Dave's Commerical Prolapse # 4

Yup, it's another double bill from Dave.

In the latest chapter of Activia’s war on 'bloatedness' we find has-been celebrity and former page-three slapper, Nell McAndrew, indulging in the fantasy of having her own chat-show:

Today’s first guest on ‘Nell’ is Emma from London, who I’m sure is cottoning on to the fact that Nell’s career on TV is pretty much restricted to her own mind, although has sportingly agreed to play along.

Emma - like most people who have anything to do with Activia - is feeling a tad bloated and strangely is happy for that information to be bombarded into the average consumer’s minds. Just think if you will about how it feels to be bloated. Now think of Emma struggling with that feeling, clutching her stomach and pulling a grimacing face, breathing out slugglishly… GO ON, IMAGINE IT!

Luckily for our collective mental sanity Emma has found a solution in Activia, as it is ‘scientifically proven’ to cure the oh-so scientific malady that is bloatedness. Activia contains the miracle science of Bifidus ActiRegularis, you see. Of course, that means nothing; it’s just a selection of words which sound vaguely scientific, but it has the word ‘regular’ in it, which could mean it makes you regular? If it’s ‘scientifically proven’ I suppose we should just do what they say. After all why would science lie to us?

After all that rhetoric, Emma feels a lot ‘easier in herself’ - although doesn’t say specifically that the bloatedness has gone - so all hail the scientific bamboozlement which is Bifidus ActiRegularis. In fact so miraculous is the change she feels a fool, for not having tried it before. You hear that everyone? Danone’s calling us all fools unless we try their magic vanilla flavoured goo. We better do what they say, as they have science to hand and to question science would be stupid. And we don’t want to be stupid now do we?

Dave's Commerical Prolapse # 3

Here's Dave Jani again...

This advert is actually quite refreshing, and probably more so than an actual gin and tonic - which to me tastes like rat piss with a twist of lemon.

It’s pretty fun and satisfying to see Gordon Ramsey pelted with things which, despite the apparent metaphor of the advert, are probably not all that nice to have dropped on you.

I mean think about it, Lemons and Ice are hard if dropped from high up enough. Also the lemon might get in his eyes – don’t even get me started on what the gin would do as well - and I don’t care how tough and uncompromising he is, it will still hurt. Then again he’d probably react with some f'ing and blinding, so in that sense it would just be another day in the office, or err… Kitchen. Still, saying that, if you turn the music down, it does look like he starts screaming when the ice starts hitting him.

It seems we are just watching Gordon being tortured by a rather inventive sadomasochist, perhaps a disgruntled cocktail waiter from Claridges looking for revenge or whatnot. Normally I would have expected it be one of the kitchen staff getting his own back on Gordon, perhaps by pouring hot soup over his head. This too would be pretty fun to watch, as Gordon staggers around the screen screaming from third degree soup burns. Still I wish the advert was a little longer and we could see more unpleasant things be dropped on Gordon - like some snapping turtles or unsold Chico CDs. Also, I'm wondering what the second course of drinks this madman intends to drop on ol’Ramsey will be. Personally, I'm hoping for flaming B52's.

More bad apples...

First Magners shamed themselves. Now it's Brothers turn.

Where to start with this one...

The main issue I have with adverts such as this is that companies seem to have no problem with having absolute imbeciles sell their product. Admittedly, it is the lovely ladies who are buying the drink, but our six erstwhile ejits are the focus of the piece. Why, even in this cider-skewed universe, would someone overhearing an order at a bar assume that it was a request for companionship?

Alright, so these things don't necessarily have to make sense if they're funny. This ad, sadly, is not. It's anti-funny. Not only do the these pricks immediately kick one of their mates away (contravening the established 'bro's before ho's rule), they assume the best way to appear as brothers is to dress up in identical clothing and facial hair. If the woman had asked for a traveling identical quintuplet family freak-show, then fair enough. But she didn't. She asked for five bottles of fucking cider, you fucking MORONS.

