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?
