Josh T-Mobile advert

There really are some awful PR pitches out there, with the rush to utilise aspects of social media into ad campaigns resulting in some pretty horrible creations.

And this. This is the Daddy of them all. I don't really think that many PRs or journos or marketers really understand social media, or at least how best to utilise it. This is a perfect illustration.

The power of social media is in creating something of value that has the potential to zip around the web across multiple platforms. If you do this well then members of Joe Public will do the work for you.

I don't have any inside information, but I'm willing to bet that CompareTheMarket.com has done pretty bloody well out of the CompareTheMeerkat.com campaign. It's captured imaginations, is fluffy and potentially amusing. It's perfect for social media platforms.

These Josh T-Mobile ads have not, because its fundamentally a pretty uninspired idea that smacks of lots of other bits and bobs out there at the moment.

'Create a band by roaming around the country holding jamming sessions with oddballs' is a cracking pitch only in the mind of an ad exec (and are all of those people on the bus really Josh fans, rather than paid-for actors and musicians?).

And if it were to ever take off it would only be due to the magnetic personality and shimmering talent of the individual fronting it.

Josh is not this person and, while probably a decent chap, cannot carry a massive multi-platform campaign on his thin, backpacking-around-India-during-a-gap-year shoulders and weedy one world wifflings.

Chuck in some awkward elements where Josh is required to suck some corporate cock in the form of some ill-fitting soundbites about how great T-Mobile is and the final nail in the coffin is hammered home.

I've said before that I don't object in principle to stuff like this, but when it's backed by a massive corporate outfit it's never possible to see past the real reason it exists in the first place.

And that's enough to turn it from something twee and rather nauseating into something genuinely awful.

Carly Fiorina sheep attack advert

OK, first up Carly Fiorina is the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard currently in the middle of a Senate run in California.

Fiorina is gunning for the Republican nomination, after HP booted her out in 2005 and has since contributed to her opponent's campaign fund.

So, you might think this ad is aimed at veteran Democrat Barbara Boxer. Nope, that's not how US politics works.

To first secure the Republican nomination Fiorina has to smear overcome other Republicans also seeking the nomination.

So, this ad is aimed at fellow Republican Tom Campbell. Fiorina hasn't even got to Boxer yet.

It's so hard to know where to start with this ad. UK readers may be shocked by how vicious the ad is, especially considering its aimed at someone from the same political party.

But low blows and negative campaigning are par for the course in US politics, especially from the right-wing, following Karl Rove's foray into political campaigning.

What is more obvious is that this is completely swivel-eyed, wing-nut, bible-bashing, lib'rul-hatin' batshit crazy.

I mean, there's a guy dressed up as a wolf in sheep's clothing running around a hillside with glowing red eyes.

There's a sheep standing on a doric column that starts ascending into the stratosphere as if animated by Terry Gilliam on an off day.

There's a bizarre attempt at an acronym that doesn't even work - FCINO. And what do 'Piety' and Purity' have to do with anything?

It's a confused message, but is the message even important? To American's perpetually scared, perpetually angry, perpetually suspicious right-wing populus it may successfully brand Campbell as evil, demonic or, even worse, a Fiscal Conservative In Name Only.

It's a strategy that bombed with the UK's rather less terrified population with the Tories' Demon Eyes billboard poster in '97, but the publicity it has garnered speaks for itself.

It's often said that if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it - and that's a mantra the US right has run with, which is why plenty of people believed Obama was a communist, a Muslim, a homosexual or not even a US national during the 2008 campaign.

This ad takes that theory and turns it all up to 11. It's all hyperbole, innuendo and flat-out smear. Already media outlets are declaring that this advert is so bonkers that it will finish off Fiorina's campaign.

I hope they don't underestimate just how susceptible US voters are to this kind of drivel. The fact that the seat in question is California offers some hope, but try telling Michael Dukakis that negative campaigning doesn't work.

Worst ads of 2009: results

Predictably Go Compare, the current Death Star of shit TV adverts, ran away with this award.

Over a third of you voted the chirpy tenor straight to the top of the year's most awful, annoying and smug adverts. And Christ was there competition.

My own bete noir, the Samsung Fucking Jet ad, spoke to me on a much more fundamentally disturbing level, as if I were looking into the very eye of some form of abstract quintessence of evil.



On the other hand the Duffy Coke ad showcased what a duck would look like if it went on a by-law flouting bicycle trip to a supermarket in search of some fizzy pop.