Cadbury? Crapbury more like, yeah?

Hah, I crack myself up with these witty titles. Anyway, check this load of old bollocks out:

Blergh. Awful, huh?

It's a shame really, because we all know that Cadbury can pull off some amazing adverts. However, with this televisual abomination, they've undone all that good Phil Collins/Gorilla related work (not something I thought I'd ever find myself typing) in one fell, sickly swoop.

Now, I could get into attacking the product, as I consider anyone who mixes chocolate with raisins to be a heretic, but we'll concentrate on the commercial. Not only is it attempting to give us some of that post-Boosh 'random' humour that Mr. Dave Jani discusses on this very blog, it also manages to weave in a horribly twee atmosphere at the same time.

Essentially, taking the very worst thing about Christmas - carol singers - and putting them in a park in the middle of Summer is an almost offensively lazy way of communicating 'craziness'. Carol singers simply remind me of that edgy, awkward feeling you get when you open the door to their shining faces and have to stand, embarrassed, as they reel off two numbers before you tell them you have nothing to give. They do not remind me of tasty, melty chocolate treats.

If the singing doesn't make bile rise in your throat, then surely the stupid marching-dance routine and their stupid costumes will. The fact that they "Leg it" at the end of the ad makes them look like a horde of badly disguised paedophiles realising they've been spotted by the law.

Remember kids, never take sweet off a stranger. Especially Cadbury Clusters - they've got fucking raisins in them. Gross.

100% pear, 98% shit advert.

I like Mark Watson. He's pretty funny on shows like Mock the Week, even if he fakes his Welsh accent. However, he isn't making me laugh here:

I don't know whether Watson had a gammy knee the day they filmed this advert, but the way he bumbles towards the camera in the first scene makes it look like he has shat himself. Either way, his mate Duncan seems surprised that his promotion in his crappy, dead-end office job is... a slightly different crappy dead-end office job. You'd almost think he was expecting a promotion to sweets and fireworks tester or blowjob receiver.

So, why didn't they tell it to him straight, like a pear cider? Yeah, why didn't they? Because everyone knows pear cider is the universal benchmark with which to measure the veracity of all other statements. Incidentally - the fact that pear cider contains 100% pear is about as surprising as finding out Mickey Rourke is 50% plastic.

And 50% scary-ass grimace.

Whereas the last Watson fronted Magners ad had a relatively decent punch-line (even if it wasn't mind-blowingly funny), this one doesn't even have that for a saving grace. 

"Wasn't one of the classic conferences then?" 

HAHA!

Fuck off.*

*Ironically, this isn't my best sign off either. 

Zero sugar - zero sense.

The last Coke Zero commercial was pretty bad. Check this one out...

Now, assuming you paid attention to anything other than the actress and her shapely behind, let's take a closer look at the way Coke Zero ostensibly works when you glug a bottle down like a thirsty piglet (as demonstrated by 'our hero' above).

Apart from making the synapses in your brain fire dangerously, it appears that every time the familiar 'pffff' sound of an opening bottle is heard, several helicopter-loads of suited and booted special forces agents crash into your life with some of the most bizarrely context-specific weaponry ever constructed. I mean, who designs the dog-mask rifle? Is there one for every breed and size of dog? Surely a dog in a gimp mask is a definite sign that something weird is going on anyway.

As supposedly useful as the Coke Zero commandos have been in this scenario, they'd soon become a nuisance. Open an ice-cold can while you're enjoying a home cooked Sunday lunch with the parents and you'll find yourself with a face full of glass and your mum's garden blown to shit.

Anyway, seems to me that 'Daddy' should be far more concerned about the freshly broken window and multiple explosions occurring outside, rather than some prick rogering his daughter. And what kind of psychotic father is this? One that leers creepily like a sex pest through the peep-hole, pounding on the door angrily within ten seconds of arriving. If anyone should have been saved, it should of been the girl...

One for the ladies...

