroid campaign gave us the ability to show the consumer that people who drink Pepsi Max are go-getters who are willing to do absolutely anything it takes in order to get what they want be that in their professional life or their personal life.”

Of course, what they’ve ended up with in reality are a group of people who don’t take no for an answer. The primary thing we have to realise here is that our friend or the ‘protagonist’ of this piece (if it’s correct to call him that in such a depressingly misogynist piece of advertising) is a desperate, pathetic man who is so sure that he’s going to crash and burn with any woman that he meets in that bar that he’s enlisted a number of his friends using expensive television broadcast equipment (even if it’s only in the other room) to get a girl to sleep with him. He is, in many ways, like many current and former hecklerspray staff members.

Sure, on the face of it the implication that women are stupid enough to fall for a ploy which was at least partially ‘masterminded’ by someone who was in American Pie Presents “The Naked Mile” is deeply offensive to anyone with even a laughable IQ but maybe this poor loser is to be pitied.

Phwoar! Look at that apprehension! She's totally into it!

For a start the protagonist, or “Defendant 1″ as we’ll be calling him, is friends with someone who was in American Pie Presents “The Naked Mile” who is now apparently so desperate for an acting gig that he’s willing to put “Conspiracy to Sexually Assault” on his CV.

Second of all he’s running a risk giving this guy the ‘reporter’ gig in the first place. What if the girl or ‘target’ as we’re quite sure Defendant 1 wouldn’t want us to refer to her as had seen American Pie Presents “The Naked Mile” … actually. No. Fair enough. We take your point. No-one’s seen it.

Naturally this advert was cleared by the ASA who, according to our friends at Bitter Wallet claimed that it was too fantastical a situation to offend. Of course it is but what if people begin to try it out, eh? What if young men everywhere are suddenly asking for expensive broadcasting equipment for their Christmas?

Best Served After Forced Penetration

Maybe this advert is part of the government’s cost-cutting plans. Surely it would be cheaper to keep a note of those buying expensive TV equipment and hiring Steve Talley than to actually keep an up-to-date sex offenders’ register? Kudos to Ms May if that’s the case.

The exploitative and offensive nature of this advert is what makes it so reprehensible and to see the three rapists (because that’s what they are) congratulating each other on a rape well done is enough to make you sick to the very pit of your stomach. Unless you’re a rapist too, presumably.

So there you have it. EXTREME advertising doesn’t work if your idea of EXTREME is forcing your unsheathed penis on a woman with no desire to have your disappointing, shrivelled prune of a peen anywhere in her vicinity.

Don’t get any ideas, okay?

PLEASE NOTE: It’s only fair to mention that Steve Talley also starred in the slightly less successful American Pie Presents “Beta House”. It was also shit.

Popular culture is a wonderful thing, especially for the people that made those classic television shows, films, cartoons, songs etc. that were actually pretty rubbish in their original incarnation but are fondly remembered by those with a penchant for nostalgia as being the finest things ever crafted by human hands.

These are people who form pop culture opinion, the people who are talking heads on nostalgic talking head shows in which talking heads regale you with tales of how they sit down with a plateful of Findus Crispy Pancakes just in time to watch the latest episode of Baywatch. These people manage to create some kind of time-capsuled ‘tweet’ of what they had for dinner 25 years ago and share it later for money.

That’s the dream folks.

The question of what sees something slip into the annals of pop culture while some things pass unnoticed into the bargain bins of Blockbuster Videos all across the land. The thin criteria between ‘cult hit’ and ‘what the hell’s that?’ is most marked in the 80s’ action drama clique. Where shows like Knight Rider and The A-Team have become TV classics, shows like Airwolf struggle to get a repeat viewing on backwater freeview channels.

Is it about memorable characters, fine writing and excellent direction? No. If you can force a supernatural talking car in there, you’re pretty much onto a winner. That brings us to the concept of shoehorning in television. Anyone with a degree in media (or anyone for that matter) knows that if you overload a show with gimmicks, it doesn’t work. If you stick to one like transforming inanimate objects, a talking car or Pamela Anderson in a snug red swimsuit then you’ll be made in the shade.

