So, it's the Christmas adverts 2017. Christmas isn't Christmas without your very own Christmas hashtag is it? I mean, a hashtag really is the true meaning of Christmas and if your advert doesn't have one you're the equivalent of one of those fictional councils that has banned Christmas.

I've copied below the titles that the various brands and companies came up with themselves and while you can see more keyword stuffing than a Christmas turkey, you'll probably notice that most have their very own Christmas Hashtag. "Hashtag Aww".

You know what else Christmas is all about? Value. Like politicians addicted to promising to make the lives of 'hardworking families' slightly less shit than last year, brands have become utterly obsessed with offering 'value', by which they mean 'cheap', by which they mean 'shit'.

That's something references in plenty of these Christmas adverts below - from the V-flicking of Lidl to the orgy of badness seen in the advert for peacocks, which is responsible for a whole new alphabet to categorise just how far down the celebrity rung the ad's stars are.

Compare these adverts to the Christmas adverts of a few years ago and the lack of celebrities is startling, as if the Brexit-hungry population might associate people who are not Norms as elite, and therefore hate them. In the place? Black, asian and gay people by the bucketload, thereby replacing celebrities as the hate-filled lightning rod for fruitcakes, saddos and bastards.

But usually it's the same old stuff: Christmas lights, tables groaning under platters, snow, CGI animals and multicultural parties in a non-threatening commuter town.

They're not all bad. Granted some of them made me bleed from various orifices, but it's just about possible to watch most of these adverts without devolving into a pile of fats and proteins.

Vote for your favourite, tell me about your most-hated - or simply go and hurl a brick through the window of a drive-thru. Whatever gets you through the festive period basically.

Me? I'm off to Soho with a my boomstick and achainsaw attached to the bloody stump where my arm used to be. I wish you a Groovy Christmas!

Christmas advert 2017

John Lewis Christmas Advert - #MozTheMonster

They say: Joe befriends a noisy Monster under his bed but the two have so much fun together that he can't get to sleep, leaving him tired by day. For Christmas Joe receives a gift to help him finally get a good night’s sleep.

I say: I'm as immune to the supposed charms of anthropomorphised Christmas CGI so beloved of John Lewis as they are to my complaining about them. Suffice it to say that they needed to explain their advert, which either suggests an overcomplicated advert or a very stupid target audience.

Turkey, Every Which Way | Tesco Christmas Advert

They say: Every family has a different turkey tale… However you cook yours - from barbecuing to basting - we’ve got a turkey for you.

The hashtag for this Tesco Christmas advert is, of course, #EveryonesWelcome. "Fuck that," said the internet in response, "the Muslamics aren't fucking welcome!" Tidings of comfort and joy and all that, eh?

So, two things here: I actually laughed out loud at the terse "Have you been basting it, Caroline?" that rings so true of Christmas Day tension exchanges.

Also I like it because it features a gay couple, black people and an Asian family celebrating Christmas. And if you have a problem with that I have a Christmas message for you: fuck you, you're a cunt.

Best Christmas Ever | Asda Christmas Advert 2017 – Full Version

They say: Step inside the Asda Christmas Imaginarium to discover the magic behind everything we’ve created, so you can have the #BestChristmasEver

I Say: I like the look of this and the setting, Manchester's beautiful Victoria Baths. There's almost a bit of a Wes Anderson feel to bits of it. The idea is quite nice, featuring plenty of Borrower-style creatures making all of Asda's foodstuffs, though you get the feeling it would be rather more honest if it features a load of Polish agricultural workers and various non-whites working for $3 a day.

Sainsbury's OFFICIAL Christmas Advert 2017 #everybitofChristmas

They say: The 2017 Sainsbury's Christmas advert squeezes every bit of Christmas into a wonderfully fun and festive song, sung by people all over Britain.

I say: I'm afraid I couldn't watch this advert for more than five or six seconds, though I did have enough time to glean that Sainsbury's is sticking to its cretinous food dancing theme, a running background chatter only slightly less appalling and moronic that Donald Trump's Twitter account.

Aldi Christmas Advert ft. Kevin The Carrot 2017

They say: Kevin the Carrot is back this Christmas and he’s met someone special. Join him in his adventure across the dinner table and see all of the delicious festive food we have on offer this year.

I say: I guess if you throw some snow and a groaning table-full of festive fare into a £5m ad campaign it doesn't really matter what else you do, so once again we have a carrot in peril from Aldi. I hope he gets grated or pureed - and his green tops turned into pesto -before next Christmas.

Marks & Spencer Christmas TV Ad 2017 | Paddington & The Christmas Visitor #LoveTheBear

They say: We can now reveal our Christmas advert - the tale of true Christmas spirit - with our favourite Paddington Bear

I say: There's more cash been spunked on this than fake snow and none of it really aligns in any way with Marksies. Still, it's hitting M&S customers - moneyed people frightened by change - right in the demographics.

Amazon Christmas Advert 2017 - 'Give' 60"

They say: See what happens when hundreds of Amazon boxes go on a magical journey, to send a smile this Christmas all whilst singing Roger Hodgson's anthem “Give a Little Bit.”

I say: Top-notch soundtrack, though needless to say it's completely ruined by non-singing people singing it, as is the fashion these days. And if those parcels knew they'd be slung over your back gate and left out in the rain they wouldn't be quite so chuffed.

Christmas List - Morrisons Christmas Advert 2017

They say: Our Christmas adverts tell the story of three families and highlight the skills of our foodmakers and shopkeepers.

I say: I can't find it in my heart to dislike Morrisons, who always seem to at least pay lip service to some of the more wholesome messages of Christmas - bonus points for the continuing voiceovers of Paul Copley too. If you want to be in a bad mood for a month take a look at the comments on this ad, which has the gall to feature a person who is Not White.

Very.co.uk Christmas Advert 2017 - Get More Out of Giving

They say: Follow the story of our big-hearted little girl as she spreads festive cheer by giving pink-wrapped gifts. Our heroine is accompanied by Ulfie, her much-loved toy wolf.

I Say: What happens if you cross The Snowman with The Box Of Delights - and add a touch of Stranger Things? This ad for Very.co.uk.

Bring Merry Back - House of Fraser Christmas Advert 2017

They say: this year, we’re recapturing that Christmas magic in our new advert with a much-needed trip down memory lane. Complete with paper chains, stick-on Santa beards and some quality family time, watch as two sisters fall back into their younger selves, reminded of the joy that Christmas can bring.

I say: House Of Fraser tracks down the very last Christmas song left unraped by advertising (though it's not a very good one) and shows us the lifetimes of two sisters through a Christmas filter.

Boots Christmas | TV Advert 2017 | #ShowThemYouKnowThem

They say: This Christmas, it’s all about the thought. It’s about old memories and the new ones you’re yet to make. It’s about the secrets you’ve shared and the laughs you won’t forget. Most of all, it’s about finding the perfect gift to really show them you know them.

I say: Ooh, two sisters. This is awkward. Like when you turn up to a party and you're wearing the same dress as That Woman You Hate. Especially when you're a man. But I can never find it in my heart to dislike Boots adverts, which at least try to get somewhere close to depictions of real life in their Christmas adverts. Great soundtrack too.

TK Maxx ‘A White Christmas’ Advert 2017

They say: Yes, we’re actually doing this. You can get a White Christmas. To your door. For absolutely nothing.

I say: A lorry turning up to ejaculate snow all over your house is so on-brand for TK Maxx it's ridiculous.

Waitrose Christmas TV Ad 2017 | #ChristmasTogether

Christmas is the perfect time of year to gather round and enjoy delicious food but, most importantly, to spend #ChristmasTogether

I say: The awful silence, the looks heavy with significance, the open hostility. Are the people snowed in at the Tan Hill Inn - Britain's highest pub - going to... kill their rescuers?

Argos Christmas TV ad 2017 - #ReadyForTakeOff

They say: Our Christmas ad is #ReadyForTakeOff! Watch our elf race through the snow to make sure no-one is disappointed this festive season.

I say: Argos warehouse workers get paid £7.71 at the time of writing - that's 21p per hour more than the minimum wage. And it's that extra half-bob that ensures Argos workers go that extra mile to deliver a toy robot dog to your house on Christmas Eve.

Creating Value in Every Moment - Matalan Christmas Advert 2017

They say: Christmas – it’s magical, fun and super-busy all at the same time! Find the value in every festive moment with us… #MatalanMoment
*An on-set vet was present to supervise Dodger the dog for the filming of our advert.

I say: 'Value' is a much abused word in this day and age - it should mean the worth, the desirability or merit we place in something. Instead it's usually a euphemism for cheap and the drive for 'value' has led to a race to the bottom in this country. Result? Cheap, tacky crap and cheap, bad food. I'll let you decide which definition of Matalan is going for here and which you most associate with the brand.

Beautifully Normal - Lidl's Global Christmas Advert

They say: Clichés don't make Christmas, it's the moments that do.

What I say: A nice effort at subverting the Christmas schmaltz and spitting in the face of the rest of the pack but have you heard this fucking music? Nothing says Christmas like a vocoder-ed R'n'B semi-rap in a transatlantic accent eh?

Barbour Christmas Ad 2017 - The Snowman and The Snowdog

They say:This #BarbourChristmas, the story of The Snowman and The Snowdog continues with the next chapter in their story. When snow starts to fall on Christmas Eve, magic can happen...

I say: Who could find it in their heart to hate something that references something so beautiful, British-ly festive? And I wouldn't begrudge Raymond Briggs a nice little Christmas windfall. Still, hijacking The Snowman with advertising is rather like tattooing SKY BET across David Attenborough's face.

Sky Cinema Christmas Advert 2017

They say: Our Christmas adverts tell the story of three families and highlight the skills of our foodmakers and shopkeepers.

I say: I hate Sky. I hate the way they monopolise sport and films, I hate the associations with The Sun and the Murdochs and I hate the way they charge you so much for something and then stick adverts in the middle. And I hate the fucking Sound Of Music.

The tagline to this ad - nothing brings people together like a movie at Christmas always reminds me of a brilliant retort to a similar claim in an advert of yesteryear.

"Nothing gets a party started like Ferrero Rocher," went the ad.

"Mmm, ecstasy does," replied my chum to many chortles.

#YouShall Find Your Fairytale Christmas | Debenhams Christmas TV Ad 2017

They say: Our Debenhams Christmas TV advert 2017 is revealed...will they find their fairytale Christmas? #YouShall

I say: Debenhams seems destined to be always the bridesmaid and never the bride when it comes to Christmas adverts. In fact it's not even the bridesmaid - it's the woman from university who was somehow part of the friendship group even though she never fitted in and was invited only on sufferance. However lots of racists have been whining about it on the basis that there's a mixed-race couple in it (and yes that is Ewan McGregor up a ladder) so it gets a pass from me.

Vodafone Christmas Love Story. Part 1: Love on the Platform

They say: There’s magic in the air when Martin meets a young lady who’s using her Vodafone Video pass to stream It’s a Wonderful Life, on the way home for Christmas. Watch as he hilariously bundles from a Jimmy Stewart impression to an ill-advised sermon on data usage in part one of our Christmas love story.

I say: Love On The Platform sounds like a DVD by Ben Dover, a grimy Carry On film of a man with a back catalogue of back-alley sex compilations: car-parks in Scunthorpe; garages in Poole; sewage works in Luton and the like.

Martin Freeman is still miles away from overexposure and there's something reassuring about his everyman awkwardness but an ad campaign for a telecommunications company - somewhere between Inland Revenue and dentists on my list of 'people I like having appointments with' - might test it sorely.

Littlewoods Christmas 40" Advert 2017 - Own it!