Don't ever accuse bADVERTISING of being sexist. Here's an ad aimed squarely at women. And probably some men...

Apparently, make-up artists finally have an alternative for false lashes. Finally, all those years of waiting and wondering are over. So... what is this revolutionary alternative? Some kind of new mascara from Max Factor? Nope...

Yup, there it is. Don't pay money for cosmetics, simply get a post-production team to digitally alter your lashes to their full and luscious potential. Of course, you'll have to film every part of your life in advance and not actually appear in person at any time, but surely that's a small price to play for 'impact you never thought your lashes could achieve', right?

Impact like this.

Ah.

Turns out I've gotten into the whole 'make fun of shitty ads from the comfort of my own home' game ludicrously late. Here's somebody who does it much better:

TV's WORST ADVERTS

Oh well.

I didn't quite catch that...

Behold:

Congratulations Webuyanycar.com - you've managed to hire worse musicians than PJ and fuckin' Duncan.

Psych.

Yup - it's the sort of ad that makes you fall to your knees and weep angrily. The sort of ad that makes you pound your fist into the wall until you leave a pulped, bloody stump in its place. The sort of ad that uses the old 'if we can't find anything good/witty/informative/clever to say, we'll just repeat ourselves over and over again until people feel something in their brain snap, and they cave in due to sheer psychological exhaustion just before their mind starts dribbling out of their ears in soft, gooey lumps' mantra. 

That's a real thing. I didn't just make that up.

The old ones are the best...

We all remember those bloody terrible Cobra Beer ads between the comedy shows on the Dave channel, don't we? 

Clicky:

Dave's Commerical Prolapse # 2 - International edition.

That's right people - we're spoiling you with two posts from Mr. Dave Jani today...

I for one hate our new Mr Muscle adverts. I miss the good old days when the sad wimpy man was empowered by the liquid muscle. Now we've got some steroid using cunt mocking us with his unequalable cleaning prowess. At least the loser of days gone by made us feel like we had a chance...

However, this advert takes on a new dimension of strange as it’s in Russian (rather than dubbing on a scale not seen since a 1970s Chinese movie, like our UK version had.) Firstly, Mr Muscle bursts in unannounced upon some poor housewife, who looks like one of the remnants of the eastern European athletics drugging of the 1980s, although thankfully with less facial and armpit hair. 

Meanwhile, the confusing Cyrillic bullshit continues and I’m still quite surprised by the fact she’s so calm that some strange man has just wandered into her house. After all, there’s nothing sinister about a buff Russian man with sunglasses bursting into your home. Even stranger, though, is the fact that her first reaction is to show off her unnecessarily large biceps. I have no idea if this is a Russian formality or not. Perhaps other such customs involve shoving your balls in the face of a woman you wish to ask out? As I say I’m not well clued in with Russian etiquette.

However, Mr Muscle seems to be more than just a cleaner, as he tackles the tough stains. It appears he also can deplete other people’s muscles, as this woman finds to her delight. Looks like her days of shaving, and deep voiced conversations are over (shame it wasn’t so simple for the real athletes who were subject to the doping). Still what’s a domestic cleaning advert without a bit of fun poked at gender roles, as Mr Muscle rights the ridiculous ‘wrong’ that is a muscular woman.

I’m sure his next trick will be to insult her cooking, demand a cup of coffee and then force himself upon her, insisting on fulfilling his “rights” as a husband! Just like the good old days, after all we can’t have women showing up their husbands now can we! 

Dave's Commerical Prolapse # 1

Guest contributor Dave Jani presents us with the first of his 'Commercial Prolapses'...

Hey kids do you know what’s fun? Stalking! However this isn’t just any old stalking, this is stalking for the 21st century child, which combines all the elements of short attention spans and ‘random’ humour.
Now I as much as anyone loves a bit of random humor, although when it’s bastardised to such an extent, to the level of making a Horne and Cordon Sketch look like Monty Fucking Python, I then begin to lose interest in the idea. It makes me dream of trapping the creator of this lowest common denominator bullshit in a cage made of hardened cheese strings, and then continuously playing back a selection of these wacky, pointless soundbites until he loses his mind.

“What’s this then, oh right we’ve got a worried looking grandma having a birthday party”. Our surveys show teenagers find the elderly acting all innocent and then having the shit scared out of them funny. Probably seconded by a focus group of long haired monosyllabic cunts who occasionally chuckled at the concept and muttering words like “cool” and “random” etc.

I can imagine the twats thinking (when they do): “Look at all their stupid faces, all worried and that, because some nut job is hiding in the background making stupid noises. People getting confused at things is funny! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Durr, they don’t know what’s going on do they?” Then again sadly neither does anyone else. Seriously - who did they get to advise them on this? Beavis and Butthead?

Perhaps this advert needs a more sinister twist at the end, like it turns out it was a crazed cow was chasing them all along, who suddenly stampedes and gores them on its horns made of cheese. Gets the same point across and doesn’t trivialize stalking either. Also, surveys show that kids love violence, so everyone wins!

Stop and think...

The Army have presumably always had a difficult job when it comes to advertising. I'm sure nothing gets the CV's in like the promise of a job where getting shot at is par for the course. But does that justify their relatively recent line of 'Start thinking soldier' ads?

I'ma go ahead and say no. 

They've been doing this for a while now - making war look like a hyper-realistic kick arse video game without even considering how traumatic it must be. As if the TV ads weren't chilling enough, the Army's online content goes one further, including actual video-games which allow you to practice with a sniper rifle, among other things.

The funny part about this ad though is that we're given three options to raid this 'bomb factory':

1. Call in air-support. 
2. Kick the door in.

3. Blow the wall.

Now, I'm no combat expert (though I did shoot a school-friend right between the eyes with a cork gun once. Seriously - he was on a swing at the time and he had a polystyrene shield for protection - I still got him) but I'm fairly sure soldiers should be open to more than three options when storming any insurgent stronghold. It seems to me that none of the above are viable options. Air support is no doubt expensive and has potential for civilian casualties (also you probably want to be standing pretty far from a factory full of bombs that you're dropping more bombs on to). Kicking the door in is stupid for so many reasons I won't begin to go into it. And blowing the wall? Hello! It's a freaking bomb factory...

Probably something like this.

Can't we all just get along instead? No? Oh well, at least our ads aren't as sinister as this.

No pride...

I'm sure we're all familiar with this one by now. For the record, it doesn't start right away, there's a 15 second segment beforehand. Why? Fuck you, that's why.

Alright, we can all see what they were trying to do here. Ha ha ha, men are useless aren't they? Ho ho ho, it's only a bit of fun. Yeah, I can see the argument. I mean, we used to have ads like this and this. 

So we all now know that the way women drive uses up considerably more tread on your Goodyears (a name so different, it's registered!) and that they often come close to a Sean Connery style sock-to-the-jaw when their coffee isn't as good as the stuff you get at work. The thing is, these ads were broadcast in the 1970's and 1950's (probably) respectively. Oven Pride's idiot-cast exists now, in the 21st Century - a time where blatant sexism isn't OK anymore. Not that it was OK back then, you understand - it just happened anyway. Sort of like Big Brother does now.

 

If this had come out when these sorts of ads actually existed, it might have had some irony to it. But, as it stands, they may as well have had it spoofing adverts for war bonds for all its cultural relevance. 

Possibly the worst thing to come out of this is the bloke who represents men in this ad. Look at him, the burbling fuckwit. Oh, and don't get me started on that vindictive, spiteful little giggle at the end. She won't be laughing when he clips her because of her shitty coffee.

Something technical... ignore it.

hanjbcprui

Chicken sold separately...

This one is just kind of sad to be honest:

Told you so.