This doesn’t apply to advertising. Please see Exhibit A below.

Let’s open with KITT, the car from Knight Rider performing a wonderful, screeching J-Turn into a parking space and then instantly receiving a parking ticket from the excitable warden on duty. Let’s forget the moral grey area of whether it’s Michael Knight or KITT himself who has to fork up £60 because even in the short to medium term, it doesn’t matter.

Especially not when that Müller truck is about to transform into a giant, gurning white orb. Of course, it’s a reference to Transformers but given that the rights to the Hasbro license would have been more expensive, they’ve gone for a terrifying rolling snowball with big dumb eyes and Inspector Gadget‘s arms. You’ll also be pleased to hear that Müller condone the consumption of traffic wardens, as long as you can transmogrify them into beloved Hanna Barbera characters. Yes, that’s right folks. It’s Yogi Bear, that famous traffic warden. In fact, the only link we can see between traffic wardens and Yogi Bear is that they both wear hats. There’s no shoehorning of references going on here though. None.

In a nod to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, the physiologically altered traffic warden doesn’t require the usual 13 years of psychological therapy needed to recover from such a fundamental trauma and instead shrugs off his new lot in life with a smile and a desire for pic-a-nic baskets.

Watch out though! There’s people on the streets of a city and Yogi looks terrified. “Look at them all,” he thinks, “I used to be just like you before I became a two-dimensional bear.” He’s terrified! Gaze with panic at what the transformation has done to this poor bastard’s fragile mental state.

Oh wait! All is well! Here comes another reference! It’s the Sony Bravia bouncing balls! Or, if you’re not into that, maybe it’s the Sony Bravia paint! Either way, it’s a reference to another advert which is pretty pathetic, even in amongst this moronic display of lip service to 3 millions childhoods. What do the balls do though? Surely they coat these drab looking business types in paint and everyone gets to play in glorious technicolour!

No. Instead they turn into Mr. Men. You’d think that’s all well and good, wouldn’t you? The Mr. Men are a loved part of many of our childhoods. Although, the Mr. Men are essentially one dimensional “people” marked out by their individual character flaw. Mr Lazy, for example, is lazy where as Mr Happy smiles in the face of death and destruction. These people in suits, these people with families and homes, mortgages and car repayments have been murdered and replaced with flawed cartoons. It’s all getting quite dark.

Luckily there’s some unicorn-driven chariots to pass by and distract us from the woe. Is that a reference to Charlie the Unicorn in there? The shape of the face is certainly similar. Could this be a wide-ranging reference to the chariot racing scene in Ben Hur? Is that a ridiculous stretch? Isn’t that the point?

We’ve had a think and we’re genuinely not sure what the small house is supposed to be. It’s not the gingerbread house from Hansel & Gretel but it could be the homestead from any Disney cartoon film ever. Luckily it’s saved from demolition by another Hanna Barbera mainstay, the conniving Muttley.

Muttley manages to throw a hammer made from a Müller rice pot into the demolition ball, sending it flying into the sky where it turns into a flock of colourful birds. It’s a definite rip-off of something but in deference to the ad’s dark undertones, we’re going to claim that it’s a tip of the cap to John Woo’s Hard-Boiled doves.

The ant carrying a giant pot of Müller yoghurt could be many things but in an effort to ensure that we don’t burst an aneurysm, we’re going to assume that this ant is just a really strong ant. It doesn’t stop there though. Even assuming the rainbow is just a rainbow, you might recognise those yoghurty hands that bundle up the clouds and send them on their rainy way. Could it be a subtle look in the direction of one Michael M. Mouse?

Probably.

This advert comes in at a whopping 1 minutes and 30 seconds which, if you assume the usual television advert lasts for only 30 seconds, the equivalent of a film in ad-land but in that relatively short space of time the people from the Müller dairy have managed to squeeze in FOURTEEN references to popular culture. That’s only the ones we noticed. Feel free to tell us if we missed any.

The dynamic may now have changed. In order to pass into the Cult Following Hall of Fame, you might have to be shoehorned into a confused, ill-considered advert from a yoghurt company hellbent on proving to the world how much money they have to throw away on paying for licenses for fictional characters from the past.

