What’s the biggest downside of having less money? No, it’s not that extra glass of wine you can no longer afford. It’s not having to downsize from a whole chicken to a couple of legs. It’s not changing from 2-ply to 1-ply toilet roll. No, it’s not being able to afford to get rid of the ads in TV apps.
How my TV is still standing following every Domino’s pizza ad, I do not know. What does ‘Domino hoo-hoo’ even mean? And what does it have to do with a pregnant girlfriend rushing to her bloke on a moving train, a man giving evidence in a courtroom, and a bespectacled wimp on his knees in what appears to be some kind of gangster hostage situation?
What the heck’s it all about? What does this ‘storytelling’ add to the pizza experience? And is Domino http://dominos.com hoo-hoo a euphemism? Does the ad agency even know?
Look: can you give me extra chillies on my effing pizza or not? I don’t need the drama.
That’s just one of my current pet peeves. Another is the John Lewis http://johnlewis.com Christmas ad, which moves me about as much as . . . well, a Domino pizza stuck up my hoo-hoo.
Ooh-er, men find it difficult to express themselves, I’ve been told (you could have fooled me, the way all my exes wittered on about themselves). Allegedly, the ad is a poignant connection between a father and son. I’ll tell you what would give them more time to bond would be if they took the pressure off the mother and daughter laying the table in the background and did a bit of work preparing the dinner between them.
The Marella Cruises ad http://marella.com purports to be as empowering to women as the John Lewis one is to men. There’s a woman who I reckon is early fifties and she’s travelling alone. She appears to be loving it, smiling all the while at the sights and looking orgasmic when a chef starts piling her plate with more spaghetti than a small Italian village could manage for lunch.
She goes to her table and, lo and behold, there’s a group of women next to her, all also smiling beatifically, and the next thing you know, she’s joined them. Oh, no! I’ve been on several cruises and hated them all. The trip and the people. On one, I asked to be moved from my table of eight to a single spot hidden away from anyone else who might ask me to join them. Why can’t people accept that some of us just want to eat alone?
The Marella Cruises ad gets worse, when our heroine turns around during one scene (clearly bored senseless by the group of women) and a bearded man sitting alone gives her the eye. She flirtily smiles back. Oh, come on. So, she was on the pull all along? Heaven forbid that a single woman travelling alone cannot last one dinner without eyeing up the available totty in the restaurant. The only available men I’ve encountered on cruises are ones I’ve wanted to push overboard.
When I had the money to be able to eliminate ads from my TV viewing experience, I was very happy. Because of my job as a TV critic, I’m still able to watch a lot of stuff before transmission and avoid these intrusive monstrosities, but viewing through apps and being poor, I can no longer afford the luxury of avoidance for things I have no other means of watching.
There is one ad that brings me out in a sweat, I hate it so much, and if I can’t find the remote quickly enough to mute it, I have to run to my bathroom and shout very loudly to drown out the sound. Yes, you know who you are, Audi http://audi.com, and your ghastly rendition of ‘I Like to Move It.’ I’d like to move you off the flamin’ planet every time you invade my living room.
And talking about music in ads . . . Does anyone else think that Coca Cola’s http://coca-cola.com slurry use of ‘Holidays are coming’ sounds like ‘Holly’s a c**t’? Or maybe my deafness is more advanced than I thought.
By contrast, there is one ad that has me rushing into the living room if I’m away from the TV at the time – because I love it! It’s for Indeed http://indeed.com, apparently the world’s biggest job site that pairs prospective employers and employees. It features a woman and man sitting in an office, going back and for about the right salary (It’s called The ‘S’ Word).
It’s wonderfully well-acted and directed, the drama escalating between the pair, until the interviewer finally gets the upper hand and insists the guy tell her what salary he’s looking for. That’s when Indeed (on his device) comes in, because Indeed can tell you in advance what is normal for the job.
Now why, for a lovely Christmas ad, could we not have had this fabulous pair arguing over how much people should pay for the office Secret Santa (‘The SS words’)? Not some tedious guy holding a lump of vinyl, reminiscing about his rave days when, quite frankly, he probably would have been too out of it on Es to remember whatever music he was dancing to.
I used to love TV ads. Cadbury’s Smash http://cadbury.co.uk, with the little tin men. The fabulous music of the Volvo ads. Beanz Meanz Heinz. Chimps bonding over cups of tea. Simple tales, well told. I still eat Heinz http://heinz.com beans, and PG Tips http://liptonteas.com is still my tea of choice (yes, those ads really worked), though the Cadbury’s Smash brand was sold in 1986 to Batchelor’s. To be honest, I’d outgrown it by then, having discovered that you could buy these things called potatoes and cook them yourself for half the price and ten times the nutrition.
All forms of advertising are there for one purpose, we know that: to make you buy the product. But Domino’s, John Lewis, Audi, Marella, Coke – all you’ve done with your irritating sounds and bad storytelling is make me determined that none of you ever blight my life off screen.
As for the sensational Indeed? Yep. I’ve signed up.
Now that’s what I call a great ad.
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