Frankly, they're all fucking terrible. I expect when Samsung takes over the world I'll be strapped into a chair, Alex DeLarge-style, and forced to endure them forever. Ho hum

Full results of the shittest advert 2009 poll:

Go Compare - 33.5%
Samsung Fucking Jet - 20.5%
T-Mobile - 11.4%
Duffy Coke - 11.4%
Gillette Phenom - 8%
Natwest - 5.1%
118 118 - 4%
Pot noodle - 2.8%
Red Driving School - 2.3%
Direct Line - 1.1%

Dell treats advert

I hate this advert: its American smugness; its terrible music; its Intel jingle (the most depressing noise in the world).

Of course, what's absurd about this ad for Dell's laptops is that it's taken them fully ten years to make a laptop that isn't a whirring hard plastic black-or-grey box.

Lord knows where we'd be without Apple. It's possible than without iPods and iPads and iMacs and the like everyone would be carrying around something resembling a Commodore 64 on their backs and taking off whenever the extractor fan kicked in.

So, this is all about trying to make laptops a bit cooler by painting them a different colour and convincing people to treat themselves. Y'know, cos it's a different colour.

Pretty patronising stuff and, as all Mac marks like me know, all PCs are simply varying grades of bloody awful anyway, with their horribly frustrating operating systems and counter-intuitive interfaces.

Painting one pink and putting a sickly sound bed behind it ain't gonna change that. It would be like putting a beard on Adrian Chiles and pretending he were Brad Pitt - underneath it there'd still be that Brummie accent.

Tena Lady advert

By their very nature adverts for Tena Lady are going to be pretty bizarre, but who could possibly foresee the answer to 'What's the first thing you notice about me?' being 'That I don't smell of piss'?

Receiving this brief must be the original Kobayashi-Maru of advertising, the definitive no-win scenario.

My sympathies to anyone involved in having to make ads like this don't quite extend to my sympathies for anyone who finds themself in the position of having to consider buying this product though.

30 allegedly hilarious print ads

Print ads, to my mind, are generally much more witty, well-observed, subtle and simply well put-together. There's no captive audience, as there is in multimedia advertising. If your target is going to see and engage with your ad, they need to want to.


So, many standard TV ad techniques – loud noises, bad music, twats, annoyance – simply aren't available to the print ad creative.

First they need to stand out, visually. Then they need to have something relevant to say. Thirdly that message needs to be memorable. That's quite a lot to think about when you've got three columns on page 14 of the Express to conjure with.

Anyway, the full article is over at spyrestudios in an article that says much the same thing that I just did, only in a rather less curmudgeonly fashion.

I wouldn't describe all of them as hilarious, but they're all pretty good by my reckoning. Except the Pringles one - that's shit. A couple of my favourites are below.


Nutri Balance: Husband



















Nikol Baking Tray: Jacuzzi








































German Olympic Sport Federation: David










































Kodak Rechargeable Batteries: Tiger



















Utopolis Group of Cinemas: Titanic









































Listerine Mouthwash: Sermon




















Kayaking Jumbo Peanuts: Choking










































Kiss FM: iPod Father

Cadbury's adverts retrospective

A sad day, no doubt for British industry. Cadbury's is off to get decimated and absorbed by Kraft; who will rationalise the Cadbury's bunny, downsize the British Curly Wurley and smash the face of the Phil Collins Gorilla in.

While few are likely to be aware of the economic and social history of the company, most will make an emotional connection with company through its advertising and products. It's often difficult to separate the two.

And while I've compiled a list of some of those most famous adverts below, I've included a paragraph by a friend on the passing of the company as we know it.

And that's it. The last of the great philanthropic British companies - such as Rowntree's, Terry's, Dorman Long, Lever Brothers and the Great Western Railway - which helped to ameliorate the worst excesses of capitalism in this country and raised the living standards of the working and lower middle classes, has gone.

This is a genuinely sad day, and not just for those who like chocolate which tastes like chocolate.

So, there you go. Another British institution off to the great chocolate factory in the sky, not via a glass elevator but the rough and tumble of globalised industrial markets.

At least we'll always have that fit bird in the Flake ad.


Cadbury's flake advert

Sex and chocolate - a firmly established routine in adland. This is, perhaps, the finest example

Cadbury's Curly Wurly advert

Terry Scott doing what he did best - and only 3p

Cadbury's Fruit and Nut advert

Actually comes over as rather wrong in quite a lot of way now, but seemed cute at the time.

Cadbury's Crunchie advert

Still turns up from time to time on telly, and the slogan still in everyday parlance. A testament to the power of a good ad.