They say: Step into December with Littlewoods this year as we help you own every magical Christmas moment you have planned in your calendar. From putting up festive Santa decorations with your loved ones, to making sure you can create and capture your perfect Christmas Day filled with love and perfect gifts, we’ll help you own every moment - with a bit of extra sparkle and glitter.

I say: As a tagline 'own it' seems a bit rich from Littlewoods, whose USP seems to be that you don't really own anything for several months, or even years, after you start paying for it. Putting Christmas on tick may not be particularly festive but it seems fairly par for the course in 2017. If that golf course is about to go bankrupt, anyway.

Geoffrey the Part Time Reindeer Toys R Us UK 2017

They say: Once upon a time, there was a giraffe called Geoffrey who ran a beautiful Toys 'R' Us store. It was Christmas Eve and Geoffrey was waiting for someone very special.

I say: If I were Toys R Us I'd just show the same faded, fuzzy advert from the 80s rather than this halfway 'have-your-ckae-and-eat-it' house that drags Geoffrey into a charmless CGI Pixar update, like a colourised Laurel & Hardy film.

Merry Techmas | LG | Currys PC World

They say: At Currys PC world, our colleagues try out our products to give you the best advice. Looking to upgrade your TV this Christmas? The LG OLED 4k ready HD TV with Perfect Black and Perfect Colour gives outstanding picture quality.

I say: Merry Techmas everyone! A heartwarming tale of how a family laughs at the idea of sitting around a fire having a conversation with one another and instead offers a hi-tech television with 'perfect black'. Makes the heart positively melt, like a Nazi's face in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

JD TV AD 2017: Undisputed Christmas

They say: Back and better than ever, have yourself an Undisputed Christmas this year, with our action packed TV Ad, featuring exclusives from Nike, adidas, The North Face, Ellesse, Under Armour and many more.

I say: Nothing says Christmas more than a bunch of happy slapping youths throwing punches at your grid.

TalkTalk: This is Christmas

They say: Here it is, our 2017 Christmas ad. Whether you're after an Oscar for your 'I *really* love my new socks' performance or cosying down in front of the telly, our TalkTalk family have shown us just how much being connected to loved ones matters.

I say: Apparently this is TalkTalk's Christmas advert but every time I catch in on telly I've been convinced it's the latest instalment of THIS IS ENGLAND.

Carrot Stick | Christmas | Brand | TV Ad | McDonald's UK>

They say: McDonald's 2017 Christmas ad is here. Time for everyone to get #ReindeerReady

I say: The idea that any McDonald's outlet has anything approaching raw, unadulterated vegetables on it premises just seems laughable. And the idea of A Christmas McDonald's advert seems as dissonant as replacing communion wine with a Jaegerbomb.

Peacocks Christmas Advert 2017 | #XMASFACTOR

Reader comment says: Oh my god honey G Is my idol I am now training to be her and am scheduled for plastic surgery in 3 days

I say: A chemical toilet of an advert featuring X-Factor rejects who would have been burned at the stake 300 years ago.

Gogglebox Meets Coca-Cola's “Holidays Are Coming” 2017

They say: See the families of Channel 4's Gogglebox reacting to Coca-Cola's iconic Holidays Are Coming ad, that has been gracing the nation’s screens for 22 years!

I say: I love Gogglebox and what works is that the people are honest, genuine and generally likeable. All of which is, of course, destroyed by throwing them into an advert and paying them to overreact to the approach of a truck carrying sugary drinks. Like co-opting a benevolent old man who gives you presents at Christmas into a Coke-wielding American.

Vote for your favourite Christmas adverts 2017

Favourites? You tell me. I'll take is as read the answer 'none of the above' will feature.

Christmas adverts of old

Refresh your memories of the best and worst Christmas adverts – sob pitifully at advertising or enrage yourself to vein-throbbing standards – of previous years.

Best and Worst Xmas Ads of 2016

Best and Worst Xmas Ads of 2015

Best and Worst Xmas Ads of 2014

Best and Worst Xmas Ads of 2013

Best and Worst Xmas Ads of 2012

Best and Worst Xmas Ads of 2011

The post Best and Worst Christmas Adverts 2017 appeared first on AdTurds.

Is it that time again. For the bad things? You know, the worst adverts of 2017? The things that have been making your angry, upset, irritated or perhaps even clinically insane over the course of the year? I must say, 12 months ago I was struggling for things to say. Now, as I find myself casting an eye withered by intense hatred over what advertising has served up over the last 12 months, I feel reborn. Just like America, where it's morning again. If that morning looks like a coming fascist apocalypse.

Back over in Blighty it's not been much cheerier, but luckily we're going to leave the European soon and all our problems will be solved. The economy will rebounce, there'll be a million more houses once the Eurocrats stop us using straight bananas for bricks and there will be no further Muslim families in adverts (thanks for nothing, Gordon Brown!).

And on the telly? No comfort there. Between the meat-grinder aesthetics of box-set killathons, The Handmaid's Tale and This Fucking Morning there's precious little to lift spirits. And sandwiched in between like James Corden wrapped up in, well, two more James Cordens the adverts are waiting for us.

They get you while you're weak you know. Just when you're reeling from Trump and nuclear war and the housing crisis and Philip Schofield they hit with concentrated messages of smiling, happy, thin people and wormtongue in your ear that if only you buy their shit you can be just like them on the telly.

Whisper, whisper. A holiday, a car, a burger.The unfettered delights of broadband from a slightly different supplier. And checking your FUCKING. CREDIT. HISTORY. They lie in wait for us like a Victorian butcher's assistant awaiting a lady of the night in the fog-shrouded east end (oh, and let's take it as read I despise James Corden, any price-comparison websites, betting websites, virtually anything for banks and acknowledge the sheer ineptitude of most daytime things for hoovers, gardening kneepads and meals-on-wheels).

And so you buy something and, fractionally, momentarily feel a little bit better. And then it's onto the drudgery of the fifth nightly episode of Coronation Street. So I urge you: don't see adverts as harmless or even a bit of a laugh.

Think of them as evil; as obviously evil as Rebekah Vardy. And steel yourself for what's ahead, for it's the time of year when I choose the absolute nadir. Brace yourselves: it's the worst adverts of 2017.

Read: worst adverts of 2017

Sainsbury's food dancing advert

Want to know what it looks like to spend bazillions of quids on a campaign in which no-one has the slightest faith? Look no further than the Sansbury's Food Dancing adverts, which features a rainbow vision of Britain where everyone prances about while cooking.

It's like a Brian Eno cut-up technique where a bunch of creatives have inexpertly welded together a bunch of aspirational and on-brand concepts and like a conceptual Human Caterpillar (please don't Google that if you don't know what it means) and just as grisly.

All so somewhere a handful of people will upload their videos to Youtube, Facebook, Snapchat or Instagram with the hashtag #FoodDancing. And somewhere in London some people will make a note of this and make a PowerPoint then show it to someone who works at Sainsbury's who, in turn, will hand over a cheque for three million pounds.

• Read the original: Sainsbury's food dancing advert

Tui Ain't Nobody advert

You know you almost have to admire this advert for Tui, a thing that used to be called Thomson that has been rationalised into a noise that seems designed to represent gross physical nausea, given the reactions to this spot.

I pondered not even doing a poll this year, as it's quite clear to me that Tui is going to sweep away everything in its path like a physical tide of comical ineptitude worse than an Apprentice candidate laced with enough chemical sludge to make everyone evacuate every bodily receptacle at once.

Clearly one of the worst adverts of 2017; clearly one of the most dreadful thing to take place within our solar system since the Kuiper Belt fiddled a load of OAPs out of their war pensions.

• Read the original: Tui advert

Clearscore advert

People actually complained when I ran through this advert with a spit before roasting it unceremoniously on top of a Bonfire of James Corden autobiographies. Because it has animals it.

Look, I like animals. I like them so much I give money to the RSPCA, RSPB, WWF and a variety of wildlife and environmental charities and pressure groups. That's what liking animals means, not gawping at the fucking things and making that 'aww' noise when you see a CGI one on the telly before polishing off another cow-leg sandwich.

So, frankly, fuck adverts that use non-existent animals as a means to barter entrance into your subconscious. As for you, if you're one of the people who liked teh funnay animals, go and put a bird feeder up in your back garden.

• Read the original: Clearscore advert

Virgin Trains advert

"Speedcore or Spandau?" Virgin asked us.

"Hobnail boot or baseball bat?" replied the world.

Like Piers Morgan entering your bedroom, dousing you with a bucket of cold water and dragging his fingernails down a blackboard just as you near orgasm.

• Read the original: Virgin Trains advert

Windows rapping teacher advert

A good grief. Tony, what have you done. Though I might decry bigotry and jingoism in all its forms I have to admit to a kernel of annoyance when American adverts are beamed, unchanged, into our upright, steadfast and proudly parochial British living rooms. We just can't deal with such an earnest lack of irony and if there's anything Tony lacks - apart from the name of a good hairdresser and any flow whatsoever - it's irony. Tony got in touch on Twitter and seems like a good guy, but by God he really is responsible for one of the worst adverts I've ever seen.

• Read the original: Windows rapping teacher advert

McDonald's dead Dad advert

I dislike McDonald's for many reasons, but I never thought they would add 'exploiting bereaved children in order to sell hamburgers' to that list.

Of course, a diet high in sugars, fat and salt is probably more likely to lead to obesity, heart disease and diabetes so perhaps it's no surprise that Dad popped his clogs before his son was in long trousers.

• Read the original: McDonald's dead Dad advert

Skeletor Moneysupermarket adverts

Like a shark, price-comparison site adverts have to keep moving forward to stay alive. Well, if that shark was a total cunt anyway. Every now and again a Go Compare or a Moneysupermarket stumbles across a winning formula - a genuinely amusing, original or dissonant advert that catches the eyes and actually entertains for the first 600 or so times you see it. But there's always a regression to the mean that ensure the next one up will be as depressingly banal as usual.

Perhaps there's simply no point in making the effort in this peculiar niche of advertising where your product is literally exactly the same as your three main rivals. If shouting the loudest and longest is the mark of success I guess we should be surprised there's as much effort as there is in these crushingly tossed-off, will-this-do 'ironic thing from your childhood' bowel movements casually shat out by agencies who know they're onto a good thing.

• Read the original: Skeletor adverts

McDonald's McCafe advert

Yes it's McDonald's again - did I tell you I don't like them? - with this advert that's half-good. Unfortunately the rest of it is pure, concentrated evil - as bad as the stuff that seeps out of the pages of the Dailies Mail and Express every day and poison the brain, heart and any other major organs of anyone who is exposed for long enough.

This point-and-laugh exercise is a metaphor for Britain in 2017, where anything different, anything fancy, anything highbrow or anything that attempts to lift itself out of the Shit Life Syndrome bog much of England is right now can be ridiculed just because it's not itself shit.

Imagine Nigel Farage in his stupid upmarket Del Boy coat smoking a fag, braying that posh-boy laugh and slurping a cup of McCafe coffee - it's startling easy to - and you'll never look at it in the same way again.

• Read the original: McDonald's McCafe advert

Nationwide 'share a sunrise' advert

Meet Toby and Laurie. On second thoughts, don't.

TalkTalk advert

It's actually called This Is Christmas. Shane Meadows meets Googlebox - somehow conspiring to advertise broadband with a soundtrack of 'real people' singing. Ghastly.

Vote: worst adverts of 2017

Obviously if you've voting on the worst adverts of 2017 it's going to be Tui. But I'll be keeping a close eye on second and third place in the battle to find the worst adverts of 2017...

The post The Worst Adverts of 2017: Vote appeared first on AdTurds.

Hundreds of votes later and it's not even close: you picked the Tui advert as the nadir of the worst adverts of 2017 by a landslide so great the only comparable geological metaphor would include Africa simply sliding into the sea like one of the those walruses on The Blue Planet II spotting an approaching polar bear and slithering off its icy perch.

