Wednesday 9 March 2011

The Big Epic Advert Hating Rant Part2- The Sequel

I hesitate to call this 'the conclusion': for there are many putrid and hateful advertisements out there which deserve ridicule, and I would hate to leave anybody out. I got a nice amount of suggestions for this one: thanks for everyone's input. If you sent me something saying "I love this advert!" and it ends up below with the piss taken out of it... well... you've only yourself to blame.

The Graham Norton award for Hideously Disturbing Campness
Some of the less easily concerned among you might find this funny. I would ask you to take a good hard look at your life. Here is a company who presumably pays eleventy billion dollars a year to some sweaty marketing executives who decide the best way to advertise their product is with a character less likeable than Adam Sandler's testicles, sexually harassing his fellow male colleagues. Smooth.




The Spaghetti Bolognese Award for Things Nearly Everybody Loves but which I Hate
The YouTube comments for this next pick would have you think you were about to watch something so artistically masterful that Van Gogh would've immediately hurled himself off a building with self-hatred at never being able to accomplish such greatness. The reality, I find, is a pathetically cute advert doing nothing to sell its intended product and introducing a dog who apparently likes watching your daughter through her bedroom window.
Then again, the average YouTube user has the IQ of a potplant.

The Andrew Lloyd-Webber's Face Award for Creepiest Shit
Hey you! Yeh you! You big shiny member of our target demographic! I think I know what you want. You want some mineral water! You know what encourages drinking mineral water?
Utterly deformed, badly animated, babies.
Yup. I'm thirsty now. I warn you, this is one of those things you wish you could un-see.
The worst thing is it goes ON. You think it's finished but OH NO! We hired this 16 year old college kid to do our animation and by god are we going to get our money's worth.

The Piers Morgan Award for Narcissism
Personally, I think perfume companies should give up on adverts. You can't possibly convey a smell through the television anymore than I can convey punching Beyonce in the face through the internet: which is a real shame because that's the overwhelming desire I'm left with after exposing myself to this nauseating visual depiction of the unwashed singer making camera-love to herself. I say we disfigure her.


The Frankie Boyle Award for Political Incorrectness
I personally find Paris Hilton about as attractive and likeable as a face-full of malaria. But it's ok: because we can mock this disfigured person instead.
Dear God in heaven...

The John Prescott's Anus Award for WORST EVER THING IN THE UNIVERSE EVER.
This really does need no introduction. If you haven't heard of this, well.... I envy you. In fact, if you've not heard of this, don't watch the video below. Lead a happy life, safe in the knowledge you never exposed yourself to the vilest, most sickening, hateful pile of breakfast-cereal based garbage in the history of mankind. Never before has an advert drawn such universal hatred and derision. Never before, and hopefully, never again.



Ah! My brain! My braaain!
Skip to 0:23 if you fancy a disturbing close up of the little twat's crotch =/




So there we have it. The end of part 2. If you enjoyed this, please feel free to spew your ideas at me and we can continue the flaming well into the future.
Ta

-Neop



The Big Epic Advert Hating Rant Part1- A Recap

Once upon a time, I wrote a blog about some adverts I hated, and I said there would be more to come. I lied though, and said it would be 'that week'. Well, here I am around a year later, planning the sequel. In the meanwhile here's the first batch for you, reproduced in full, lest we had forgotten the contenders:
(Open quotes)

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

Friday 4 March 2011

Past midnight, Blogging is go.

Ah. So having been suitably roused by some well-meaning idiocy in our quaint student household, coupled with an overarching desire to not-sleep, I find myself as usual in a slightly pissy mood doing what I do best at this time of the night. And I don't mean clubbing children.

GOD. Children piss me off.

Not all of them mind. Mostly only the ones I see around here. Maybe it's because the more innocuous younglings don't draw any attention to themselves and I can happily ignore them in my daily routine of wake->uni->home->eat->go out [replace 'go out' with 'write blog' as appropriate]. But, living next to a run down council estate you'd be forgiven for thinking that every sub-18 year old is a badly dressed loudmouth with the IQ of a football and the public decency of Lindsay Lohan on ketamine. You can't pass a miserable, sweaty group of the jumped up little bastards without getting insults hurled vaguely at you (or anyone you're standing near) in this sort of pathetic pre-pubescent powerplay that smacks of underdeveloped brain syndrome (medically classified as being "Fucking thick").

You know the sort. 

They potter around in their little 'cru' with their stupid hair and their stupid Adidas trousers tucked into their stupid socks, feeling like entitled little dictators. I don't believe in capital punishment for one minute but I wouldn't hesitate, if I were the parent of one of the swaggering little parasites, before branding 'dickhead' on them with a hot iron. That being said, probably the average parent of one of these respiring little shit-sacks is a fat wobbling mass of cheap lager and nicotine farting their way through benefits only stopping to occasionally piss and moan about rich people. Yes fat-cat businessmen are wankers, but at least they're wankers who own yachts and aren't going to die, writhing in chest pains from a self induced heart attack, at an age where their sole achievement is contaminating the earth with their useless effing offspring.

An aside:

I'd like at this stage to add some caveats: being as we are living in an age of very loud online groups with acronyms instead of names, if more than my customary audience of about 20 readers get hold of this and feel that I've somehow implied that all council estate dwellers are in fact bottom feeding scum, I will be summarily lynched publicly and expensively. As this is the case I'll qualify this by saying firstly that I have nothing against council estates inasmuch as I can't have anything against inanimate areas of habitation: and also that I'm somehow generalising whole groups of the population (perhaps unfairly) into a category of sub-human faeces whom I utterly despise.

This second point holds some value: it's impossible to completely generalise people. You can't even say you hate Nazis because Oscar Schindler was a Nazi and he helped a whole bunch of Jews in a bizarrely altruistic way.

However I take the view that most people clever enough to type in a web address (or at least follow a hyperlink) can also realise this themselves. In this case generalisations are useful and you shouldn't have to worry about the sort of covering-your-own-ass which I am relentlessly pursuing in this very paragraph. In short: I'm picking on the people who deserve to be picked on. If you're not a stupid little cock, and your parents aren't blundering arseholes, then I'm not aiming my comments at you and please don't take offence; even if you live/lived on a council estate. By virtue of the fact you're reading this you're a completely different league of human being.
These guys obviously agree with me. You can tell because they have sunglasses on.

To resume, then.

I haven't been alive long enough to make the kind of conceited comment that this wave of human-shaped viruses is somehow a product of the current times/government/digital revolution/water fluoridation. I imagine a large majority of the older populace does just this on a regular basis. My main question though, is why does there seem to be such a divide? This is all based on the microcosm of society that I have been exposed to in my short 21 years but you rarely find people that sit in the middle of laddish-thug and what I'd call a normal person. It's an honest question and I'd be happy for some sociologist to explain to me and then give me a firm telling-off for cheapening their science by blogging about it.

Until they eradicate the stupid gene though, we're stuck with them. We even have the word 'Chav' to encapsulate the whole nauseating class into one succinct syllable for easy conversation. We as a society have clearly hunkered down and just gotten used to the fact that they exist and aren't going anywhere except possibly the old-folks home to steal things and piss on the walls. They're going to keep yelling that bystanders are gay, keep smoking from the ripe old age of twelve, keep knocking back White Lightening like it's not fermented Demon-piss, and keep getting each other knocked up so that their kind can continue to get on everyone's tits for generations to come.

And there's nothing you can do about it. Goodnight.

-Neop