h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I absolutely loathe ALL tv adverts.They get in the way of the really cr@ppy tv programmes.

Loreal Elvive - with 'the power of nutrillium'. Modelling woman says 'I love it when they talk science'. Stick to the modelling, love.

Also there is some cereal that says "Stop dieting, start losing weight" and talks about how you don't need to diet anymore, just eat this cereal and the pounds will roll off. And then there is a text written across the screen saying "Only works as part of a calorie controlled diet" or something to that effect. In other words, you still have to diet.

I have to confess that I kind of like adverts. Some of them But sometimes...

When I saw this tread I was just talking with some colleagues about one advert running on Swedish TV right now. It's soooo disgusting!!!
Starts with this guy walking around the house with a bow of cereal. He enters the living room and tries to sit on the sofa. But, oh, look, the sofa is all covered in white flakes. He looks around the house and his eyes stop on this girl, standing by the kitchen table, buttering a toast and .. pilling off her skin! She is actually in short top and shorts (or possible bikini - too shocked to look carefully!) and you can see the skin all over her body curling and falling of in big flakes...
Brrrrr... SO HORRIBLE!
And you know what the worst is? I don't even remember what they were advertising - my brain couldn't process all the information! I mean, why would ANYONE give money to film an add like that!

Probably to do with sun cremes. They have some scare campaigns for that on Irish TV. Also an ad about a woman who I think is eating cereals, and kind of breaks out of her clothes to reveal new looking clothes underneath. It might be related to the one you're mentioning. A sort of renewal/snakeskin kind of theme.

The woman shedding her skin in a snakeskin style is for Evian. Quite effective, I think.

I haven't seen that Evian one, but the idea with the snake skin sounds good
But talking about stupidity... One of my favourite adds is the one you can find on the bottles with mineral water in US. They inform you that there is 0% fat in the water! And no calories!

Cool, eh?

Advertising has not been the same since they stopped doing them brilliant singing Fruit n Fibre 'raisins, hazelnuts, sultanas, apples, coconuts, banananas' cereal ones. What do you have these days, William Shatner telling you to eat cereals so you can poo more regular and Ian Botham pretending to like his children. Bring back the inane singing.

I used to love the ad for a certain razor that claimed it could exceed the speed of sound by some margin and was powered by some kind of turbine. Seemed to be aimed at people who didn't need to shave.

Anyway, I bought one and couldn't find any moving parts at all .

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/nottinghamshire/4055281.stm

These are posters put up at railway stations so that:

"Hopefully people will look at these posters and remember that railway workers deserve the same rights as everybody else."

They describe (in the first person) a railway workers experience of being abused by customers. The thing is that nearly every word is misspelt, well not so much misspelt as has its letters in the wrong order. The letters are 'muddled' in such a way, for example:

"tihs knid of aubse",

that it the brain automatically rearranges them, and thus can easily read the sense of the text.

Their slogan is "It doesn't make sense".

My first objection to the posters is that the slogan is untrue, the text makes perfect sense to anyone capable of reading English. It isn't spelt correctly, but it still makes sense.

My next objection is that it seems to insinuate railway workers are incapable of spelling.

My final objection is that the campaign seems to completely disregard the reason the customers are driven to abuse rail staff. The current poster describes a chap in a suit abusing a member of staff for telling him his ticket is invalid, and ends (in a suitably mixed up, but entirely readable manner):

"I thought he was going to kick me".

I read this poster and think: stop making value judgements about people just due to their clothing for pities sake.....then I think "but he didn't actually kick you did he" (is thinking someone might do something to you a form of aubse?), then I think "I wonder who sold him the invalid ticket, maybe he is just furious that his ticket is incorrect and what you're actually witnessing is his impotent rage towards the horrendous state of the rail network in general". Then I think: "..and learn to spell!"

Then I take several deep breaths.

I get on with nearly all the railway workers I encounter on my daily commute - I am on first name terms with many. I naturally assume that they "deserve the same rights as everybody else", who the hell ever suggested they don't?

I also feel that the sort of person who actually spits at someone or racially abuses them,just because they are doing their job,is unlikely to look at such a poster and have a Pauline moment.

Gosh, that was a bit of a rant wasn't it, and to think I thought I only found the posters annoying.


Cheers all

G

You guys are so lucky, on this side of the pond we get fat freaky lawyers yelling at us to call them so they can line their pockets by suing anyone and everyone if you tripped on a pavement, and car ads that make out that Cadillac make better cars than Jaguar, BMW and Mercedes…

Just thought of another annoying advert. That annoying AA one with Bev and Kev.

Quote:
"Bev?"
"Kev?"
"Bev!"
"Kev!"

I've just seen the Cillit Bang! advert. It used to say 'Limescale is simply Calcium that sticks'. It now says 'Limescale is simply Clcium *carbonate* that sticks'.

Hurrah! (Here's hoping Ben Goldacre http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/sciences/story/0,12243,1404258,00.html
hasn't led me astray).

No - I noticed that too, the standards people should've come down on them hard. It's one thing to say limescale contains calcium, it's quite another to actually show a lump of pure calcium reacting and directly compare it to the product's effect on calcium carbonate. That was a lie, pure and simple

What I don't get is the cosmetics industry's obsession with technology and science.

I keep seeing adverts with 'fruit oil technology' and 'waterproof technology' and I remember one which featured either Jennifer Aniston or Sarah Michelle Gellar where after giving the usual "your life is meaningless without this product" speech she said "and now for the science part."

My current favourite nonsense ad is for Adios Diet pills:
"The best way to lose weight is through a calorie controlled diet.

People have been using a herbal remedy to help.

Adios!"

This is fabulous because it makes no calim whatsoever for the product. They say that dieting makes you lose weight, this is separated from the fact that people take pills. There is no actual claim that the pills are effective in helping you to lose weight, just that some people take them. It is an ad that attempts to suggest things without actually saying anything at all, brilliant advertising strategy!

Like all those ads for expensive paracetamol in a branded box that say 'Nothing is more effective without prescription...' without mentioning that there are dozens of things that are just as good for a fraction of the price...

k

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KP salted peanuts have a note on the side of them saying "may contain nuts" I ruddy hope so, otherwise I've just bought an empty packet!

Ok, not so much the advert as the product: Fairy Active foam. What, exactly, is so inconvenient about washing up liquid?

These people wouldn't be inventing stuff to fit a pre-arranged marketing strategy, would they?

Not so much advertising stupidity as adverts that *really, really* wind me up

Adverts for a mascara the makers claim can make my lashes look X amount of times thicker, X amount of times longer, that have models wearing (oh so obviously) fake eyelashes in them.. I mean.. GRRRR!!!!!

'You too could have fabulous eyelashes like this... If you just nip out to Boots and buy them'

If the mascara could indeed do the things the makers claim, then why on earth would the models be donning falsies?!

I honestly think there should be some sort of rule, law, whatever, in place to stop this downright annoying practice..

Oh boy, it winds me up..

3 of 8 -

In need of more important things to worry about

There was a very disturbing one, although hopefully unintentional, for something to do with mobile phones, with the phone conversation going as follows:

Girl: "Dad, I'm pregnant".
Dad: "Oops". [hangs up]