To me the Tui advert is simply a bad advert - it reeks of undeserved smugness, entitlement and there's more than a whiff of the Brits Abroad stereotype of us lot swanning around the world expecting the natives to bow and scrape as if we still own a third of it.

And the execution is somehow... off. It's cringe-inducing not only because it's just so pleased with itself, but also because there's something not quite right about it, like watching a stand-up comedian die a death on stage. So simply a bad advert then - until you get to the soundtrack.

I've written at length on how advertising sucks up everything you like and turns it into something you hate, with the sole purpose of making you remember how something you loved became something you hate. Memorable, see? An so it goes with this rendition of Chaka Khan's Ain't Nobody.

But it's not just a bad version of a song people tend to like. Bound up in its breathy, winsome delivery is a self-satisfaction so antagonising it couldn't be worse if Toby Young kept flicking your ear and mouthing his tiresome cunting-for-money controversies while you're trying to reach orgasm.

What is this style of singing, popularised by Kate Nash and Lily Allen? A posh-not-posh, twat-next-door timbre of Brit-school banality. Is its lightweight, trilly delivery supposed to evoke some sort of relatability? Like 'we know this sounds awful but you could probably sound like this too'? A sort of non-threatening lilt for people who might be intimidated by actually good singing?

Whatever it is I want no more of it. In the Tui advert it's reached its apotheosis. In this advert Tui has kicked us in the the Ts, crossed our eyes and put a U (for unbearable) in the middle.

Now fuck off, Tui. You are officially the worst advert of 2017.

The post The Tui Advert IS The Worst Advert of 2017 appeared first on AdTurds.

Did you miss me? I've had to take something of a sabbatical from the adverts. In fact I've been receiving daily blood transfusions in an effort to rid me of the concentrated evil that's built up in my body from almost a decade of watching pure, unfiltered adverts. It's 1000 times purer and stronger than the stuff you get in your living room and when they opened me up there was the unmistakable sound of that tinkly piano riff from the Tui advert and a pulsating tumour with the face of Gio Compario.

As a result I'm still on a long road back to full fitness and can only subject myself to tiny doses of advertising. So I'm going to let you choose the current worst advert of the month, based on intel received from Facebook, Twitter and the good (meaning bad) people of the Suggest An AdTurd community.

But be careful. Only experts should watch more than a few advert in one go. Overdo it and you risk devolving into a bubbling, stinking mess of the proteins than probably go in chicken Mcnuggets.

Apple iPad Pro advert

You might question why anyone would ever think that a hateful, precocious child in your advert is going to connect with people. Then you realise that everyone who made and signed off this advert works in advertising or tech. Although I was given pause for thought when I recognised various bits of Brooklyn from my honeymoon there, which I guess makes me a big twat too. Ho hum.

Voices Nationwide Flo and Joan advert

People are literally begging me to make this advert stop, like when you see women in films who are so desperate to save their children they offer their bodies to Nazi soldiers or evil supervillains. Flo and Joan are probably lovely people and in the right place - a Radio 4 comedy programme in that slot where I'm Sorry I Haven't A Clue and Just A Minute usually reside - or some godawful hipster cafe I never have to visit - I have no problem with them.

But stick anything on television again and again - even Salma Hayek pouting or Tom Baker laughing or the Blake's 7 theme tune and it's going to become hateful very quickly. And if your song about a house that's so twee it makes people pull the same face as when they bite on a lime segment then expect hatred so strong it rivals Piers Morgan's utter hatred of himself for being a snivelling little cunt.

Go Compare Monster Bill advert

In search of new ways to annoy you, Go Compare has decided to mine the 'deliberately awful acting' seam to good effect here. Over 2 million people have watched this on Youtube. Two million. That's one in thirty people who have been taken over by lookalikes that hatched from a pod. And it is your duty to destroy them.

Also, is it just me or is the 'random people turning up in your house at the same time' thing suggestive of a porn film set-up? Looks like Gio is going to be comparing more than just home insurance prices with these two lovelies...

First Choice advert - The Turners Go Mahoosive

Who still says mahoosive? Even provincial commercial breakfast radio DJs are too embarrassed to say that shit these days. And as for the Turners' rap - how many free holidays did they get for it to be worth all this? And what an incredible way to absolutely trash your own brand. Could this look any more cheap?

Right, look. I'm going to say something now and you need to bear with me. This mixed-race couple thing. I'm a bit uncomfortable with it. Hang on, hear me out. Mixed-race couples are everywhere where I live - and that's not a good or a bad thing, it's simply a thing as far as I'm concerned. I can't think of a friend of mine who is not white who is not in a mixed-race partnership. Great.

If you have a problem with that you're a racist, basically and I want no part of it. And if you think it's 'political correctness gone mad', well I don't agree with that either. What's 'mad' about showing people behaving exactly as they do in the real world?

But on this First Choice it's like you can see the workings out, the base code behind it. You need a family rapping, but an all-white family rapping? Bit awkward. An all-black family rapping? Nice spot of cultural stereotyping. Like Goldilocks, someone has found this racial mix - and I don't believe for a second its a coincidence - juuuuust right. And the thought of that level of racial card-shuffling makes me cringe.

But, one a much more basic level, this is simply a crashingly devastating advert of awfulness.

Fiftylife Over 50s Life Insurance

It's hard to pinpoint what's the cause of the final product here, which is so hilariously bad you're constantly waiting for the punchline. Is the script, direction or acting most at fault here? I'm not sure but I'd challenge anyone to successfully pivot from a cheery 'Mum loved it here' to a solemn 'her death was such a shock'.

This actress clearly thinks so as she hasn't really bothered to change her delivery at all between the two lines. Her reading of that latter line suggests this was as shocking and emotionally devastating as the milkman delivering two pints instead of one last Tuesday.

Luckily Dad joins in with a reading of 'it hasn't been easy' suggesting he's bringing to mind a particularly tricky spot of grouting he's been tied up with. And is there a right way to broach the cost of your own mother's funeral? Perhaps, but reserving the manner you'd normally adopt for feigning interest in someone boasting about their double glazing probably isn't ideal.

The following discussion of the financial intricacies of life insurance makes it clear no-one intends to make any further effort to make this ad in any way naturalistic, a sense only heightened by a shot of the not-grieving father and daughter standing about an inch away from one another.

Oh, Fiftylife advert people. Your ad makes Johnny Depp and Amber Heard's Australian dog immigration apology look like Schindler's List.

• There are two versions for some reason. Why not see if you can figure out which is worse.

Vote for your most hated advert

But choose wisely, for you can only choose one. And no you can't choose another one!

The post Choose February’s Worst Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

Recently, while out on manoeuvres, I had a close escape. Settling down to watch The Post (sentimental tripe) at my local cinehouse I was subjected to not one, but two McDonald's adverts. Clearly my enemies had found me and taken great delight into showing two adverts about the popular burger chain's Type II Edible Matter Products.

The first I have talked about before - the McDonald's McCafe advert - but there is a new iteration. This time, rather than poking fun at coffee houses themselves it's those pesky young people with beards and knowledge who are getting it in the neck.

As I have said before I'm ambivalent about coffee snobbery. On the one hand the achingly wanky hipster coffee houses of the world are an expensive and pretentious indulgence. But I've been in very few coffee houses that fit this bill. Most are cheerful, independent and employ local people and local ingredients.

I've been into McDonald's 'restaurants' a couple of dozen times in my life, usually under protest and in a larger group,and I have never found them to be cheerful. Independent? Nope. Local ingredients? Nope. They might employ some local people - but let's not forget that economies of scale in business lead to fewer jobs than in comparable independent businesses. This is a statistical fact.

What I hate about this advert is how thoroughly, aggressively anti-knowledge it is. It sneers at knowledge, passion and skill - and by virtue of this it sneers at independent business, individuality - even thinking. "Get in line," says the McDonald's McCafe advert "and drink your cheap, shitty coffee lest people in the quirky cafe next door laugh at you."

It's the perfect metaphor for Brexit, where fear of ridicule, fear of change and fear of the Other overrides everything. Look at the bloke in the image above, terrified because the coffee guy is sitting down next to him and explaining coffee. Imagine living your life like the protagonists in this advert - forever afraid. And probably a bit racist. A disturbing vision for a resolutely Stupid, Fearful Britain riddled with terrible coffee.

Next, it's the anniversary of the Big Mac. It's 50 years old, which is probably the average life expectancy of someone who eats this rubbish regularly, their arteries probably harder than Chuck Norris.

I wouldn't eat a Big Mac if you paid me. I once ate a chicken McBurger after a drunken night out and the memory of the taste of sugar - in the bun, in the mayonnaise, in the coating - still makes me retch. Year later on a very early-morning work trip I ventured into one with some colleagues and rationalised that they could hardly fuck up a breakfast wrap.

Wrong. My overriding memory of this was a wrap and a frisbee of egg that tasted of, yes, sugar. No wonder people get all aggressive when you question their McDonald's habits - Maccies has got them physically addicted to the gak they pump into their food.

So I'm not moved to celebrate the invention of a burger that has probably sent thousands to an appointment with a specialist diabetes nurse. Not convinced? Here's an illuminating post about what eating ONE Big Mac does to your body and the potential consequences, which include the following phrases:

"raises your blood sugar to abnormal levels..."
"contributes to the likelihood of compulsive eating"
"These ingredients are also harmful and can cause obesity, diabetes and heart disease..."
"This huge amount of salt can result in dehydration..."
"This causes high blood pressure and can ultimately lead to heart disease and stroke..."
"you have lost control of your blood sugar, making you crave even more fast food..."
"The high-fructose corn syrup in the Big Mac bun...[causes] insulin spikes and even greater hunger pangs..."
"The burger’s ingredients can cause serious harm to your body, especially when you consume them on a regular basis..."
"Azodicarbonamide... is also carcinogenic..."
"...increases your chances of becoming overweight by 40%..."

Again, what's so obnoxious about the actual advert is the contempt directed at people who don't choose to eat this processed shit, as if you have to be some sort of weird elite to not eat crap. The response to the man who has never had a Big Mac? More contempt. I've never had a Big Mac either and there are few things of which I'm more proud.

The first time I went into a McDonald's - about 1988 - I threw the food down in disgust, much to the amusement of my classmates. One of them shouted acrosss to a nearby Maccies worker - in a situation not unlike the one portrayed in this advert - and said: "Our mate says your food is horrible!"

The employee looked from me to my mate, watched him scarfing down his Big Mac and pointed at me.

"He right," he said in broken English.

Then he pointed at my mate, wiping away grease and cow parts from his face.

"You wrong."

And off he went, sweeping the floor.

It's literally 30 years ago and I still often think of that chap - like something from a Hollywood film that makes the protagonist recognise some universal wisdom - and wonder where he is now. Not working in a Maccies, I hope.

What's always noticeable about these McDonald's adverts is the cast of people they include - like a pick'n'mix of regional working-class types. Look carefully, you'll usually find a workman's helmet in there somewhere. And families, oh the families. Because what sort of parent are you if you don't given in to your kids and feed them food you know is astonishingly bad for them?

Rarely do you see anyone in a McDonald's advert who is dining alone. Imagine what sort of sad bastard would be eating a Big Mac on his own, eh?

Because there is something almost unbearably sad about someone going to a McDonald's on their own and eating a Big Mac on their own - perhaps a single candle sticking out of a Big Mac bun on the occasion of their own 50th birthday, riddled with gout, gasping for breath and reaching for a vial of insulin.

Yes, happy birthday Big Mac and thanks for everything you've done for us.

The post A Double-Whammy McDonalds Advert: McCafe and Big Mac appeared first on AdTurds.

Well, well, well. A new Diet Coke advert. Like a Tory party broadcast or a Nigel Farage Question Time appearance, a new Diet Coke advert is to be treated in much the same way as an unloved season. Tedious, inevitable - though more likely to make your guts explode.