Cadbury's Roses advert

Cockneys singing and Big Daddy. Crude but memorable.

Cadbury's Caramel advert

I fancied the sexy bunny in this as much as I liked eating Caramel.

Cadbury's Wispa advert

Featuring the wonderful Ruth Madoc and Simon Cadell.

Cadbury's Milk Tray advert

Much parodied and undeniably silly, almost certainly responsible for lots of apologetic boxes of chocolates laid on kitchen tables by guilty husbands.

Smash robots

One of the great classics of advertising.

Cadbury's Fudge advert

Inspiring rude take-offs in playgrounds since the 80s

AdTurds wordle

Wordle is a tool that lets you see what words you're regularly using on your blog. Here's one for AdTurds. Frankly I expected a lot more fucks, shits and twats.

Spam up advert

I'm not much of a food snob. In fact I was brought up on working class foods including things like offal, reconstituted meat and suet, and delicious they were too.

While foodstuffs like these may not be the most healthy choices, I'm sure they're a lot better for a growing lad than the diet of burgers, crisps, chocolate, energy drinks and weed kids these days seem to subsist on.

However, in these sniffy times old-fashioned food has gone off the menu somewhat. This can't be because of price, nutrition or taste - instead it seems to be due to a kind of muddled food snobbery that okays £1 ready-made chicken kormas from Iceland but turns its nose up at deviled kidneys.

So there's not much of that kind of food that's off the menu for me, including spam – which is fairly tasty.

However, spam has a problem. It's so deeply out-of-fashion that it's virtually taboo, like smoking on television, glue-sniffing or masturbation.

This effort to raise spam's profile seems to be have been made 25 years ago, which is oddly appropriate, but seems hopelessly doomed to failure.

The idea that spam could serve as 'a special tea' is just about acceptable, if it's a kids' meal. But to suggest that serving up a plate of spam to your loving wife on your anniversary is going to end with anything other than a slap in the face and night on the sofa is wishful thinking indeed. Even if your wife is Pamela Spam from Spamtown, Spamania. And even then it's pretty lazy.

I feel sorry for the people given this brief, I really do. Because in this day and age trying to convince people that spam is cool is like trying to convince them that a ball and cup is Christmas 2010's big toy craze.

Not the top TV ads of 2009

Apparently these are the top ten most-watched UK TV ads of 2009 according to a site called tellyads.com.

1. Cadbury: Eyebrows

2. Comparethemarket.com: Comparethemeerkat.com

3. PG Tips: It's The Taste

4. Churchill: Rolf Harris

5. Change4Life: Eat Well, Move More, Live Longer

6. Maltesers: Tiny Jeans

7. GoCompare.com: Only A Tenor

8. Vodafone: If I Ruled The World

9. Aviva: Green Army

10. EDF Energy: Eco20:20

In an article that seems to have been barely altered from the original press release, the Grauniad breathlessly describes just how many hits the various shit ads on the site have received over the course of the last year.

Public interest in TV adverts seems to be greater than ever, the poll reveals. Visitors to tellyAds have watched 6.3m clips this year, 50% more than last year.

Fucking fascinating, I'm sure. After some more PR puff for the site, we get the following amazing revelation:

The Cadbury's "Eyebrows" advert features two children posing for a photograph. When the photographer is called away by a ringing phone, the children begin a synchronised eyebrow dance – without a blink – to the 1980s track Don't Stop The Rock by Freestyle. The ad was created by ad agency Fallon and directed by Tom Kuntz, who was also responsible for last year's Lynx "Chocolate Man" advert.

The article is written by Rebecca Smithers, consumer affairs correspondent, who presumably drew some sort of short straw in the office in the run-up to Christmas.

If you can bear to make it to the end of the article you finally get to the list of adverts, some of which I've genuinely never seen.

What should be apparent by now is that someone at The Guardian doesn't get the 'optimised content doesn't have to be shit, obviously-optimised content' thing, as the whole thing has LINK BAIT written through it like a stick of rock.

Even if you can bear to make it to the list of adverts at the end another, related, problem becomes apparent.

This is no measure of popularity, penetration or quality, it's simply a measure of how well optimised various parts of tellyads.com are.

How else would the Change4Life advert be the fourth-most watched advert of the year? Or an advert for Maltesers fifth? or one for EDF Energy be tenth? Why, specifically, would anyone seek any of those adverts out?

So, an utterly pointless article made from a barely repurposed press release, and some empty and misleading rundown of some shite ads from last year. Cheers for that Guardian.

Do you even remember ever seeing this ad?