Wednesday 23 June 2010

The Big Huge Epic Advert Hating Rant Part 1

Inspired by being reintroduced to TV after my self-imposed televisual exile at University, I've decided to commemorate the stupidest adverts ever (that I can find) with a nice little blogging. Rather than do a countdown of the worst adverts ever (which was my original intention, but has been done many times) I'm going to pick out a few choice pieces of thick-headedness and give them my own coveted Neophlegm Patented Advert Award 2010®. Without further ado, let's see the winners!



The Duct-Tape and DVD award for Most Forced Movie Tie-In


We're probably used, by now, to the relentless capitalist empires of large firms throwing money at big Movie production companies to leisurely paste their logo all over the resulting film. Audi in I Robot and Iron Man, Sony in Terminator Salvation, iPods in.... everything. But while these at least bear a passing relation to the subject matter of the film, I think the forced-marriage of Twilight and Volvo leaves many, many questions unanswered:




The Microsoft Help Centre award for Useless Information


This category is dedicated to all those adverts which tell you absolutely bugger all about their product, under the pretence of being useful. I was tempted to award this to anything with a figure like "75% of Women prefer [Product]" but instead have to award this to any advert which includes the phrase "Up to 100%". There are plenty of these, but the one I've highlighted here is a particularly retarded Head and Shoulders advert which gives you the useful information that it can make you 'up to 100% flake free'. 

This tells you two useful things: That you may be anything UNDER 100% flake free (for example, 0% flake free, which presumably means your head is one enormous flake... yummy), and that it will never make you MORE than 100% flake free (which I imagine would mean it had an area effect which cleared other people's dandruff?). Anyway, video here if you need reminding how easy it is to baffle large groups of people with figures and crap French soundtracks.


The Mel Gibson Award for Barely Concealed Racism

There are a worrying amount of entrants in this category: of note are Sony's poorly thought out PSP ad, and this more obscure advert courtesy of an air-headed Spanish basketball team.

The runaway (pun intended) winner however, is this wonderfully bad-taste piece that appeared from Intel a few years ago, which is definitely not a concealed veil for white supremacy. Original piece on Gizmodo.



The High School Musical Award for most Cringe Inducing Soundtrack

If you're expecting a certain cereal advert for this section, I'd like you to consider that 'cringing' is not the same as 'contemplating murder'. Be patient.

This category though, I think is jointly won by two different stupid pieces of advertising garbage for two different reasons. The first winner is this pathetic attempt to appear 'cool' by one of those oh-so-trendy sofa companies DFS, who saw fit to pick out a bunch of photogenic but otherwise useless actors using a recruiting piece which probably ran "Wanted- Actors to mime horribly to utterly inappropriate soundtrack for Sofa store ad. Must have no appeal whatsoever, and dance moves that would make Michael Jackson cough up blood".



The second winner is something of a no-brainer, and doesn't really need any introduction, except to say that there probably aren't many people left who don't want to cause some amount of bodily harm to this guy.

Anyway- that does it for part 1. More to come in part 2 later this week. Keep your eyes open!

-Neop

Thursday 10 June 2010

Four sites to keep an eye on

Other than this one, of course, here are four sites I heartily recommend for those among you (presumably all of you) who get a kick out of internet funnyisms:

Clients from hell
-Real conversations between graphic designers/web designers etc. and less-than-intelligent clients

F*** My Life
-You surely must've heard of this. Ever had a day you wish'd you hadn't?

Sleep Talkin' Man
-Probably mentioned this one before. Real excerpts from the weirdest sleep-talker in history

xkcd
-Obviously!

Wednesday 2 June 2010

Another one!

We've just had another Jack Wills catalogue delivered. Thanks very much to the previous tenants for the continued entertainment. Mwuhahah!

Tuesday 1 June 2010

If you enjoy these rants

Check out some of Time's rants in this lovely article detailing the worst inventions ever.

Clickez Here.

I've started you arbitrarily in the middle because of the slating it gives Kanye West. Hooray!

-Neop