I have a longstanding beef with Diet Coke, because their adverts are some of the worst ever devised. First there was the advert starring Duffy that not only killed Duffy's career stone-dead, it finished of Keith Duffy too, just for good measure - and he had nothing to do with it.

Second, the Diet Coke frotters, fingering their ringpulls when they spray their sticky stuff all over a man.

Now, a confession. I drink Diet Coke. I started drinking it with a vengeance when I quit smoking - it's the caffeine hit I guess - and haven't really weaned myself off it. And I can safely say that it's fucking horrible.

Diet Coke tastes like poison, in much the same way that smoking does. It's reminiscent of chemicals and something that vaguely resembles sugar. I drink Diet Coke because in some fucked-up psychological manner I associate the nicotine hit I still crave with whatever Diet Coke is doing to my synapses. And that's it.

So the claim that Diet Coke 'is delicious' lies somewhere on the honesty scale between Russia's denials that it has stockpiles of chemical weapons and any claim disputing the actual fact that Piers Morgan is a snivelling little cunt.

Secondly, the lady in this advert claims Diet Coke 'makes me feel good'. That's because it's full of chemicals that make your brain briefly go haywire. It's certainly bad for your teeth, worse than even full-fat soft drinks according to some authoritative reports, so it's no surprise that Coca-Cola doesn't even try to make the suggestion that Diet Coke is actually good for you in any objective way in its adverts.

We then get the utterly baffling "You know what else makes me feel good? Athleisure!"

I like to imagine the young lady in question has a lisp, and she's actually saying 'ass-leisure'. I'll leave it for you to decide what that might entail.

Also I'm not sure why this apparently-British lady is using the American pronunciation 'lee-zure'. It's 'lejuh' - like in 'leisure centre'. A small point perhaps, but another facet of this utterly horrible advert that seems determined to send precision-guided shooting pains through my head.

"Because it's comfy casual." Even Holly Willoughby couldn't be this simperingly vacant if you boiled her for 24 hours, collected the resulting residue and injected it into Nigella Lawson. Plus, what the fuck are you talking about?

Next we hear that life is short. Which leads me to wonder whether this Diet Coke advert is simply trying to prepare us for the oncoming apocalypse? This is, surely, how the news will be broadcast to us anyway? Not with a stern-faced, gravel-voiced news anchorman, but by Clare Balding on a comfy sofa or a Reggie Yates documentary.

I don't want to live in a yurt, thanks, neither do I want to run a marathon (a side-note, if you use the prefix 'super' to create any word not already in the dictionary, I super-hate you).

But why is a drink that used to be extolled for its health benefits being advertised by a woman telling us to indulge ourselves, as if it's a Krispy Kreme donut injected wit Ket? Leaving aside the fact that, should I want to indulge myself, I'll be plumping for whiskey, fags, cocaine and a huge German prostitute, it's unutterably pitiful that a can of Diet Coke could be considered by anyone some sort of guilt-inducing gastronomic sin.

Unless that guilt is induced by the mountains of plastic waste it is responsible for - or for muscling in and drying up wells around the world, of course.

Bear with me, I'm nearly finished.

"If you want a Diet Coke, have a Diet Coke."

That's it? That's the pay-off to this sequence of dissonant Millennial brain-shart? Is this what William Shakespeare died for? Is that what a medium-sized Colombian cocaine-harvest produced? 'Have a Diet Coke - because you can'?

Rest in your grave Emmeline Pankhurst; sleep tight Stephen Hawking; dream fitfully Nelson Mandela - mankind has got it covered. We've had a long talk about it and we've decided that we've come up with the answer to life, the universe... everything. And the answer is... 'if you want a Diet Coke, have a Diet Coke.'

That's the sum total of human endeavour, right there. That's what 200,000 years of evolution, the renaissance and industrial revolution brought us. We've decided to hand over the reins of humanity to the Diet Coke demographic, with their athleisure and 'yurt it up'. We're superhappy with the results and we think the future's in safe hands.

Back in the 70s, ensconced in Berlin, David Bowie and Brian Eno refined a technique for creating music called Oblique Strategies. The idea is to encourage lateral thinking, often by doing something that might appear nonsensical or resulting in an apparent non-sequitur. In our short history such techniques have been used to create some of the finest art in history.

But in this Diet Coke advert, filled with meaningless, unconnected phrases that still manage to come off as deeply affected and hatefully hip, what appears to be a similar dynamic has birthed perhaps the most obnoxiously dumb 30 seconds in existence.

More nauseating than Trump boasting of grabbing women by their parts; more smug than Piers Morgan announcing he has won the Euromillions rollover; more thoroughly awful than Nigel Farage laughing while doing a shit in your bath, the Diet Coke advert is a Soho/Manhattan nightmare of vacant stupidity that literally has no meaning. You are trapped in it and there is no escape. Welcome to 2018. Welcome to the rest of your life.

Ever wanted to live in a yurt? Wear athleisure every day? It’s time to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Why? Because you can. Be the first to see our new TV ad here. pic.twitter.com/Ij7xLdEAhN

— Diet Coke GB (@DietCokeGB) March 5, 2018

The post Diet Coke Advert 2018: Yurt, Athleisure and A Gaping Abyss appeared first on AdTurds.

I've been hearing from you in your droves. The AdTurds postbag is positively throbbing with anger at the new Halifax Wizard Of Oz advert, CGIing a camp Halifax mortgage chap into The Wizard Of Fucking Oz and abusing its 'There's No Place Like Home' catchphrase like a racist brandishing a Union Flag.

The new Halifax advert seems to have caught people genuinely off-guard. Sure the Top Cat and Flintstones adverts were annoying but I'm not sure there's quite the emotional connection or sense of desecration. Hacking up The Wizard Of Oz to flog mortgages for the banking equivalent of Home Bargains seems a bit like getting Mary Berry to strut around as a ring girl at Connor McGregor's next fight.

It's not news that Halifax adverts are among the worst on television - their record over the last 20 years has been worse than Val Kilmer's film career. Remember the ones where they ran a radio station (Isa Isa baby)? What about the Halifax choir?

This latest set of children's entertainment rip-offs seemed to confirm Halifax's view of itself as the Crazy Gang of the banking sector, but why would anyone want to entrust their money to a zany bank?

Fred Flintstone wants to switch bank accounts. Top Cat can't get a mortgage anywhere else on the high street. Why? I dunno. Why Harambe? Because we can, seems to be Halifax's response.

And now we have a Halifax Wizard Of Oz advert, where Dorothy and her unlikely back-up squad. Halifax approves mortgages for tinmen, scarecrows and even lions, apparently, in what appears to be a grossly irresponsible lending policy. No wonder Britain is mortgaged up to the hilt: Halifax has been giving out money hand over fist to fictional characters.

Theis new Halifax Wizard Of Oz Advert doesn't even make any sense. The Welsh chap representing the bank can't even approve a mortgage for Dorothy. Oh, I guess there's a 'no place like home' pay-off that just about makes sense of the MGM trappings but fundamentally it's just another example of nostalgia appropriation by the dead hand of advertisers.

But as yet another childhood-mining advert eviscerates your feel glands I've realised something. I don't much care. Because this is advertising in a nutshell. If you like something and it's popular and it can be used to encourage you to do something that earns someone else some money, you can bet your bottom dollar - or your bottom for that matter - someone is going to weaponise it and use it against you.

Our key details - age, wage, families - are already known by any business who has a few quid to spare. Business is only going to know more and more about us. Every page you visit on the internet? Logged. Your physical location at any time of the day? Tracked. Your likely voting intentions, biases and fears? Predicted. What you buy at the supermarket? Shared. Sexual orientation, peccadilloes, porn habits? Old news. All of them are up for grabs.

And where might this lead us? Targeted adverts addressing us by name? Talking about our families? Zeroing in on our every insecurity and foible? Think I'm exaggerating? It's nearly ten years since Nike used an audio recording of Tiger Woods' dead father whenthe golfer was on the comeback trail, after all.

People are very worried about what information governments hold on them. And that's not something I take lightly. But have you any idea what Tesco, Amazon or Facebook knows about you? Why don't we worry about what business knows about us too? And what it might do with that knowledge.

If you thought the Halifax Wizard Of Oz advert was depressing, disrespectful - invasive even - it's nothing compared to what advertising is going to do with its file on you in years to come.

The post Halifax Wizard Of Oz Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

Have you heard about this thing called plastic? Well apparently there's more of the stuff choking up rivers, seabeds and the digestive tracts of birds that there is shit spewing from the mouth of Jacob Rees-Mogg. And that's a lot. Seriously. Have you heard the twat? He look like a Staedtler 2B pencil in a suit and sounds like he should be instructing a class of Fauntleroys on their Catullus prep.

But I digress. Plastic. In one of those crashing moments of awareness the human race very occasionally enjoys - like when you cringe at the memory of an ill-advised Snapchat - we've realised that covering the world in tiny fibres of indestructible, toxin-attracting baked oil might have been A Bad Thing after all. Turns out there's not a lot of demand for eating microbeads, given our position at the top of the foodchain, after all. Who'd've thunk.

Plastic is toxic in more ways that one and it's agreed that, for the last 50 years or so, we pretty much got that one wrong. See also: when we thought we'd seen the last of racism, the class system and voting for politicians who actively want to kill - or fuck (or kill and fuck) - everyone.

Now, plastics have their uses and we've built our world around them, to the potential benefit of the odd tree. But take a look around you and, if you're one of the unlucky few to be blessed with things such as brains and empathy, you'll realise that we've seriously fucked up.

How else to explain the concept of single-use, well, anything? Single-use coffee cups, plastic bags, Tindr dates? And then perhaps the most egregious thing the human race ever invented - far worse than nuclear weapons, Nando's or even Philip Schofield - the straw.

The straw, ladies and gentlemen, is the single-most, stupid and evil thing ever invented. If you drink through a straw you inflate your guts like Violet Beauregard. You also look about seven years old. And then you throw them away, at which point they find themselves on landfills, in canals - then out into our oceans and to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, which contains more hazardous shit that MailOnline.

Some say there'll be more plastic than fish in the seas within a couple of decades; others that plastic is already part of our food chain and is probably resting in our stomachs, alongside other poisonous shit from McDonalds, Haribo and Subway. And all because you wanted a stupid bloody straw in your Screaming Orgasm.

It's odd then, given the catastrophic situation, that the new advert for Robinsons Refresh'd - you can tell it's for cool kids because it has an apostrophe, the coolest of all punctuation marks - features a straw zooming around the biosphere destroying organic matter, as if Britvic wanted to create a visual metaphor for what plastic is doing to our environment.

An advert with a straw #refreshedbyrobinsons @DrinkRobinsons Environmental issues. Change it please!

— Sue (@MrsWhitters) May 3, 2018

Said straw flies out of a young lady's drink and vanishes off into the countryside, where it wraps itself around a tree as if strangling it, then pulverises a bunch of harmless fruit before ending up in a stream. If only Robinsons had thought to show the plucky straw's journey ending in the nose of sea turtle it would have amounted to a pretty good exploration of the insanity of things you couldn't possible need, use once and throw away.

Some would say the Robinsons Refresh'd advert is apt for our singularly idiotic times. I suspect it's more evidence that the grinding wheels of business simply do not care unless their bottom line is damaged. Sometimes advertising is more truthful than you might think.

The post Robinson’s Refresh’d Advert: Straw Donkeys appeared first on AdTurds.

Sky, Sky Sports News, Soccer Saturday, Jeff Stelling, Chris Fucking Kamara. If there's a nexus point for all the fuckwittery, hyperbole, vulgarity and utterly shit bantz engendered by modern football it's these quite dreadful things. As if to amplify and clarify just how awful, they're all at the centre of a raging conflagration of football betting. If I were to line up the things I hate most about the United Kingdom most of these things would feature - and that was before this genuinely devastating Super Boost advert.

I parted ways with football 15 years ago, just aghast at the horribleness of it all. When Newcastle sacked Bobby Robson - one of football's finest for several decades and a truly great bloke to boot - that was it for me: a totem of how thuggish, stupid, greedy and simply divorced from reality the whole thing had become. Very little I've seen since - perhaps apart from the slight blip of the 2018 England Word Cup team appearing to be decent human beings - has convinced me that I've ever been wrong.

Football has been bought. Pride in your town / city or conurbation of choice has been bought. The family memories forged through football - bought. Very rich people who don't live in this country and couldn't give a fuck about your club - which they have bought, or its players, which they have also bought - own all that stuff now. They are prepared to sell little snippets of it back to you at vastly inflated prices. And that is the relationship you now have with football, whether you know it or not.

Where best is this evidenced? You might think the hilarious prices of season tickets, the terrible food and drink available at matchdays, for which you need to remortgage your home, or the eye-watering mark-up on replica shirts. Or you might look at how much a subscription to Sky costs and think it's there. But no. The most obvious example of how football has been sold is in how closely intertwined the football, media and betting industries have become is in Sky Bet and this Super Boost advert.

If you like football you will almost certainly have a Sky subscription. With that subscription you basically have a 24-hour Jeff Stelling channel. In fact it's only a matter of time before Stelling is wired up with seven Go-Pros so he can loudly comment on whatever mundane events are happening around him at any given time. Enjoying his breakfast, giving his wife some flowers or just having his first dump of the day.

And now he's all over the telly urging you to piss whatever cash you still have into some depressing little Sky Bet app on your expensive smartphone that only exists to rob you of money. Well, that and sit on your smartphone quietly feeding back information about your smartphone use to its evil masters anyway.

Where exactly does Sky Sports end and Sky Bet begin? Is there any real difference between them? And what is Jeff Stelling's job now - as an anchor on coverage of football or a shill for betting companies? Having Stelling as the face of both seems deeply problematic, a bit like your gynaecologist trying to set you up with prostitutes.

Unconvinced? Here's a tweet from Sky Bet where Stelling refers to the Soccer Saturday Price Boost. Sky Bet? Sky Sports? Is there any difference?

This week, Jeff Stelling brings you three reasons to back the @SoccerSaturday Price Boost. It's #bettingbetterhttps://t.co/NfrLbmv3b5

— Sky Bet (@SkyBet) October 16, 2015

The reason this is so concerning - and why it's astonishing that it's even allowed - are the alarming rates of gambling addiction in the UK, a leader in the western world in entwining sport and betting so ferociously.

And Stelling, for all that I dislike what he does and stands for, is a consummate broadcaster. A man who engenders trust, respect, attention. The perfect man, in other words, to encourage you to gamble.

To see him clapping and shouting into your face - like something from 1984 only worse - is to understand how indistinguishable sports are from online betting. The football-chant-like mantra; the handclap; the repetition. The insidious suggestion that football amounts to nothing unless you bet on it.

And I hope that somewhere on the A19 in his plush, expensive car, Jeff Stelling occasionally pulls over onto the hard shoulder and sits, dabbing the occasional silent tear away with his Hartlepool United scarf, thinking about what he's done.

The post Jeff Stelling Sky Bet Superboost Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

Oh you absolute bastards.The Wizard of Oz and Bloody Top Cat and the Flintstones are one thing, but when I first saw this Halifax Ghostbusters Advert I felt a small part of the soul of the human race shrivel up and die. "Is nothing sacrosanct?" seems an increasingly rhetorical question these days. If they can sodomise Ghostbusters it begs the question as to what else is next.

A bit of context and perhaps a defence here. For some, the original Ghostbusters is hardly a work of art. When some reviews of the deathly Ghostbuster reboot came out, some actually went so far as to claim that the female-led reimagining was more amusing than the original, or 'relentlessly funny'. Almost correct.

While the remade Ghostbusters film was a deeply forgettable piece of work, I also deprecated the misogynistic backlash the film attracted. But while I thought the whingeing about people's childhoods being ruined was pretty ridiculous - mainly because some ladies with fannies were in the new film - I've started to empathise with those ecotplasm-loving GhostBros.

Why? This Halifax Ghostbusters Advert, the advertising equivalent of defecating directly onto the faces of everyone involved in the original film. Here Bill Murray is replaced by Gareth, the stout Welsh chap who, not content with vomiting all over the Wizard Of Oz, now seems to be embarking on an all-out celluloid rampage akin to painting a cock into the Mona Lisa's mouth.

I'm guessing that it's no coincidence that Bill Murray is not involved, a man who, unlike Dan Akroyd, seems to be unimpressed by money and frivolity when it comes to his work. Harold Ramis, of course, did not have a choice whether he appeared in this genuinely upsetting spot, by handy virtue of being dead. There's an irony.

"Oh, it's only an advert. Get over yourself!" some arsehole will inevitably type. The reason the Halifax Ghostbusters Advert is so unpleasant is the inherent message behind it: see that thing you like? We can buy it and we can use however we please, simply because you like it and that has a value to us.

It's as naked as advertising gets in exploiting you, your memories and your fondnesses. And if you're one of those 'get over yourself' types then imagine how you'd feel if they wrote HALIFAX DEBIT CARD all over your Mum's face.

If you accept that some things would be beyond the pale on virtually any level - let's say dropping Gareth into Schindler's List to discuss life insurance, for example - then you accept that all such judgements are questions of degree. And if you have any sense you'd concede that everyone's red lines are set at different levels. Who are we to judge other people's red lines?

For me, this advert crosses one. For I have incredibly fond memories of Ghostbusters, forged with friends, families, girlfriends. It's a common cultural currency for people of my generation. To buy it, to unfunny it, to reduce it to digital material that's only good for advertising financial services; to erase Bill Murray for a camp bank clerk burbling on about debit cards, well... it's just depressing isn't it?

To see adverts like this is to look through your memories, the repository of stuff you like, and realise that every single bit of it is up for sale. And whether you like Ghostbusters or not, that's a frightening thought.

The post Halifax Ghostbusters Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

I have a lot of time for Martin Freeman. His everyman, underdog shtick has a real ring of authenticity and, as the most relatable man in most television series or films he's in he's a natural repository of good will and trust for the viewing public. Tim in The Office; John Watson in Sherlock; Arthur Dent in Hitchhikers; Bilbo Fucking Baggins... he's always a bit nice, a bit awkward and so very human. He might as well have been walking around with a target painted on his back as far as advertising is concerned - hence this Vodafone advert.

I wrote an email to a Government agency a while ago, providing my advice on how to communicate important things (pensions, benefits - boring, awkward, difficult stuff to communicate in adverts) through the medium of television advertising, having been unimpressed by their over-complicated efforts.

The concept ran as such: if you need to tell the unwashed masses about something both dull and difficult - the switching off of the analogue system that was feared might result in thousands of grannies being unable to watch Countdown and not knowing why, for example - you do it as simply as possible. An example: Michael Parkinson, sat on a chair, a white background, explaining in white-hot Yorkshire common sense that you need to buy a Freeview box if you want to be able to continue watching Inspector Morse repeats for 18 hours a day.

For that demographic you could hardly do better than Parky - a man with a face like Harrogate toffee, a voice like warm beer and a presence like a crackling open fire. A man imbued with good humour and sincerity.

Martin Freeman is the Michael Parkinson of Generation X and Y, who have almost been trained to listen to what he says and silently root for him. Tim the Underdog, John the Underdog, Arthur the Underdog, Martin the Underdog. Slightly pained, put-upon - but we will always have his back. Because he's you, me, us. We see Martin Freeman and we see ourselves. So if Martin Freeman has a Vodafone contract and wants to make lots of money through that association, who are we to judge?

For advertisers, Martin Freeman must be catnip - not for nothing is his voice lathered over TV adverts. Freeman is a precision-guided missile to your Trust Nodules, buried deep inside your Empathy Gland, just next to your Buying Synapses. It's no surprise he's in such demand from charities and political parties - it's hard to think of anyone better who can convey the required feels.

In this context it's clear why Freeman is a man in demand in advertising. And despite the ubiquity of his adverts, the frequency of them and - more often than not - the annoyingness of them, we can't hold it against him.

For he is Martin Freeman. Bastard.

The post Vodafone Advert: Martin Freeman Submits To Money appeared first on AdTurds.

The G-Tech AirRam advert is the perfect example of a phenomenon of our times, namely making something utterly banal and everyday sound sexy and dangerous by giving it a stupid name.

The G-Tech AirRam is, perhaps, the perfect case in point. It is basically a hoover, albeit one of those souped-up hoovers that sounds like the world is ending whenever you fire it up, runs on a battery that lasts about ten minutes and can pack as much as 100g of filth into its dirtbox. It's digital, which is a fancy way of saying there's a battery in it, and it probably has some glowing lights on it. But, fundamntally, it's your grandparents' vacuum cleaner with some fancy branding.

Not convinced? Let's deconstruct this name a little. G-Tech. Sounds like military hardware, although in actual fact you use it to hoover Hobnobs crumbs out of the crevices in your much-used couch. AirRam? Sounds like some monstrous sex aid, even if the closest it ever comes to nookie is sucking up the short-and-curlies from under your bed.

In this advert put-upon housewives are 'tethered and shackled' by their old hoover, in a line that sounds like a lesbian a prison sex drama.

And when you put your boring old-fashioned hoovers away 'more mess appears'. I'm unclear how the cordless G-Tech AirRam helps with this particular problem, but OK.

"Do we really want to touch the dirt?" the man who designed the G-Tech AirRam asks us, presumably rhetorically. I have never met a hoover whose dirt you did not have to touch, unless you're happy to spend ten minutes trying to shake the compacted fluff out of the vacuum's ever crevice.

Adding to the cognitive dissonance here is a man wielding something that could be a laser rifle, which is called an AirRam, and he looks like a curate on his day off.

The AirRam will help us break free, we're told next, in what might be a cheeky reference to the classic Queen cross-dressing music video.

What do I know - it might be the best hoover you'll every buy. As you lie on your death bed, you may look back on the moment you took delivery of your new G-Tech AirRam and consider it the finest day of your entire life. The product and the advert don't especially bother me. What does irk me is the branding.

Cast your eyes around the retail world these days and you're assailed by brand that sound like they should be selling body armour, assault weapons or cruise missiles: Under Armour (vests); Gel Speed Menace (cricket shoes); Airblade (hand drier). If something can be sold it can be branded in such a way it sounds like it should be reviewed in a weapons magazine, regardless of how innocuous the product is.

A quick glance at the other hoovers on the market is testament to the small-penis boasting of these brands: the Dyson Cyclone V10; the Philips SpeedPro Max; the Shark DuoClean...

You can buy a vibrator called Bullet, a pick-up truck called Warrior. Herbicides evoke wild-west notions. T20 Cricket? Blast. Big Bash. Football boots? Predator.

If we eat avocado it must be 'smashed'; meat must be 'pulled' or 'shredded'. Energy drinks? Monster, Relentless, Red Bull.

In the spirit of such clear insanity, I've a few suggestions of my own for how to brand a stupid cordless hoover - and if any of them are ever used I claim my 20%. Feel free to join in.

SuckBastard.
AirWhore.
FluffSlayer.
FilthBlast
DustCock.
VacSlag.
HoovTwat.
DirtShunt.
LintFucker.

The post Commodity Fetishism: G-Tech AirRam Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

I am immune to the supposed delight of other peoples' children, specifically the sound of the them singing. The sound of children laughing - heck, even my dormant hormones stir a little in their long slumber - but children singing? Genuinely horrible noise. Children re rubbish singers. And so it goes with this John Lewis / Waitrose Bohemian Rhapsody advert.

