No Gremlins in my Noodles! (Best / Worst TV Adverts)

Member Name: MGirl

Product:	Best / Worst TV Adverts
Date:	09/04/05 (2216 review reads)
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Oooh I love these categories.

**** the best ****

# Pot Noodle. What an inspired piece of creative work. The basic premise is that Pot Noodle is a bit chav but God bless it, we just love it don’t we? They started off with the advertising campaigns centred around people searching out pot noodles like illicit sex but the most recent one is the best. Basically a man walks into a bar to meet his friends with “The Pot Noodle Horn” creating a suspicious bulge in his pants. After questioning by his friends he has to race off for his fix of illicit pot noodle. If you live outside the UK, have a look at the ad on http://www.potnoodle.co.uk/home/ , it’s brilliant!

Apparently though the advert has lead to 65 people complaining*. Spoil sports.

# Guinness Extra Cold. In a marvellous piece of self referencing, Guinness have gone back to some of their poncy, yet award winning adverts from the past and “chilled them”! You can see them here if you register (registration is free). http://www.davidreviews.com/ a reworking of the snail, dancing and surfers. Brilliant. The surfers “tic fulla toc fulla tic fulla toc” running into the ocean, getting the toes wet in the cold water and running straight back out. Inspired.

# Cilit Bang. Hi Barry Scott. Erm, who’s Barry Scott? Here’s the new Power Crystals ad. http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=21077&a mp;type=coolad&startrow=1
So obviously made for an Eastern European Market! Do you ever get the feeling Barry Scott’s going to break into a Troy McClure-esque dialogue? “You may have seen me in such low budget adverts as ‘Loans-for-Chavs’ and ‘Ooops I ate the Turkey Twizzler!’ “

Brilliant. So bad it’s good. You can see both ads on http://www.davidreviews.com again you have to register.

**** The worst ****

# Anything with Howard for Halifax. *Involuntary shudder*. It’s evil. Every one has some lame rewriting of a song – for example, “The first, the last, my extra thing…”, “we are saving”, Evil. Annoying. Is there any truth to the rumour that he got all a bit big headed and started demanding more cash? (For those of you who don’t know, he used to be employed in a local Halifax branch before being catapulted to “stardom”.) They’re there on http://www.davidreviews.com if you’re really masochistic.

# Esure. “Calm down dear, it’s only an advert!” GRRRRRRR! It’s the worst series of adverts ever, featuring the most evil of evil men, Michael Winner. Sometimes just crashing into a woman’s car, sometimes dressed up as a woman himself (he makes a disturbingly realistic middle aged woman actually). http://www.visit4info.com/details.cfm?adid=21069

# The government “dispel your gremlins” ads. When these ads were first aired, my mother had to explain what they were for. I’m not stupid, I have a PhD, I just hadn’t really paid that much attention to them. To be fair to them, they got clearer as they went on. The several scenarios involve people not doing simple tasks in their lives due to being discouraged by “gremlins” who represent their problems with literacy or numeracy. You can see the images on http://www.dfes.gov.uk/get-on/downloads.shtml the ads themselves are also on http://www.davidreviews.com. I can see what they tried to do, they tried to make the problem external to the person so rather than thinking “It’s my fault” someone with basic skills needs could feel motivated and not ashamed to seek help. All very noble but they’ve been running these ads for 3 years. The UK government is now the biggest UK advertiser in terms of spend. Advertising is hugely expensive, it costs millions of tax £s for a campaign lasting weeks. The reason why I don’t like this advert is because I question a campaign that needs 3 years to work because the message is so vague. Also, isn’t there a more direct way of contacting people with literacy and numeracy problems? The numbers of people lacking basic skills are higher in low skilled factory roles and where I work the unions are really effective at helping people in that position. Also I imagine that proportion of people without basic skills will be higher in people seeking job seekers allowance?

One thing that really made me laugh though was I was watching Star TV or Vectone the other day (one of the Asian channels) and saw the Gremlins ad. Nearly every other ad was in Hindi or bilingual. The Gremlins ad was in English. Obviously some bright spark had thought “hang on, what about people who can write other languages but not English?” but didn’t think to translate the ad. What a waste of cash!

* Source Brand Republic

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