Snigger that into your fruit corner, Muttley.

Chocolate! It’s a wonderful invention. Not only did it get thousands of American soldiers laid during the second world war, it’s also a tasty treat that you can give your kids. Your kids who will die of a fatty liver by the time they’re 25. Not only that, it’s an indulgent treat for you to force down your gullet at every available second while telling yourself that it’s just a little slip-up.

It might not surprise you to learn that there are loads of ways to advertise chocolate because it’s such a universally beloved product. The big question is that of the target market. If there isn’t an established target market for product then we end up with mad-eyed children, planting ideas about milk chocolate in your head through a hypnotic eyebrow dance.

That kind of confusion might spark ‘water-cooler’ conversation but it doesn’t make anyone want to eat a bar of Dairy Milk, no matter what anyone claims.

That hardly matters though. Especially when there’s women around to advertise to. Remember how we tell you, almost every week, that advertising companies think that everyone fits into two or three snug categories that they can tailor their advertising to?

Yes? Good.

Well, aside from playing up the notion that women love chocolate and that some are cold-blooded thieves, it seems that advertisers have now resorted to editing old adverts as the recession bites the advertising budget of the big companies and forces them into revisiting successful adverts from the past.

This isn’t the version of the advert with the edit, unfortunately. It’s probably seen as being so trivial by the pedants of youtube that no-one has even bothered to upload a version, clumsily shot on a camera phone. This means that our creative faculties will be put to the test as we try to point out the subtle change.

IT’S THE CHOCOLATE! The next time the ad comes on television, remember this moment. Keep in mind everything we’re about to tell you:

THE CHOCOLATE BAR IS CGI! LOOK AT IT! IT’S NOT REAL CHOCOLATE! IT’S FAKE!

Right, we’re off to accuse Editor Mof of eating our bar of Galaxy. Unfortunately, we’re not smart enough to keep one hidden away so we’ll just beat him to death and consume him instead. Cannibalism is much better than badly edited chocolate.

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There’s no video content for this week’s Badvertising, primarily because caretaker of the advertising corner, Michael Park, has become the victim of legal action after a woman’s head exploded after seeing his smug, self-involved face on her computer screen more than the appointed twice in a month. This means that it’s back to plain ol’ words!

When you’re making an advert, it’s important to establish a relationship for the sake of the viewer. Now, what do we mean by that? There are myriad different types of relationships in advertising from the authoritarian ‘expert’ who spends a worrying amount of time bellowing out of the television, to the ‘friends’ who love nothing more than snuggling up on a couch eating Maltesers and taking intravenous injections of air freshener.

There are antagonistic husband and wife duos as well as the brother/sister combo and occasionally you get to see a couple of children sitting around being accosted by a rip-off mouse. It’s just how advertising is. Relationships are usually established pretty damned quickly.

Except here…

Who is this woman? Aside from being someone who breaks into people’s houses and demands cups of tea while speaking like Margaret Thatcher after she was forced to chain-watch all six seasons of Sex In The City, she appears to be an apparition who believes solely in the spread of bingo.

Perhaps she belongs to the Church Of Jesus Christ & The Latter Day Tweak of the Thumb. Who knows. She could be the Queen Bee or the Dancing Queen. She’s definitely not one of the Two Fat Ladies. There we go, we’ve got rid of all the woeful bingo puns in one paragraph that you could have ignored if we’d had the good grace to warn you beforehand.

Once this mad bat has cracked her laptop out, she begins indoctrinating her shocked victim into the ways of bingo until the poor, bemused fool is too broken to even question this woman’s presence in her kitchen. There she was getting on with a spot of ironing and the next thing she knows, some vampiric whore who has just eaten a live chicken to sustain her blood lust is hovering over her talking about her father liked to engage in orgies.

Everything happens so fast, even the audience is left completely unaware of who this woman is. One thing’s for sure, she must have an endless supply of laptops if she’s not even bothering to take it with her. Do vampires have a lot of money? That’s a thought for the Hallowe’en special…

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Gordon Ramsay has more nervous tics that One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. He twitches, jiggles and burps ‘Uh?’ while swearing like Tourette’s bus. Why no-one has certified this man mental is quite beyond us.