What have we got here? There's some robots, some kids (awwww!) singing Bohemian Rhapsody, something about robots... it's a spot of blah because John Lewis and Waitrose are doing something with their branding and everyone must know about it. The tagline interests me - "For us it's personal" - because this advert has hit the airwaves, probably at some obscene price, just as John Lewis is sacking 270 of its staff. I'm sure the irony is not lost on them.

John Lewis, of course, is usually in hibernation at this time of year, waking only to spunk twelvety billion pounds on an advert in which a:

CGI / old / young;
person / animal / creature;
is sad / is sad / is sad.

When John Lewis ventures out of its natural Yuletide habitat its adverts generally involve children in some way, so to deliver a precision-guided arrows of consumerism straight to the hearts of weepy parents with crap drawings on their fridges, emotions utterly shot through years of looking after small humans and deep, deep wallets full of cash unspent on the nights out, city breaks and romantic holidays rendered impossible by enslavement to their offspring.

What else are they spend money on, but expensive and unnecessary kitchenware, expensive and unnecessary aspirational food, and expensive and unnecessary bed linen, straight from your friendly John Lewis and Waitrose stores?

And because this advert has a lot of money and a John Lewis logo lavished on it, people on social media are simultaneously evacuating their bladders, orgasming and weeping at the same time - as if they have swapped all of their mental faculties for one big gland that responds solely to emotions, pinballing from weepy mawkishness to an almost feral desire to spend £38 on a selection of herb-infused olive oils for that woman at work they don't like.

So forgive me if I don't join you in dabbing at your cheeks, getting slightly tumescent and feeling the need to do John Lewis's job for them by sharing it all over social media. I know it's not Christmas yet, despite John Lewis buying the festive season in 2012, but bah fucking humbug.

The post John Lewis / Waitrose Bohemian Rhapsody Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

"It's good, no?" asks the worst man in the world, in this Diet Coke Mango advert for something called Diet Coke Exotic Mango, evidently part of Coca-Cola's efforts to remain relevant to a new generation of absolute dickheads.

No. It's not good. As is well established, Diet Coke tastes like petrol with a spoonful of Sucralose in it. I asked some followers of AdTurds what they thought it tasted like.

"Like what would come out of a ferret if you squeezed it too tightly," read one that caught my eye.

"Like the smell of the pedal bin when the bag needs changing," is another gruesome mental sensation.

The relationship between Diet Coke Mango and an actual mango is, I'd suggest, akin to the similarities between said fruit and a photocopy of a toddler's drawing of a mango.

And yet Coca-Cola is desperate for us to hail these new flavours as if they are the emperor's new low-calorie vegetable-based carbonated liquid. And to help, they've deployed what might be the most wilfully stupid ad campaign since Boris Johnson posed in front of a double-decker bus.

The reason is fairly clear: Coke, spooked by diversification in the market is chasing the youth quid. And when I say 'youth', I mean 'idiot'. At least, that's the only possible conclusion from this genuinely wounding set of Diet Coke adverts, that are barely one step above 'goo-goo, ga-ga' baby speak.

"I like Diet Coke, it's supergood," begins this new Diet Coke Mango advert. This is the second advert in this series that has used the 'super' prefix like a 50-year-old Dad wearing Adidas in the belief it makes him younger.

You can almost hear a room full of people staring at a report of words that 16-year-olds use and figuring out how they can work them into their ads, like a toddler whacking a jigsaw piece into the wrong slot.

He's 'totally into this,' he tells us, after a big swig of the Exotic Mango drink (listed ingredients do not include mango). This is another repeat, after the young lady in the first Diet Coke ad told us that the drink 'is delicious'.

Now I'm all for keeping things simple in advertising, but if your actors actually have to protest that your drink is really, really, good it smacks a little of desperation.

He's into aerial yoga and DIY furniture. This is just pitiful, like some try-hard bell-end trying to impress a girl by listing 'zany' things they like. Coke says they're targeting younger people who are 'unapologetic' about doing the things they like in these Diet Coke Mango adverts. There's another word for doing things, just because you want to, especially if you're unapologetic about it: 'cunt'.

"Maybe you're into friends who leave voicemails," adds the man, in what sounds like some bizarre attempt at communicating in a secret code, before adding "I know I am!" with a slightly knowing look, again as if the audience is supposed to be in on this apparent double entendre.

"You've just got to like what you like - and I like Diet Coke," is the pay-off to the sequence of baffling logical dead ends.

I've heard of 'no hard sell', but this is 'no sell'. It actually leads me to ponder whether someone has taken up my theory of how most advertising works: the message is totally unimportant; the coverage is what matters. Would it matter what he said? If you chuck tens of millions of quids at TV companies, social networks and print, would it matter what you wrote?

Maybe Coca-Cola decided to find out. Or maybe they focus-grouped what vlog-loving, gibberish-tweeting, LOLing teenagers talk like and it happened to be as bereft of meaning as if they had just written down a load of old shite for a man wearing a 90s denim jacket to say anyway.

And maybe the people who took receipt of that research, having read its findings, realised that the game was up.

That it had all been for nothing and that humanity was on the downward slope of a bell curve, skiing gleefully towards Idiocracy like a farmer voting for Brexit.

If the rise of Millennials has coined the term 'dawn of the dumb', this Diet Coke Mango advert is their simpleton soundtrack.

The post Diet Coke Mango Advert: Superbad, SuperAnnoying, SuperStupid appeared first on AdTurds.

It happens less and less often - on the basis that I immediately mute or skip the adverts or simply watch the BBC - but every now and then I see an advert so awful I sit up, sharpen an imaginary pencil and say to myself: "Right." That's what happened when I watched this "She's Me Mum" Boots Advert. Well, after a few minutes of dry-heaving, anyway.

This Boots advert features something more and more prevalent in Christmas adverts: a relatable Christmas message (you hate your own Mother) and relatable (ie. terrible) singing. With lyrics that would unite the DUP and Sinn Fein in mutual hatred ("It was her; did you see? Standing there; by the tree") and with a voice scarcely less awful than Boris Johnson grunting his way to verbose orgasm, it's a truly grisly prospect.

And that affected 'me' instead of 'my' - because market research shows that Northern accents are more trustworthy? Just ugh.

That's before we get to the backing track, Robbie Williams' love song for people who don't like music, which we have to hear sung by some godawful community choir. It's only at this point, of course, that an entitled teenager understands that the woman who birthed her is a fully-functional, independent human being - it's OK for her to have emotions and she deserves some make-up after all. Merry Fucking Christmas.

This might be a message that resonates with you, but that's how advertising works, after all. It's a flat-out con trick, playing on your emotions to guilt you into buying some unwanted shit for someone in your family.

Whenever I point this out, people to whom this has obviously never occurred get very defensive and start telling me to 'lighten up' and it's 'only a bit of fun'. And I get why - if someone had just pointed out to me that I'd be had by some very obvious scam, I'd probably get defensive too.

Here's what Boots have to say about it: "We wanted to really celebrate this special connection by focusing in on the spirit of beauty gifts showing you really understand your loved ones.

The spirit of beauty gifts.

Let that sink in for a second. We all know about the spirit of Christmas. Love, forgiveness, selflessness. Peace on Earth. And buying a No7 lipstick for your Mum, who you normally despise. It's not exactly A Christmas Carol, eh?

No, instead we have "She's me Mum," and instead of Scrooge we have a brat who remembers not to hate her mother once a year thanks to Boots.

Thank God we have private-equity owned multinationals to tell us what, how and when to feel. That's the true meaning of Christmas - and the real spirit of beauty gifts.

The post “She’s Me Mum” – Nauseating Boots Advert appeared first on AdTurds.

Well, the last year flew by eh? Seems like just a few weeks since we were ready to go to TUI headquarters brandishing flaming torches and defaced copies of their brochures. And here we are again: time for the worst adverts of 2018.

Over the last year work and lifestyle changes mean I've watched less and less television - and so fewer adverts. That has the effect of insulating me from much of it, but being so much more aware of how dreadful some adverts are when they do make it through the mental shields I've developed over the years. Suffice to say over on Facebook and in the reader comments I am kept well abreast of the latest disasters.

2018 was perhaps the year when I felt most people in the country were able to understand the madness I have fleetingly experienced over the last ten years. As I write the government is stockpiling food and medicine - and spending £4bn on planning for a disastrous no-deal Brexit that it could simply rule out if it wanted to. Even the Leavers I know think the government has gone mad.

Welcome to the world of AdTurds; a world where you can't quite believe that no-one else seems to appreciate how insane everything is. Where you want to grab people in the street, shake them and scream in their face that they stop eating at Nando's, buying those stupid plastic coffee pods seemingly designed to pollute the world for ever, calling radio phone-ins and all the million-and-one other things that seem to speak of certifiable insanity.

Well, maybe they have a taste of my universe now. And if you don't, well the next 3,000 words on the worst adverts of 2018 might give you an insight into it. My pain is constant and sharp and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. Enter at your own peril - for there may be no way back.

Worst Adverts Of 2018

Wrigley's Extra advert - Tom

See Chewing-Gum Tom in his bare-chested glory. He has just finished fingering your daughter. See him chewing mint-flavoured gum. See his fashionably floppy hair. See him standing only in his boxers, which hide a penis <...>hmm, penis...> that was until a few minutes ago interfering with your offspring in a particularly intimate manner.

Chewing-Gum Tom has already usurped you in the stakes of your child's affections. Now he openly challenges you, with his flat stomach and well-developed chest. Perhaps you are attracted to Chewing-Gum Tom on some level? No, no - there is only the Oedipal challenge he now presents. Forget about caressing his rock-hard abs >.

You must destroy Chewing-Gum Tom, like Saturn devouring his own son. If you do not strike now he will stand metaphorically astride your broken body, wielding the testes he has symbolically removed from your nether regions, steadily meeting your gaze and willing you to voice a breath of discontent at the terrible, unspoken subtext that passes between you ...sinking into those eyes like limpid pools of cool, cool water.... >.

Chewing-Gum Tom owns your Princess and his vigorous manhood oh dear Christ his penis, his erect penis...> is going to be at her like a frantic piston during a rash B-road overtaking manoeuvre - and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

Kill Chewing-Gum Tom ...kiss Chewing-Gum Tom...>.

KILL HIM NOW BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!

Just to be clear: the point of the advert is that Wrigleys Extra makes the girl’s dad fancy Tom, right? pic.twitter.com/WXmtWV3c3B

— Ian Hallard (@IanHallard) February 3, 2018

Diet Coke Mango - Superbad advert

Perhaps the one thing that made the idea of imminent climate change apocalypse seem like it might not be such a bad thing, the Diet Coke Mango advert is truly a piece of appalling stupidity not even Nathan Barley could have gone there.

Maybe Diet Coke focus-grouped what vlog-loving, gibberish-tweeting, LOLing teenagers talk like and it happened to be as bereft of meaning as if they had just written down a load of old shite for a man wearing a 90s denim jacket to say anyway.

And maybe the people who took receipt of that research, having read its findings, realised that the game was up. That it had all been for nothing and that humanity was on the downward slope of a bell curve, skiing gleefully towards Idiocracy like a farmer voting for Brexit.

If the rise of Millennials has coined the term 'dawn of the dumb', this Diet Coke Mango advert is their simpleton soundtrack.

• Read the original Diet Coke Mango advert entry

Sainsbury's Christmas advert

The sound of children singing is horrible. Children are shit at singing. Wiring plugs, claiming housing benefit, driving articulated lorries. All things kids are shit at - but we don’t make them do those things do we? So why do we have to make an exception for the little fuckers making a noise scarcely less awful than Donald Trump dragging his fingernails down a blackboard... then sexually molesting it like he would any given woman within lunging distance?

What’s that? You like the sound of your own kids singing? Course you do. You’re a slave to hormones in the same way those ants who’ve been parasitised by fungus are. Your kids could probably singing Catfish and the Fucking Bottlemen backwards and you’d wee yourself a little bit.

No, children cannot sing. But they can shriek feel-seeking emotional missiles straight at your cry glands. Sainsbury’s know this - so that’s what they have served up for your Christmas dinner: emotion raw as sushi, with lashings of sentimental sludge and a side-serving of the vague unease we rightly feel when we make precocious children sing and dance like adults.

Now off you go to buy your Taste The Difference goodies like the good little ants you are.

Halifax Ghostbusters advert

This Halifax Ghostbusters Advert is the advertising equivalent of defecating directly onto the faces of everyone involved in the original film. Here Bill Murray is replaced by Gareth, the stout Welsh chap who, not content with vomiting all over the Wizard Of Oz, now seems to be embarking on an all-out cultural rampage that will presumably end with him painting a cock into the Mona Lisa's mouth.

I'm guessing that it's no coincidence that Bill Murray is not involved - a man who, unlike Dan Akroyd, seems to be unimpressed by money and frivolity when it comes to his work. Harold Ramis, of course, did not have a choice whether he appeared in this genuinely upsetting spot, by handy virtue of being dead. There's an irony.

If you accept that some things would be beyond the pale on virtually any level - let's say dropping Gareth into Schindler's List to discuss life insurance, for example - then you accept that all such judgements are questions of degree. And if you have any sense you'd concede that everyone's red lines are set at different levels. Who are we to judge other people's red lines?

To see adverts like this is to look through your memories, the repository of stuff you like, and realise that every single bit of it is up for sale. And whether you like Ghostbusters or not, that's a frightening thought.

• Read the original Halifax Ghostbusters advert entry

Flo & Joan Nationwide advert

People literally begged me to make this advert stop, like when you see women in films who are so desperate to save their children they offer their bodies to Nazi soldiers. Flo and Joan are probably lovely people and in the right place - a Radio 4 comedy programme or some godawful hipster cafe I hopefully never have to visit - I have no problem with them.

But stick anything on television again and again - even Salma Hayek pouting or Tom Baker laughing or the Blake's 7 theme tune - and it's going to become hateful very quickly.

And if your song about a house is so twee it makes people pull the same face as when they bite on a lime segment, then expect hatred so strong it rivals Toby Young's utter hatred of himself for being a snivelling little cunt.

Boots - She's Me Mum advert

This Boots advert features something more and more prevalent in Christmas adverts: a relatable Christmas message (you hate your own mother) and relatable (ie. terrible) singing.

With lyrics that would unite the DUP and Sinn Fein in mutual hatred ("It was her; did you see? Standing there; by the tree") and with a voice scarcely less awful than Boris Johnson grunting his way to verbose orgasm, it's a truly grisly prospect.

Instead of Scrooge, we have a brat who remembers not to hate her mother once a year thanks to Boots. Thank God we have private-equity owned multinationals to tell us what, how and when to feel.

• Read the original Boots advert entry

Vodafone ice-skating advert

There was at least something going on in the initial Martin Freeman Vodafone adverts. Some semblance of the everyman character Freeman always portrays, railing against the inanity of modern telecommunications contracts and clumsily romancing a young lady through the medium of data-allowance banter.

In some respects it was, I guess, vaguely relatable and not completely obnoxious. But like a mince pie discovered at the bottom of a bread-bin long after Christmas is over and done with, this series seems stale, over-familiar and thoroughly unwanted.

The repetition is one thing, but this advert is possibly the least inspired 60 seconds that has ever had the misfortune of being committed to a memory card. Not even a regional disc jockey could find this amusing; not even Freeman's wife could muster an iota of respect for him going through with it; surely even his young children must openly despise him for what he's done. Benedict Cumberbatch will surely slap him right across his oh-so-rich-now face when next they meet.

Freeman strikes me as one of the least annoying celebrities on the overexposure circuit (cf. Lauren Laverne, Ben Wishaw, Olivia Coleman) but this utterly uninspired advert - what's it even about? something about no coverage, then he goes ice-skating? - is so bereft of even the most infinitesimal iota of inspiration that it's basically an insult to the very idea of advertising, storytelling or Torvill & Dean.

That fucking dilly dilly Budweiser advert

This one is pure concentrated evil. It’s for Bud Light, a drink only MAGA-hat wearers actually imbibe, once everyone else has grown out of drinking this sugary piss at the age of 14.

The ‘makes stuff turn into product’ idea has, of course, been mined by Skittles for years now so it seems odd to lift the idea. And not just the general concept. Even the theme of this superpower being akin to some sort of curse to be endured is repeated wholesale here, just in a way that isn’t remotely funny.

And then ‘dilly dilly’: a sort of medieval ‘Wasaaaaaaaap!’ for genuine morons to rally around - whether ironically or not - when they meet in the sort of IKEA-fitted bars that actually serve shite like Bud Light, to bring together their few, meagre sugar-soaked brain cells and talk shit about sport, cars and how Brexit would be going alright if it only they’d put Boris in charge.

Oral B advert

On the face of it there's nothing of the nuclear-level awfulness to compare with the rest of this list in this Oral B advert. There's a couple of very gratuitous shots of the actress' bum and of her jiggling about a bit - and yes there's the usual simpering smugness that goes with toothpaste adverts. But next to Diet Coke, Boots or Halifax? No, simply not in the same league.

That's until you get to the line 'I didn't even know Oral B made a toothpaste'. And it's hard to pinpoint exactly why this is so aggravating. Perhaps i's the fact that everyone knows Oral B makes toothpaste and the rank disingenuousness of pretending anyone in the mind might not know.

What, exactly, are Oral B known for, if not for toothpaste? Pizza? Price-comparison services? Over-50s life insurance? And what, exactly, does the name Oral B suggest beyond dental hygiene? No, don't answer that.

Perhaps what's so annoying is that truly no-one on this planet gives a fuck whether Oral B do make toothpaste or not, nor does anyone care what Oral B get up to. They can shove toothpaste up their arses for all I care - and for all I know, they do.

Sun Bingo Advert

If fairness the couplet 'got fake tits? / but are you gonna bingo'? is perhaps the most on-point bit of work ever seen in an advert. And what an advert it is. It's worth bearing in mind that this is an advert for playing online bingo - on your own, in your bedroom on a fucking mobile phone - on The Sun's website. The tragedy of that mental image.

Sun. Bingo. Is it hard to imagine a more disastrous confluence than those two words? Chernobyl McDonalds? Jacob Rees-Trump? Piers Morgan? An appalling meeting of minds between the mindless: a profoundly, proudly stupid newspaper publishing content halfway between The Beano, Pornhub and Mein Kampf; a pastime that requires the mental faculties of a Krispy Kreme doughnut.

To be fair, as a proud Northerner, I don't really have a problem with bingo. It's that S** bit. Stick that word in front in front of anything and it conjures up a Coldwar Steve world of terrifying awfulness.

Sun Orgasm. Sun Holidays. Sun Heaven. See? Even if you can't really discern what they might involve you just know it will be awful: a warm-lager, faded-seaside, racist-by-instinct, smartphone-nudes, fast-food, homophobic, GMTV, zero-hours, Primark version of anything you can imagine - with a guffawing cockney soundtrack.

Amazon Christmas advert

I don't know why Amazon don't simply have a video of Jeff Bezos touring around the third world torching everything organic he comes across with a flamethrower. That's all I can see whenever I see a box with Amazon branding, or their horrorshow website - the very concept of a world based around buying crap for the sheer hell of it. 'Shit for cunts' as one meme I've spotted on the internet has it.

The fucking nerve of Amazon whitewashing the genuine hideousness of working in one of their George Orwell workhouses, where people piss themselves because they're so afraid of getting sacked for having a toilet break, genuinely beggars belief.

Still, so much of our concept of Christmas is based around Victoriana, so it makes sense that the pre-eminent business of our time is merrily bringing back working conditions that could only be described as Dickensian. If that doesn't make you feel genuinely upset and a little bit frightened then I'm worried for you.

Maybe that's just life in the Broken Britain of 2018 - but pretending that Amazon warehouses are some sort of winter wonderland is the most grotesque dishonesty I've seen in Adland this year.

Diet Coke advert - Yurt and athleisure

"If you want a Diet Coke, have a Diet Coke."

That's it? That's the pay-off to this sequence of dissonant Millennial brain-shart? Is this what William Shakespeare died for? Is that what a medium-sized Colombian cocaine-harvest produced? 'Have a Diet Coke - because you can'?

In this Diet Coke advert, filled with meaningless, unconnected phrases that still manage to come off as deeply affected and hatefully hip, what appears to be a similar dynamic has birthed perhaps the most obnoxiously dumb 30 seconds in existence.

More nauseating than Trump boasting of grabbing women by their parts; more smug than Piers Morgan announcing he has won the Euromillions rollover; more thoroughly awful than Nigel Farage laughing while doing a shit in your bath, the Diet Coke advert is a Soho/Manhattan nightmare of vacant stupidity that literally has no meaning. You are trapped in it and there is no escape.

Ever wanted to live in a yurt? Wear athleisure every day? It’s time to do whatever you want, whenever you want. Why? Because you can. Be the first to see our new TV ad here. pic.twitter.com/Ij7xLdEAhN

— Diet Coke GB (@DietCokeGB) March 5, 2018

• Read the original Diet Coke Yurt advert

Vote for the worst advert of 2018

The post The Worst Adverts Of 2018: Vote appeared first on AdTurds.

And you thought the Brexit vote divided the country.... well, those shouty people outside Parliament have nothing on AdTurds readers. When I asked what the worst advert of 2018 was I might as well have opened the floodgates to one of those frightening ponds full of radioactive shit at Sellafield while standing directly in front of it. Because I don't just have to pore over the torrents of frustrated fury - I have to watch all the adverts.

Talking of Brexit, people don't like me to. Talk about Brexit, that is. And I get that. They probably come here to be amused (I'd like to think) rather than find someone else blabbing on about whatever the backstop is, Theresa May's haunted-tree face and Jacob Fucking-Rees, Twatting-Mogg - a man who resembles a Staedtler 2B pencil that hates poor people in a suit and seems to have more punctuation in his name than most undergraduate essays.

But I think in this Sun Bingo advert, which you voted the worst advert of 2018, there is a metaphor for Brexit. People who are angry about leaving the European Union - whether because it's happening at all, or might not happen, or isn't happening fast enough - have projected all their dissatisfactions, their grievances, fear, anger and disgust onto Brexit.

It's become an issue that I think has lost all meaning - it's just something to transfer anxieties onto, all the grubby little things we think are wrong with the country, whichever side of the debate we're on.

And that's what this Sun Bingo advert is. It's everything British people hate about Britain. It's cheap, vulgar, stupid, ugly. It's probably the sort of thing Brexiteers voted against and it's everything Remainers think Brexiteers are. In that regard, the Sun Bingo advert has united everyone. If only Parliament could do that.

This is the awesome power of the Sun Bingo advert. An advert that looked at genuine monstrosities, such as either Diet Coke advert, and shat them. Either of them. Take your pick; either flavour, whether "Yurt It Up" or "Supergood", has the potential to genuinely make adults cry.

I'm not even joking - I bet somewhere, someone was genuinely moved to tears of impotent frustration by how awful these adverts were. Some will say that having two Diet Coke adverts in the pack split the vote but what else was I supposed to do? It would be like not trying Goering at Nuremberg just because you'd also caught Himmler.

