Commercials: The Good, the Bad, and the Burberry

You could say that watching Mad Men (along with recently taking a copywriting course for work) has made me more aware of commercials and what they're trying to achieve, but really, the inspiration for this post came from one of the worst ads I've ever seen -- not a commercial, actually, but a print ad on the tube that made me so angry that I had to share it with our small corner of the internet in hope of bringing its purveyors to fist-filled justice.

But first, some good ads. Obviously I don't get to (or have to) see most of the commercials from America anymore (except the ones that get famous and end up on YouTube), so this will be UK-focused, but I've found videos of all the ads in question. The good ones tend to be few and far between, perhaps for obvious reasons -- most commercials seem to set out to be annoying, most likely so that you'll remember the product (e.g., the ubiquitous Sheila's Wheels ads -- Australia, you have a lot of explaining to do, beginning with why you think it's acceptable to use the word "bonzer"). If they're not annoying to begin with, they are by the time you've heard them 400 times. I'm not going to go all Hidden Persuaders here and delve into the subliminal psychological techniques advertisers use, but it is terrifying to think that I can still recite the Oscar Mayer jingle by heart, and yet I can't remember the full text of a single poem. Sure, the jingle's better and more accessible than half of what John Ashbery wrote, but then again, he didn't have weiners as his muse. Or did he?

A rare good one that got particularly famous a couple years ago was the Sony Bravia ad that featured a lovely song by Jose Gonzalez (one of the only good ones he has, I'm afraid -- and it turns out it was a cover as well. I hope you're getting residuals from Sony, Jose) and a whole bunch of bouncy balls rolling down a San Francisco street. I think this ad got so popular because one, it's beautiful, and two, who hasn't wanted to dump a truckload of bouncy balls down a hill and see what happened? According to Wikipedia, source of all internet knowledge, David Letterman did it on his show before the ad ever happened, which doesn't surprise me, given his propensity for smashing watermelons and making guys in stilts jump over cars. Anyway, here's the ad, for anyone who hasn't seen it:



It's a mesmerizing ad; every time it was on, we'd stop to watch it. I even had a picture of it as our laptop's desktop for awhile. We still haven't bought a Sony Bravia tv, though (but not for lack of coveting). Sony tried to recapture the magic with a few similar ads, but the idea was really a one-off stroke of inspiration; the others seem a little pathetic by comparison.

More recently, we've found a new set of ads to love -- Teletext holidays. This is the first one we saw and still my personal favorite:



The rest can be found here. They're a world away from most ads that feature animals (see: the weird Volkswagen ads featuring a singing CGI dog), though I have to admit that they're still pretty anthropomorphic, since a visual representation of our cats' brains would probably look more like this:


Now on to bad ads. I will warn you ahead of time: this first one features Joss Stone rooting down her cleavage for a candy bar.



Joss Stone is so authentic! She's just like a real person who rehearses in a professional studio while singing an insipid, supposedly ad-libbed tune about how great Flakes are! (I know I will inspire outrage by saying this, but Flakes are disgusting anyway. They taste like chocolate ash.) Poor old Joss is already a national laughingstock after her Brit Awards appearance, where she displayed a poor sense of humor and an even worse American accent -- and now she's managed to annoy the Cadbury-loving public. Big mistake. As we will see later, no one can resist chocolate (even suspect ashy chocolate), so whose reputation is going down? Not flaky tempting chocolate's. No, it will be flaky pseudo-hippie warbler Joss Stone's.

Our next awful ad also has to do with chocolate, although that's not the product advertised -- instead it is Lynx body spray, previously seen making misogynist commercials about how Lynx will make women writhe uncontrollably with lust when they smell it (I'm sure Lynx does make women writhe uncontrollably; it's just that it's not with lust). What has lovely sweet delicious chocolate ever done to anyone? Besides this:



