This seems to happen quite often nowadays. I was reminded by TV ads for a Sydney morning radio program The Cage. If they didn’t advertise and I saw a list of the people involved I may have listened to the show but the ads are so excruciatingly unfunny I avoid it.
Similarly, I enjoyed watching XXX with my teenage son and would probably have gone with him to the sequel except for the advertising which I kept hearing. It featured Samuel L Jackson saying “The new triple X has to be deadlier, more dangerous, more attitude.” More attitude??? I have never seen it, not even on DVD.
Every. Single. Car. Commercial. On the radio, anyway. The telly ones are not so bad, then again, I don’t have cable anymore. But the car commercials on the radio are positively obnoxious.
And the other ones I really hate-hate-hate are the stupid maxi pad commercials during dinner. Excuse me, I don’t have blue blood (snerk) and I don’t need such graphic little demonstrations.
There’s a creepy commercial for a real estate agency (century 21?) where a wife is brow beating the husband into buying a house he’s not sure about, during this pretty nasty argument, a woman real estate agent who is on speaker phone jumps in on the wife’s side too. Slate recently had a column on this ad.
Every time I saw it I thought, don’t buy the house, leave that shrew and her b*tch of an agent and move to Vegas you poor henpecked SOB.
There is a guy who sells Oxy Clean, in a loud, semi-obnoxious way. He may have the gift of gab, but that’s all he has. He doesn’t have the personality to bring it off. What’s really disconcerting, though, is the fact that he is wearing several bottles of Just For Men coloring on his hair and beard. It looks very strange. Nobody his age doesn’t have some grey hair. You can tell by his manner that he thinks he’s the world’s coolest guy. My wife was the one to point him out to me, because she doesn’t like him, either. We won’t be buying any of his product. We call him the Oxy Moron.
There’s a rash of Radio Shack commercials which feature a person, sitting in a chair talking to the camera about whatever Radio Shack product they want. There’s this one with this extremely annoying woman going on and on about this mobile phone. Apparently, she wants her significant other to buy the device for her. She actually says something along the lines of if he wants their relationship to remain exclusive, he’d do well to buy her the telephone.
I swear, it put off sitting in chairs and talking to cameras as soon as I saw it. I don’t mind Radio Shack, though.
Pretty much ANY Promo by Channel Ten will invariably lead me to avoid whatever programme they’re promoting at all costs.
Most of those “Brand Power” ads tend to make me think “Note to self: do not buy this product, as punishment for twee advertising campaign”
The Ads encouraging people to visit Brisbane also have a habit of reminding me why I try not to go anywhere near Brisbane itself if I can actually help it, too…
Of course, this is really common with movie trailers; the vast majority of them tell you the whole story, giving away most of the plot surprises along the way. Mrs. R: “Well, I guess we don’t need to see that one now.”
Those Quizno’s commercials from a couple of years ago with those ugly spongemonkeys definitely did not make me hungry. They looked like rats, and they had really bad teeth. Rats with bad teeth do not make me think, mmmm … Quizno’s!
My husband has sworn that he will never buy a Mazda on the basis of their “Zoom zoom” campaign. We just bought a Toyota Corolla last year, so take that, Mazda!
Canadian Tire, an institution in Canada, had a series of ads with the most annoying couple in the world recently. Unfortunately, they fired them after they realized that their annoyingness was starting to become legendary. It’s too bad, because making fun of them was starting to get really fun.
There’s an ad out now for A & W that features an extremely churlish father, his wife, and their grown up son and daughter-in-law. They get dad the oaf a grandpa burger instead of a papa burger as a way of telling him that they’re knocked up. It always makes me laugh when dad the oaf looks at his son when he figures it out in such a way that you imagine him asking him, “It’s yours?” HA!
Actually, there have been a few A & W commercials lately that feature some pretty wankish people. There was one with the Boomer couple where the guy had just fixed up his vintage Mustang, and every word out of his wife’s mouth was some kind of negative comment. Now they have one with the guy who never has any money, and his frustrated friend. I’m not sure why A & W thinks all of their commercials should feature negative, unpleasant people.
One thing Jim and I do to make commercials more fun is, after watching a particularly stupid one, to say in an announcer-type voice, “Product X, it’ll get you laid.” Try it - it’s fun!
I haven’t set foot in JC Penny since their Valentine’s Day campaign. It featured a guy clumsily reciting a poem he’d written to the woman he loves, which made her grimace, but he redeemed himself by giving her a box containing some overpriced junky jewelery. Yeah, a declaration of love is worthless without the Bling.
Easy, that Indian guy who’s called me four times today to sell his company’s phone-related product. I don’t even know what it is exactly but I’m never buying it, ever.
Oh, and that TV ad for some phone company. Imagine, against a red background, this 20something metrosexual guy in a tight t-shirt, with a slight lisp… I don’t mean the gay stereotype, I mean just the most obnoxious, self-absorbed young person you can imagine, going “Oh, I love to talk. I talk all day and all night, and it drives my parents NUTS, my dad CONSTANTLY has to throw me off the phone, and my sister has hired Columbian hitmen to come after me, just to get me off the phone, and every day they’re all like GET OFF THE GODDAMNED PHONE! but it doesn’t work of course, 10 minutes later I’m back on again and yakking away, in fact if you saw my phone bill…”
There are a number of campaign types that will piss me off enough that I’ll absolutely never deal with them:
Hard sells. Don’t yell at me. Don’t tell me how CRAAAZZEEE you or your prices are. Don’t show pictures of your show room because it almost always looks like a dingy flea market. I will never, ever shop there because you’re a complete insult to my intelligence. And you’re a stupidhead.
Although I have a favourite brand I tend to buy, I still can’t stand shampoo commercials. Every freakin’ year there’s some new compound/extract/culture/fruit they’re adding to shampoo hailing it as the latest and greatest thing you could possibly do to your hair. Do I really need a Ginseng Ylang Ylang Jojoba Cactus Yogurt Honey Beer Stinkweed Mustard Paste Bird Seed Pro Megavitimin X-12 extract that will give you multiple orgasms this year? I was prefectly happy with the Ginseng Ylang Ylang Jojoba Cactus Yogurt Honey Beer Stinkweed Mustard Paste Bird Seed extract that mererly tickled my prostate from last year.
Gillette commercials. Seriously. I bought a Fusion razor expecting to open the package and find a pocket-sized cyclotron that would shoot lasers at my beard stubble and instantly transform me into a ravishing stud of a man, at which point doting hotties would leap out of the packaging and rub me where it tingles. Instead all I got was an M2 Power with a whole bunch of extra blades welded onto it. It made me afraid to rub it where it tingled.
Any ad that purports to be a cooking show. Every last one of them is retarded beyond my means to express.
There’s more, but I need to stop here and gather up the brain cells that jumped the fence when they were forced to think of these.
There was an ad, I think for Dodge where this husband and wife had just bought an SUV, or Minivan and the mom is cooing to their baby about all the safety features and the DVD player when the husband snaps at her that she’s making the boy a sissy and all the kid needs to know is that the aforementioned gas-guzzler has a Hemi in it.
It is such a nasty little scene. It’s like the official car for people trapped in loveless marriages.
The funny thing is here on Arab satellite TV they have that same commercial in Arabic with Arab actors. I don’t speak Arabic, but it is just as nasty.
