I don’t mean like scams or anything like that. I mean what’s the ad that has done the worst job as an advertisement? Instead of making you want to buy the product you wanted to avoid it.
There was an ad recently on UK TV for some shitty food delivery company,and had a constant loud doorbell sound.
I emailed the TV channel and said myself and everyone I know have stopped watching their channel because the advert was so obnoxiously irritating.
They emailed back a month later and said they’d asked the advertiser to redo the advert due to multiple complaints
We can make a difference if we make an effort!
Gillette had an advertisement and it was a bunch of different hot men lined up and a woman fondling their bodies, evaluating what trimming style she found most sexually appealing. They were encouraging you to buy their trimming products.
I just thought, let’s flip it around. There’s a bunch of busty and tight women in swimsuits, and a man comes and lustfully fondles their bodies, and then they’re telling you to buy makeup.
Edit. I should add that this was what made me decide to just stop buying their products. It was just one commercial, and I’m not making a big whoopee about it, but it motivated me to make a change and there’s no reason to go back. I pretty much realized through this that I don’t need any of their products that I formerly used, and I can shave myself for pennies versus what I used to pay them for disposable blades.
I just thought, let’s flip it around.
This is how you best determine the presence of gender bigotry.
Take the genders in contention, and swap them. If the skit or saying or phrase or whatever no longer “reads” exactly the same as it did before, then the “inoffensive” version is nothing more than gender bigotry being aggressively whitewashed.
Example: “kill all men” ↔ “kill all women”. Do both sides read the same? Are both sides taken to be “equally offensive” by most of society? No? Congrats, you have correctly identified the left hand side - frequently lobbed about by a majority of female supremacists as “a joke” - as being a whitewashed example of gender bigotry. And mercy upon the soul of anyone who utters the right-hand version, such is the severity of how offensive society sees it as.
I can shave myself for pennies versus what I used to pay them for disposable blades.
Safety razor, FTW. Blades are cheap, I can shave myself daily for five years for the same price as a 16-pack of replaceable Gillette razor heads that barely last me six months with only thrice-weekly use. And I have a straightedge for dealing with neck hairs during the winter when I let my beard grow out, works wonders in giving me a clean edge to my beardline. If I take care of it well, I could pass that straightedge down to one of my grandnephews in near-mint condition.
All the anti-smoking ads. I don’t support smoking, but the anti-smoking ads are so dramatic I’m surprised they’re allowed by the Geneva Convention on psychological warfare.
And the real world affect of those ads were they just reminded smokers they hadn’t had a smoke in a while and they’d go light up.
Now Im reminded of he Thai Insurance ad
Crazy frog. Advertising what, a ringtone? I stopped watching television and never really started again.
It was an election poster. The slogan (translated into English) was “Forbid Crime!”
So… make crime a criminal offense?
Yea. I’m still thinking whether or not we should actually do that…
A few years ago, Skittles had this ad with a dancing elf looking dude. I used to love Skittles, dentist will back that up, but i just couldn’t support that kinda nonsense.
#2 would be those Quiznos ads… I wouldn’t eat there anyway, but the deep-fried hamster looking thing isn’t going to convince me.
Excuse me, but are you referring to…
BERRIES AND CREAM?!?
The Quiznos ad was a reference to a popular Flash video from back then. It made sense if you were online a lot, but I can only imagine how off-putting it was without proper context.
Which one?! I remember eBaums World, Newgrounds, and whatever Digg was recommending, but I must have missed that one.
Spongmonkeys. It was posted on Rathergood.com way back. Knowyourmeme entry if you want to see more about it.
Skittles also had that add with skittles pox. That triggered my phobia (not sure how to spell it)
On the other end, my favorite Skittles commercial:
the deep-fried hamster looking thing
They were chinchillas. Why? No clue.
Every grammarly as that has the English mistake in it.
So, all of them.
Any ad that runs on youtube. Literally. All of them. You have paid for the privilege of ruining my enjoyment of whatever I was trying to see. Eff you and the product you rode in on.
Any of the ads that have started autoplaying when I turn on my FireTV Cube. It pisses me of so much I’m actively avoiding the shows and movies they’re promoting.
Turn off the auto play video option in your settings. It used to be off by default and got turned on in a recent update.
You are my hero, I looked for something like that but hadn’t found it. Thank you!
I feel like any ad you remember isn’t the worst.
The point of ads is to entice you to buy sonething. Theres a higher chance of me buying something I dont remember the ad for than one that I make a point to avoid because of how terrible the ad for it was.
You got it! Aside from anything seriously offensive, these are ALL better ads than the ones we’ve completely forgotten about.
The Quiznos ad with the talking chinchillas.
Most people didn’t even know what those things were. I heard them being called weasels and rats and deep-fried hamsters and even beavers.
But, no. Photos of chinchillas, with talking human mouths superimposed. Ended up being the most fingernails-on-a-chalkboard commercial I have ever come across. Sure, there have been worse commercials in terms of raw stinkers or stupidity, but this one was by far the most repellant one I have ever personally experienced.
They’re called spongmonkeys and I’m pretty sure they’re modified tarsiers.
An ad for Descovy, an HIV prophylactic, that they kept playing in Portland in 2020. You gotta step up… PReP UP!! It featured this super creepy dude who I guess was supposed to be gay and kept making eye contact with the camera. I felt like I was being stalked.
HEADON
there was an old ad with a kid sitting on a dock fishing, eating a bologna sandwich and singing “my bologna has a first name, its o-s-c-a-r. my bologna has a second name its m-a-y-e-r”…
nothing wrong with the commercial except it turned out to be an ear worm that would live in my head FOREVER. my brain trots it out at least once a month for no good reason. usually more.
ive never bought bologna and i’m low key mad at Oscar Mayer so maybe this counts?
i disliked an ad in tv before 2000 and decided to not buy the deodorant stick then because of that. like 10 to 15 years later i accidently bought the product- long forgotten that this was the one with that bad ad and actually liked the product and bought it regulary for some time (then remembering how bad that ad was, but okay the product was good actually). that was until they decided to put more plastics into packaging as well as less content into it (same price for package) just to make it more costly for me thus more profitable for them, whilst producing more litter and destroying more resources just for profit. The higher price would not have been too bad, but creating more litter for more profit made me then search a better product. then found a bio product with all natural contents, very few plastic packaging and even less pricy.
That ad made me NOT buy it. So that was the worst ad i’ve ever seen in two ways: it reduced my willingness to buy their product to far below zero lasting for a decade and i did not even want to try the product that i later found to be actually good, so worst case for the vendor AND the customer.
However that product later also had the “best” Price raise (by less content) for me ever as that made me search and find the then newly existing even better and more natural, less pricy product of their competitor.
Maybe good CEOs are rare.
Literally any ad. I hate advertising in all forms and it does nothing but piss me off. If your ad is intrusive enough, I’ll remember it well enough to never buy your product.