And we’ve not even looked at his weird, weird face. It looks like a cliff face that’s falling into tge sea.

With that, the fact he got get on fire, it’s hard to imagine that anyone actually noticed any difference from him. He looks weird, swears a lot and cooks flesh. If you were in the next room, you’d carry on doing your crossword wouldn’t you?

All this happened while Gordo was shooting a documentary in Costa Rica about the illegal shark fin industry.

It’s here that you assume that Ramsay nearly set himself on fire while cooking some hideously dull looking meal. You’d be wrong.

See, some fishmonger’s henchman attempted to set fire to him.

How great is that? Give that henchman a Bafta!

Not talking up the incident in any way, shape or form, Ramsay told Playboy magazine:

“That was a little bit hairy… The fishmongers have these armed guards patrolling fortress-like towers, so we tried to get in and ran into a guard.

“They poured petrol all over my hair and neck and tried to set us on fire.”

So there.

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Every week, Badvertising takes a look into the murky backwaters of advertising as we call out the idiotic decisions of committees and advertising companies who thrust their intellectual vomit down our throats. This week is slightly different as we’re a little worried.

Normally we watch adverts and can identify the fact that the mysterious hand of the ‘Ad Men’ in every second of the video. Usually, their influence is obvious; ear-worms, repetition, hideous sexism designed to cater a product to knuckle-dragging oafs who believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen, hideous sexism designed to cater to pseudo-feminists who believe that every man on earth is a knuckle-dragging oaf who believes a woman’s place is in the kitchen and annoying recurring characters. That sort of thing.

This week, join Dep Ed Michael as he worries that the people from Plenty of Fish might have missed an important factor in their latest ad. Find out what it is over the jump…

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Supermarkets and kids are funny ol’ things, aren’t they? As we’ve already pointed out, you can’t make a supermarket seem less like a soulless, fluorescent death camp for creativity by involving children in your advertising- we will catch you. Further to that, if you try to market a product to kids by trying to be both hip, trendy and hilariously off-beat then we will catch you out and we will cut your throat.

Like Badvertising ninjas.

Oh, sod off. You laugh when Russell Whatsisface makes jokes about ninjas.

At hecklerspray, our usual treatment of cheese is either a snide look at the latest JLS track or a serious, po-faced look at Madonna’s gynaecological situation. However, on this occasion we’re looking directly down the test hole into the murky world of cheese itself.

There are two types of people in the world, those who like cheese and those who are jealous of people being able to eat cheese, A.K.A. ‘Cheese Hataaazzz’ or ‘the lactose intolerant’. There are many different types of cheese in the world and not everyone likes every single different kind- that’s because variety is the spice of life. As glamorous writer-types, we’re often invited to glitzy wine & cheese parties with the Hollywood glitterati, and are therefore connoisseurs of the finest cheeses available on the market.

Fine, ‘yellow, coloured cheese, dished out in cubes by Editor Mof is more like the reality but on a Friday we get a cheese triangle each, so it’s not all bad. Regardless, selling cheese to kids has always been a problem. Anyone who remembers the early years of Cheestrings with their unfortunate, 7up-man lookalike mascot will remember the perils of trying to sell something which is essentially an unhealthy, fatty snack product to kids. “Good source of calcium, you say? Fat lot of good that’ll be when you have a fatty liver at 21.”

Still they try and this latest attempt (or series of attempts) from Cathedral City is the latest:

Did you laugh? You might well have. The ads are voiced by Matt Berry whose distinctive tones are becoming omni-present in ‘wacky advertising’. This time, he’s voicing a mouse. Mice like cheese. Following us so far? Good. This particular mouse is, of course, a musketeer. A mouse-keteer. Mouseketeer.

Are you paying attention to this, Disney? This mouse is a Mouseketeer. We’ve already got a stamped, addressed envelope for you to send the Cease & Desist to. That’s before we even start on this; which we won’t because it’s insultingly obvious.

The mouse speaks a corrupted form of Elizabethan English and constantly challenges the same two children to preposterous competitions that they can’t possibly win because the mouse has no real concept of winning or losing. Essentially they’re being bullied out of their saturated snack by a rodent riding a dog. Anti-bullying campaigners take note, the games are rigged.

Of course, the kids manage to look non-plussed throughout, which is probably the highlight of the advert.

To be clear, the basic premise of the advert is that kids of all ages love many different things. You have your two relatable characters, the two nonchalant pre-teens that couldn’t give an arse about an anthropomorphic mouse, riding a dog on wheels and claiming to be from a city called Cathedral (it’s a company, not a city, it’s a spokesmouse, not a knight). You have your soft, cuddly animals which kids also love and ‘yoof’ music for the teenagers and a “totally street” name. It appeals to all demographics.

Wacky comedy by committee.

Ridiculous.

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We can categorically guarantee without a shadow of a doubt that our readers know exactly what an experiment is. Some of you will have studied science in school and will have been involved in the dissemination of liquid from beaker to conical flask; some of you might even be scientists. If you are then can we suggest that you keep an eye on that petri dish over there as it appears to be sentient.

Even the regular readers who trawl the site looking for something to get up in arms about are familiar with experimentation, having been used as test subjects by a series of alien species with nefarious designs on the rectal areas of people who believe in a Michael Jackson-led arachnid conspiracy, coordinated from the moon.

Odd-balls, basically.

Unfortunately there are many advertisers who, like most of the simple concepts in the world, just can’t get their heads around the idea of an experiment. Take the lovely people from Bulmers as a case in point. Their latest advertising shtick revolves around rewarding ‘experimental’ people.

You can watch it here if you can handle the inane advertising drivel that goes along with it. It’s probably best that you at least try, otherwise a lot of what we’re telling you might be quite hard to digest.

For a start there’s the cider itself. Crushed red berries and lime, made with over 100 years of experience. Hardly experimental. crushed red berries go quite well with lime, anyone who’s ever tried a strawberry daiquiri can tell you that. Is the experimental element putting it in a bottle? As we already mentioned, much of science is decanting liquid from one receptacle to another. Perhaps that’s it.

Is it the stacked up TVs which are the experimental element? There’s nothing experimental about the systematic piling of television equipment unless Bulmers hope to create some kind of portal to another dimension using nothing but static electricity and cathode ray tubes.

Wait. Hang on just one god-damned minute. Is this the experiment? An un-named comedian (Humphrey Ker, to give him his due) standing in the street, acting like a charity mugger with a camera crew trying to get people to go to his “friend’s gig” round the corner? He’s handing out wristbands! Is that experimental in any way? Having a man in the street trying to get people to do something that they don’t want to do? Walk down any street in a city and you’ll see that en masse. There’s no experiment there.

Perhaps the gig itself is the experimental element? Maybe it’s some kind of Japanese musical installation where the band members only play sounds using construction components. Maybe we’ll hear the first ever drum solo played on a high-visibility jacket stretched over a storage drum.

Oh, it’s Plan B.

PLAN B ISN’T EXPERIMENTAL! The man would like you to believe that he saved soul music from the drudgery of the world but in actual fact he did nothing more than further dilute an already irritatingly shallow talent pool with music that doesn’t really “do it” for anyone but definitely sounds good when having a few drinks and nibbles before a dinner party. It’s the kind of music that David Cameron might listen to. That’s not terribly experimental.

Maybe there’s an element of sexual experimentation? Maybe the advert will end with Plan B taking sixteen women, three men and a Shetland pony backstage for a massive orgy that will only end when the police come in to break things up like the massive fascists that they are.

That never happens.

In actual fact, nothing experimental happens in the entire advert. That leaves us wondering why a company would create an advertising campaign based entirely around experimentation and the rewards that can come to those who ‘take a chance’ while having video evidence to the contrary.

Perhaps the experiment lies in finding out how many people see beyond the idiotic gloss of the thirty second advert to question the experiment itself. Perhaps we’ve now transcended to another level of existence where we can see through the nonsense in adverts and get straight to their core message. In reality though, this is probably another example of the “let’s hope they don’t notice” culture which is pervasive throughout the advertising community at the moment.
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Cars. Automobiles. Vehicles. Things with engines. On four wheels (sometimes three) that often get covered in ice during winter and, if you get leather seats, are too hot to sit in during the summer. Yes, our four wheeled friends are so much a part of our everyday life that it takes the release of Disney Pixar’s ‘Cars’ to actually make us consider the fact that cars might have feelings too.

Which they don’t.

And that’s a good thing because if certain cars had feelings they would almost certainly see themselves as hideous, nutrient-guzzling windbags with no friends either on the road or in the driveway. It would likely drive them to self harm, presumably by slashing their own tires while sitting in a puddle. Who knows? It’s rarely a good idea to personify inanimate objects too far as they are likely to take on a terrifying edge the next time you clamber into one to pop down to the shops.

It’s a real shame for cars. Assuming that cars do have feelings which- admittedly- might be a bit of a stretch for some of our readers who believe that Justin Bieber has a penis and that Tom Hardy can spell, it is easy to assume that being a car makes for an incredibly depressing life. You see, cars just aren’t that good looking any more. It used to be that cars were either sleek lines or grudging, grunting boxes with all the welcoming appeal of Theresa May naked in a jacuzzi but still, unlike Theresa May in a jacuzzi, one could respect the car for at least making the effort.

If cars did indeed have feelings, they’d realise how much the tone of advertising had changed. The focus is no longer on the car itself, its sleek line, its fuel efficiency or even how safe it is for the driver if you were to slam it into a child at fifty miles per hour. Now the car has become such a hideous pariah in its own industry that it’s better to focus on completely abstract elements of life instead of on the car itself. One need only look at the frankly ludicrous Renault Clio advert which stars almost every popular culture reference ever used to sell a car which is hanging from the ceiling in a state of impotent fury (more personification there).

It would be easy to suggest that the end of this advert shows the lynching of the car. The evil, putrid, spewing, belching demi-corpse of the car in a world where people passively snigger at Top Gear before complaining that their Prius doesn’t get enough miles to the gallon. People need to make up their minds. Do they hate cars or love them?

Funnily enough, it’s not just the car-buying public that have to decide what the hell they want from cars. Citroën, for example, have just released an advert which basically challenges people to buy their new DS4 model.

In the past we’ve been told that it’s rude to pick apart someone’s hard work for comic effect but to be fair, not everyone has to work this hard to produce an advert so full of preposterous misinformation. Let’s open with some yeses. Yes, you will work Sunday. Yes, you will take your hideously materialistic bitch of a wife shopping despite the fact that you’ve been working all day at your job and are knackered. Yes, you will buy coffee from Starbucks and meat from a supermarket because it’s just easier and you’re knackered from working at your job where your boss under-rates your contribution and exhausted from your home life where your hideously materialistic bitch of a wife complains because you’re ALWAYS BLOODY WORKING!

It’s little wonder that you end up conforming so much that when the opportunity arises to get fully naked in a jacuzzi with the Home Secretary arises, you’re too tired to do anything but give into the bubbles and those hard, calloused, Thatcherite hands.

Funnily enough, the Citroën DS4 is (in looks if not in policies) similar to a fully nude Theresa May in a jacuzzi. By conforming so much in life, you feel the need to break the chain and either engage in warm, wet… but still dry, disappointing coitus with a Cabinet Minister or buy a car that looks a bit like her. You know, all curiously smoothed lines where there was previously a jutting line.

It is easy to conclude that buying a Citroën DS4 is the lesser of two evils in this instance. At least in buying a hideously deformed car, so ugly that they only show it on screen for a few seconds, you are not committing an act of adultery. Although, you’ll never sell your tell-all story to a tabloid and bring down the government of the day in a whirlwind of sex scandal if you just buy a badly designed five-door coupé, will you?

That doesn’t mean that you won’t take our personification of vehicles too far and end up in a tabloid with your genitals enveloped in an exhaust pipe though. It’s all about headlines.

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