I could legitimately have included two Halifax adverts on the same basis, but the desecration of Ghostbusters just struck me as so obviously evil. Still, Sun Bingo triumphed. Just parse that. There was a worse advert in 2018 than the Halifax advert that crapped all over Ghostbusters for the sheer hell of it.

And, God bless them, Flo & Joan. I can't bring myself to dislike them and I can only think how excited they probably were to be on an advert and sing their godawful song. Then again, if I had to listen to that song ever again I might wish any number of obscene things upon them involving that keyboard being turned sideways and inserted into an orifice even smaller than their tiny house. However, even they could not withstand Sun Bingo.

Sun Bingo looms over the country like a referendum that has torn the country apart. Only worse. At least, one way or the other, Brexit will be over one day. But no-one who has seen the Sun Bingo advert will ever forget it.

Like walking in on Richard Keys wanking, it can't be unseen and we will never be free of it. Sun Bingo is the worst advert of 2018.

The post The Sun Bingo Advert IS The Worst Advert Of 2018 appeared first on AdTurds.

When I asked which adverts are currently getting on peoples tits, people told me about this Carling advert. It wasn't just getting on their tits, they said, it was rubbing itself over whatever genitalia they might possess. And not in a good way. So I was compelled to seek it out.

I’m a beer drinker but I can drink lager. On a hot, sunny there is, perhaps, nothing better than a good pilsner. But there are good lagers and bad lagers. And Carling is one of the worst, even if it is made in Britain.

Yes, the brewery at Burton draws its water from a deep artesian well, probably the best water in the country for making beer. But if you’re going to turn that water into something as foul as Carling you might as well pump in whatever seeps from the pooling tanks at Sellafield. We make a lot of nuclear waste in this country too, but I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of.

The days of those cheery, cheeky and genuinely funny "I bet he drinks Carling Black Label' adverts are long gone. And more's the pity. I don't know why adverts for lager don't even attempt to funny anymore - they seem to have been replaced with a try-hard earnestness.

In this new "Made Local" Carling advert we get one of the 'roll-call' ads that tries to be all things to all, well, people. Maybe the fragmented market and a new generation of supermarket drinkers make that inevitable, but it's certainly been to the detriment of advertising.

Lager has rarely been sold on flavour or desirability. More the associations with nights in the pub, friends, good times. And that makes sense because the vast majority of lager is total shite.

Let me try and describe how Carling tastes to me: gas - as in the actual stuff that comes out of your hob - mixed with sugar and injected with, well, more gas. And more sugar. It makes you feel bloated, it will give you a stinking hangover and God forbid you try to drink the stuff unless it's chilled to the point where most of its chemical-works flavour has been mercifully nullified.

In mainland Europe, America and beyond most people drink two schooners of beer and call it a bender. Here we're gluttons for punishment. It's not a sesh until we've drunk ten pints of the stuff, fallen over, been sick and then fallen over in the sick. And that's on a Wednesday.

And, dear Lord, the associations. It's fair to say lager has never had a great image, stretching back to the 80s, when it was invented by Margaret Thatcher and Jeff Banks. Whether because of the rioting, racism or just plain, good, old-fashioned bank holiday loutishness, lager would probably be placed probably somewhere between the E4 programme Coach Trip and the abuse of nitrous oxide on a list of How High Is Your Opinion Of This?

It's possible to identify correlations between very unlikely things. One enterprising chap, for example, has tracked the geography of Pret outlets to Brexit voters. And a couple of years back YouGov opened up its vast database for nerds like me to play about with - from which I made the discovery that you can track how right-wing you are according to which car you drive.

It may or may not come as a surprise to learn that Land Rover drivers are the most right-wing on the roads, so much so they think Jacob Rees-Mogg is a lentil-wearing pansy and most specify Union Jack underpants, Katie Hopkins talking books and portable gallows with their pointlessly big cars that never go offroad (for what it's worth Fiats are the most left-wing cars).

Which brings me back to Carling. Were I to place Carling somewhere on the Brexit spectrum I'd expect to hear it phoning LBC to start ranting about a No Deal. I'd imagine it shouting "You're a traitor!" at Anna Soubry, in a hi-viz jacket, while streaming live on Facebook.

Which makes this Carling advert a bit puzzling.

I applaud the multicultural vision of Britain offered in this Carling advert, the inclusivity and outward-looking attitude. The rainbow laces (and the inclusion of Black Country Fusion - an "LGBT inclusive" team) are interesting. Obvious enough to those who understand what they signify, but probably sufficiently oblique that anyone who might spit their teeth out at the idea of say, scissoring, might just think ‘what a lovely colourful pair of shoelaces’.

Fair play to Carling - but I doubt we're going to see two men having a kiss and a cuddle while sipping their fizzy pint of piss. This is the reason you scarcely ever see two men having a drink alone in any beer and lager commercials over the last 30 or so years - people might think they're gay.

And we have some women in Anfield boxing. Good for them. And more life in the small towns around the country. I suppose the idea of is to herald locally-made stuff and apparently there's a series of short films about these communities. But without context this advert just seems like another Great Great Britain! box-ticking exercise, not far off one of those lager / betting / fast food adverts that comes out when the World Cup is on.

Brexit casts a pall over everything these days. When HSBC brought out an advert about Brits being outward-looking people said it was too Remain-y. So too a vomit-inducing spot for British Airways that seems to think there are actually people out there who like Paloma Faith.

Meanwhile, this Carling advert has drawn accusations that it's a tad... Brexity. It's not really, but I can see how people of either political inclination can see patterns here. That's what the EU referendum has done - everything's binary now: Good or bad; black or white; leave or remain.

Either way my country seems to have gone completely bonkers in the last ten years - so for me this Carling advert - and all the rest of the 'brilliant Britain' ads - ring a little hollow.

It's enough to make one turn to drink. As long as it's not Carling.

The post Carling Advert: Made Local and The Pall Of Brexit appeared first on AdTurds.

What would you do for a bag of Tu-dah? As those of us old to remember these Tudor Crisps adverts from the 70s and 80s know only too well - they are worth climbing a mountain for.

Tudor Crisps were, of course, a north-east brand - if you hadn't guessed from these extremely canny ads featuring crisp-obsessed likely lad Terry - that featured unlikely flavours such as Spring Onion, Pickled Onion and Tomato Sauce.

AdTurds - who still savours flavour - still has fond memories of the Spring Onion Tudors. They were later joined by 'something a bit special' in the shape of the ridged Tudor specials, featuring even less likely combos such as Roast Beef & Pickle, Gammon & Pineapple and Sour Cream & Chives.

I'm not sure whether to believe the Wikipedia entry on Tudor Crisps, but other flavours apparently included some foul offerings as Fried Onion, Fried Tomato & Bacon, Hot Dog & Mustard and even Kipper. Kipper-flavoured crisps. Fucking hell.

All the ads feature Terry, first as a wily paperboy conning a younger mate to deliver his papers to the Dunston Rocket, an incredible 29-storey brutalist tower block, now sadly demolished, in Newcastle. In exchange of a "bag 'o Tu-dah" of course.

Next Terry returns as a fully-grown, though still snack-crazed, man to see his old boss and learn about the new flavours offered by Tudor Crisps. Having scoffed his way through a bag of the specials, Terry reveals he's not exactly making his way in the world - instead he's a chauffeur. There's more than a whiff of Clement & Le Fenais to these ads - and that impression is confirmed when we hear who's doing the voiceovers at the end.

Next up on Terry's crisp-orientated rampage around his old haunts is a young floppy-haired student, who gets exactly what he deserves for not displaying the local lingo by having Terry scoff all his crisps and leave him high and dry on the A1 hard shoulder. What a bastard.

Still, it's hard to stay angry at Terry and soon he has a hot date. It seems some pyar canny Geordie rumpy-pumpy is likely to take place in the back of Terry's Rolls. And what could be better than a shag in a limo with the Tyne bridge lit up in the background?

I'll tell you what could be better - a bag of Tudor Crisps Tomato Sauce flavour. Sharon is, understandably, disappointed at first, probably expecting something involving sausage at least. But she soon relents - and her moans of passion soon give way to the unmistakeable sound of Terry's salty morsels being enthusiastically masticated.

The message? Well, clearly the love of Tudor Crisps can lead to sociopathic behaviour - and even to passing up clear offers of penetrative sex. To be fair, they must be some bloody good snacks.

The Geordie references? Count 'em. First there's the all-toon cast, including Allen Mechen (spotted in such Tyneside classics as Spender and later as a Geordie baddie in Brookside) as Adult Terry. Then the homely voiceover of James Bolam, aka Terry Collier of The Likely Lads (and sequel Whatever Happened To...). The numerous shots of Newcastle landmarks of course. And finally the soundtrack to these Tudor Crisps adverts - The Blaydon Races, a song probably incomprehensible to anyone born outside a 50-mile radius of Gateshead.

Sadly Tudor went the way of all things in the early 90s, lost in the product mix of Walkers. In a final indignity the Tudors blue Salt & Vinegar and green Cheese & Onion bags were made to bow down to the Walkers cognitively-dissonant reverse branding. A bit like Henry VIII making Catholic bishops recant their religion, only with crisp packets.

Anyway, here's the full gamut of Tudor Crisps adverts. Watch them - and I challenge you not to feel like it's nearing teatime on a Friday afternoon in between Batfink and Rainbow.

Watch all the Tudor Crisps adverts

The post Tudor Crisps Adverts – Adverts I Love appeared first on AdTurds.

This Samsung Galaxy Advert for the new S10 phone might not be quite so hideous, were it not for the robotic rendition of Que Sera Sera - Doris Day's reminder from the past that you life may be shit but there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

We also see a lot of grown-up kids in the future, doing all manner of wonderful things relating to technology - with barely any screaming, cannibalism or mindless violence due to the existential terror of man-made climate change that will surely kill us all.

Perhaps that's why nothing in the Samsung Galaxy Advert looks remotely like Britain, in fact nothing like Europe for that matter. Perhaps some of the more upscale bits of America's west coast, maybe south-east Asia. But certainly nothing as hideous as Stockon, Poole or Peterborough. Probably because the country will have been utterly destroyed by Brexit in the future we're looking at. Or, more prosaically, because those town I mentioned are shit.

And what's with the little kid on a tricycle roaming around the house? Is this advert doing its best to evoke the mind-bending horrors of Stanley Kubrick's The Shining? She's looking at a window that lights u with a cartoon character when he rides past - which is good, because the chances are all she'll see are dead trees and more concrete in the near-future that Samsung is so keen to show us.

What else? A man using haptics to design clothes; another man using a stylus to create a tattoo. That's it? That's the bright new future? Same work, different tablet?

But wait, there's a robot, drawing a tattoo on a woman's shoulder. And as anyone who's learned anything from horror films knows only too well, it's probably seconds away from lasering a hole through the back of her head. Thanks, Samsung.

Next up - a same-sex couple snuggling up with an ultrasound attachment on their smartphone and admiring a scan of a baby that will surely be doomed to a short, brutish life due to the sea levels that will have covered most of mainland Britain in 50 years' time.

And we end with a bunch of children gleefully killing something, in a reference to massively multiplayer online gaming. If you've ever seen the Black Mirror episode Men Against Fire you might recognise what a frightening vision of the future this amounts to. If you haven't, well, still.

Augmented reality multiplied by stealth military training is a terrifying, hands-reach vision of a dystopian future. Yet here it's a Samsung Galaxy Advert where technology = good. And that's it.

There's enough material for Charlie Brooker here to create a whole new season of Black Mirror. We should be terrified by the real and varied threats to our existence this advert cheerfully highlights. Que sera, sera; whatever will be, will be - it's not worth worrying about it.

Instead we're glumly staring at our phone while the world burns. And that's the future we're creating.

The post Samsung Galaxy Advert: Que Sera Sera – A Terrifying Vision Of The Future appeared first on AdTurds.