I just hope that kid got paid a whole lot of cash. He'll probably need it to pay for the facial reconstruction operation after his schoolmates kick the shit out of him for dancing like a twat.

Especially for this bit.

Also, it's quite impressive that Old El Paso's 'Crispy Chicken Fajita' kits come with absolutely zero crispy chicken.

Look - REAL PEOPLE!

Ah, Confused.com... purveyors of dreadful advertising since the dawn of time (or so it seems). Their last line of ads were truly horrible - remember the band of merry imbeciles who gurned at us through our screens with their stupid 2D props? Example? The bloke with the unspeakably awful spiky hair, looming towards us with an expression that says both 'cretin' and 'pathological killer' all at the same time. 

Well, technically things have improved. Gone is the horrible over-acting and 'wacky' cardboard computer screen. Now we have REAL people, with REAL experiences and REAL thoughts. 

Look how REAL they are!

Confused.com have chosen polar opposites of the people in their previous adverts, yet they still appear to be as dumb as their cartoonish counterparts. For instance, our long-haired friend here claims that the company won't ask "loads of complicated questions...", which is mighty nice of them. He even starts off strong on the example front - "... like: what were you doing seven years ago?" Good, because that question would indeed be complicated. And totally irrelevant to an insurance company (unless you spent the whole of 2002 crashing cars into your own house). It doesn't take long for him to fall down though - "Do you like bread?", "Do you have a beard?", "Do you like ice cream?"

Well, the first two are yes or no answers. They couldn't be less complicated. Additionally, the use of 'bread' and 'beard' show a massive lack of imagination on his part - he only moved the letter 'r' two places. And the last one - well actually the last one is less complicated. You see - everyone likes ice cream.

Orangina is scary.

Bit of an old one this, but by Christ it's terrifying. In fact, words simply cannot communicate how terrifying it is, and therefore all shall be said for now is 'pole-dancing squid'. 

Do not adjust your sets. Or your medication. You did just witness that.

This anthropomorphic nightmare caused outrage when released (who'd have thunk it?) for being 'too sexy'. One can only assume that the people who judged the ad to be 'too sexy' were in fact 'too fucked up in the head' to register that the characters were CGI human-animal mutant hybrids. Ok, so we get some pretty basic visual innuendo, but surely the phrase should be 'too bed-shittingly scary'.

Here comes the citrusy money-shot...

I'm not sure anything else needs to be said on this one...

The best place to start...

Where better to kick off proceedings than with this - proof if ever it was needed that the coming apocalypse is imminent.

One second, I need to vomit. 

Now, I'm sorry to kick things off with this day-glo hell-zone, but the tone had to be set. Apparently, in the world of (the aptly named) Toolstation, everything is just fucking awful. When employees and customers aren't dancing moronically like cockney wide-boy characters (circa 1830) then, well... ToolStation is closed. Don't be fooled by their flashy, plastic smiles - these people are almost certainly dead inside. And possibly outside - which would explain their complicit, zombie-like willingness to shame themselves, their children and their friends' children's children in this stomach-churning, bile-enducing festival of horseshit.

Why? Why are they so happy?

As if the vaguely offensive working class builder stereotypes weren't bad enough (along with the 12 year old emo-fringed guy pictured above) the song is based on the Hokey Cokey, a tune that couldn't even be described as 'good', 'fun' or 'in any way worth allowing into your ear canal' when it was in fashion.

All I can suggest is that you visit a rival tool-renting company (if such a place exists) and borrow a few screwdrivers. Next time this ad spews its way on to your screen, drive them into your eyeballs and ears respectively, lest you have to watch or hear these gurning morons feign excitement over drill-bits and hard hats ever again.

And so it begins...

Welcome to bADVERTISING - your one stop shop for the most excruciatingly bad television adverts that have ever forced upon our weary, aching eyes. Hopefully my 'hilarious', 'award winning' commentary will provide a glimmer of relief throughout the audio-visual shitstorm that follows.

My Many Fictional Awards.

So, shall we start?