Top 5

January 2011's most annoying adverts

Mike Pollitt | Tuesday 11 January, 2011 10:01

Today’s Top 5 was going to helpfully suggest some wholesome and enriching cultural activities readers might like to do in London this week. Then your compiler got home from work to be assaulted by some of the most offensive, pretentious, bile-inducing wankery ever committed to screen. Here are five adverts currently being thrust down the nation’s throats every 15 minutes and instantaneously triggering Snipe’s gag reflex. Shame on them. Shame on them all.

Any advert for sofas

One of the great unsolved mysteries of modern British life is why sofas only seem to be advertised for one month of each year. But in that month, my word, are they advertised. One of the other great mysteries is how this DFS advert from a couple of years ago has acquired over 55,000 views on YouTube. What is wrong with people?! Anyway, it stands for all such adverts, including as it does the sofa staples – a couple flirting bleurgingly, a nerd reading studiously, a dog jumping muddily, a babe writhing suggestively…you’ve seen it all before. And you’ll be seeing it all again next time you turn on the TV.

Match.com

This advert is everywhere at the moment, and it’s toe-curlingly twee. If you find this mawkish crap endearingly sweet then Snipe pities you, for you are clearly unable to access the deeper emotions upon which a full appreciation of the human condition necessarily rests. Uck.

MORE THAN freeman

What the hell is going on with the capitalisation here, for a start? But beyond that, how flimsy can an advert’s premise be? What was the pitch? “Erm…right…guys…have you ever noticed how there’s a bit of assonance between your company’s name and the first name of a famous actor…so what we’ll do right, we’ll use a soundalike of that actor to talk portentously about insurance! And he’ll be quirky right, and he can answer insurance questions on Facebook and Twitter but he’ll totally answer non-insurance questions too cos he’s so quirky. And it won’t be a parody exactly but nor will it be an homage, because either of those would require some coherent creative thinking which we’re incapable of because we can’t stop creaming ourselves about how clever we were to notice the assonance in the first place”. Don Draper would spit in their face, and rightly so.

Confused.com

Like MORE THAN freeman (and good god if I ever have to type that again I will flip) this is an example of advertisers attempting to create a quirky character who does not sell a product directly, but rather seeks to drive good associations between the viewer and the brand. Basically, they’re trying to copy Compare the Meerkat. Unfortunately for them, whereas Compare the Meerkat was a brilliant and original response to the specific problem of name recognition within a diverse and competitive industry, this cartoon woman singing Queen is an annoying, irrelevant and intrusive waste of space. Go away.

Andrex

Some adverts in this list are more annoying, but none is so stupid. You are Andrex. If there’s one thing, one thing, your brand has got, it’s puppies. Everyone loves puppies. Look at this earlier advert, see how all you have to do to make people like you is film some puppies slipping and falling and bumping into mirrors and being clumsy and generally just as cute as an ickle wickle fluffy button (seriously click that link, it’s insane). So with that in mind, WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU MAKE THE DOGS CGI? Why? Seriously, why? Now instead of some adorable furry babies being impossibly lovable, you’ve got yourselves some unoriginallly anthropomorphised pixels being impossiby dull. Bizarre. Utterly, utterly bizarre.

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