Just like the rest of you,* I occasionally fall down a U2B rabbit hole and watch a buncha music videos in a row. When I do this, before every other video–literally between every two videos–my vid association flow is interrupted by an ad for . . . wait for it . . . U2B MUSIC VIDEOS! I am literally prevented from watching music videos BY AN AD TELLING ME TO WATCH MUSIC VIDEOS! I can handle this maybe three times before this ad makes me stop watching music videos. Are there other examples of advertisements that are so offputting they actually cause you to actively avoid the product being touted?
Carl’s Jr. When their campaign wasn’t boasting about how disgustingly messy their food was, they had Paris Hilton skanking around. Honestly, when your spokesperson primarily has the viewer wondering how many STDs she currently has because she’s so proudly sleazy, she doesn’t exactly make the food appealing.
I avoid any product or service whose ads gleefully describe how they’re supposedly putting competitors out of business and costing people jobs.
Example: the ad showing the despairing owner of an Italian restaurant which is empty because its customers prefer buying frozen DiGiorno pizza with cardboard crust to eating actual Italian food.
Since this thread is spluttering, I’ll give an example that’s many years old and that I think I may have mentioned on the Dope before.
There was a series of adverts for salad cream in the UK. (salad cream is just a kind of salad dressing)
The theme for the adverts were that salad cream could make any food delicious. So, for example, there was one advert where a guy wakes up hungover, finds a dry slice of pizza stuck to his bedsheet, pours salad cream on it and eats it.
All the adverts were nauseating, and put me off salad cream for years.