I don't know where to begin hating Lynx for this commercial. With the implication that women are such helpless creatures that a whiff of an "erotic" smell will make them sex up a nebbishy loser (and the matey, wink-nudge tone that comes with -- hey, it's like GHB, but you won't go to jail!)? Because of the implication that chocolate is such catnip to women that they will turn into drooling maniacs willing to do anything for a piece of it? Or perhaps the best part -- the fact that the women are eating pieces of his body and that's not incredibly creepy and disgusting. Yay cannibalism! Mm, that viscera was so chocolatey delicious. Try the bone -- it's got all that gooey marrow inside! Yes, it's chocolate, but the guy's walking around handing parts of his body over to be devoured. We also get the oral sex implication at the picnic in the park (finally she'll suck it, am I right, bro?), though that turns out to be something even more horrifying: she's swirling a strawberry in his belly button!!! There is not enough GAHHHH in the world for that. I think the thing that annoys me most about the Lynx ads, though -- along with the Nuts ads that ran recently -- is the implication that this is all good-natured fun, and if you're a woman and you don't find it funny, you're just a humorless feminist bitch. I hope those women rip his chocolatey Cadbury's eggs off.

This next one was suggested by Admiral Neck (as was the Lynx one), because this model has recently become inexplicably ubiquitous in the UK press -- she's usually pictured on the society pages in weird stripy dresses draping herself over people like a banded wombat. Admiral Neck hated her in particular, above all the other weird-looking models who become inexplicably famous, because of her "awful pill-shaped head" and faux-punk style. [Hate might be too strong a word. How about "severe twitch-inducing dislike powerful enough to make me scream obscenities at the TV"? - Admiral Neck] We also both hate her listless underwear-based dancing, which looks like an updated version of how everyone in The Great Gatsby danced (what's up with the horizontal arm slide? Is that how you dance without spilling your gin and tonic?).


I have to admit that I kind of love the way the announcer says "Burberry": she pronounces it "Buuuuuurrrrrbry" in the most bored, haughty parody of a posh voice ever. The worst thing about this ad, though? The model is named Agyness Deyn. Yes, that's right. Agyness. Deyn. (Real name: Laura Hollins. God, she could have just fixed it by calling herself Lho'Rah HyolLinS.)

And now we come to the worst ad of all. An ad so vile that we both tried to take pictures of it but couldn't, so had to scour the intertubes for it. Turns out we're not the only ones who hate it.


If you can't read the text, it goes: "Chris had a long face. The wife wanted a new family car and this had the potential to blow a huge hole in his finances, not to mention the other plans he had for his money. A little bird told him to get down to Cargiant, where he bought a quality used car that kept the wife more than happy and saved himself a tidy little sum in the process. Just enough for a wicked weekend in Paris...with the girlfriend, tweet tweet!"

Ha ha! Adultery is hilarious! Who is this ad trying to appeal to, actually? Cheap adulterers who like trumpeting their conquests to the world? Smug assholes with faces made for punching? It's got the chummy, matey vibe of the Lynx ad ("the wife," keeping financial decisions safely away from the hands of women, who only use money to buy purses and shiny baubles), but then it suddenly hurdles over any semblance of reason into insane lechery ("tweet tweet"? WTF?). The ad fails on all levels -- it could only appeal to a very niche audience of douchebags, and everyone else who sees it will be horrified and avoid Cargiant forever. (I can't help but think their salesmen all look and act exactly like the Chad in that ad.) All I know is, if I ever see that actor in real life, I'm going to kick him right in the Cadbury's.

The Devil Wears An Outfit By Patricia Field

Since we’re big fans of Ugly Betty, with its sharp, funny writing, faux-Almodovar sets, and awesome your-brother’s-not-dead-in-fact-he's-Rebecca-Romijn! plot twists, we decided to belatedly watch The Devil Wears Prada. Last September no reviewer could resist pointing out how similar the two were, as both were about frumpy girls who work at fashion magazines (actually, this is where the similarities ended, as otherwise their plots could not be more different, but when you’re an entertainment journalist you’ve got to devour any crumb of a trend that you get). We heard bad-to-middling things about Prada, but we’re both huge fans of Meryl Streep, especially when she does comedy, so we decided to rent it.

It sucked. It sucked so much that I feel sorry for Ugly Betty that it happened to start a few months after the movie came out, because surely anyone who saw Devil and didn’t like it (i.e., everyone who saw it) would read those articles and think, “It’s like Devil Wears Prada? I would rather eat one of Anne Hathaway’s feathered bowler hats than watch a show that has anything in common with that movie.” Happily, though, Betty seems to be doing quite well for itself in the ratings, even here in the UK, which is as it should be.

The movie, however, was a glossy, flat, affectless cliché-well, a comedy that didn’t raise so much as a smile from us (unless you count laughter at Anne Hathaway’s increasingly ridiculous outfits) and was so full of Guptic characters that it was hard to care what happened to any of them, aside from hoping that somehow the wolves from the New York of The Day After Tomorrow would escape from their movie and come ravage the brightly-colored fashion mavens instead of blameless and long-lashed Jake Gyllenhaal.


The movie began with “frumpy” Anne Hathaway taking a job at the fashion magazine Runway, because apparently there are no journalism jobs anywhere in all of New York City. That’s believable, right? That it’s easier to get a job at a premier fashion magazine than a newspaper? Of course it is. No – stop thinking! I should mention that “frumpy” Anne Hathaway, aside from wearing outdated girls-boarding-school clothes, doesn’t actually look that bad. I am no fan of hers, with her stretchy duck lips and her huge cow eyes and her weird, gangly body, but mussing someone’s hair a bit doesn’t actually make them look ugly. It just makes them look human, and possibly combless.

Anyway, Andy (for that is Hathaway’s name in the movie) begins working for Miranda (Meryl, her hair the color of a stainless steel fridge and her attitude just as icy) as her second assistant – Emily Blunt plays the senior assistant. Blunt is good in the role; she manages to get the few laughs the movie has to offer, though unfortunately she is saddled with the worst eye makeup this side of Tammy Faye Baker.


And the days go by, Miranda duly chucking her coat and bag at Andy every morning and giving her increasingly insane tasks to do. Just as a side note, one of Salon’s writers did a piece about how Miranda is a great character because she’s a strong female boss – in her zeal to praise this leap forward for feminism, she managed to make it sound like she thinks Miranda’s attitude is something we should all strive for, to be so obsessed with our work that we treat other people as if they were faulty computers, to be abused whenever we feel like it. Betty Friedan? You’re welcome.


One day Stanley Tucci (who is, as AdmiralNeck pointed out, is dressed here as a gay Nazi scientist) takes pity on “frumpy” Andy and leads her to Runway’s closet, the place where they store all the clothes they use in photo shoots. It first appears to us accompanied by a soundtrack of angelic voices and a glissando. Apparently it’s every little girl’s dream, even Andy’s, even though she has professed time and again that she does not care about fashion. Yet her true feelings have emerged! She, like every woman, is helpless in the face of such beauty.


Is that the garden trellis Matter-Eater Lad was chomping earlier? No, it’s a fashionable poncho. Not as fashionable as some others, obviously.


So Andy has her incredible makeover, which, other than the clothes, seems to consist of someone brushing her hair and actually making her bangs worse – at the beginning of the movie they are mostly swept to the side and admirably cover her fivehead while still being unobtrusive. After the makeover, they look like someone gathered all the hair on her head, swept it forward, cut off half of it, and piled the rest on top.


The first post-makeover outfit is shown in slo-mo -- it is apparently so fashionable that it slows down time itself. And it is, may I say, hideous. A bejewelled cruise-captain’s jacket paired with skintight leggings and boots that are clearly too wide for Hathaway’s legs. All aboard on the SS Duck Lips -- we're off to Crazytown. But we could expect no less from the woman who brought us these memorable fashion moments:




Patricia Field, your continued employment is all anyone ever needs to justify why fashion is so incredibly stupid and arbitrary. Go back to the planet Zorleck, you freak.


I’ll skip over the rest of the plot, as I’m sure that even if you haven’t seen the movie, you’ve figured it out by now. But before I go, I must mention the…oddness of Simon Baker’s appearance in this movie. If you don’t know him, he’s an Australian dude who’s been kicking around in Hollywood for a few years – he was the lead in that short-lived tv show The Guardian and, more recently, a movie called Something New. He’s usually pretty good-looking, in a tanned way.


In this movie, he looks…well, the best description is insane clown. His eyebrows have taken on a life of their own and are seen here colonizing his face in preparation for their imminent takeover. As for what’s going on with his hair…I can only think it’s waging its own war.


If that's not enough to put you off sex forever, I give you this: