Truly Failed Advertising

[Something Amyss]

So naturally, I must've seen the same 3 or 4 Glee scenes as adverts 20 times each.

You poor, poor soul.

Actually, few TV ads do anything for me. That is, ads for television shows. There are shows I actually like where I watch the ads and go "Why am I watching this?"

 

[GenericAmerican]

The Obama inaugural coin commercial...especially when it takes up every ad spot...4 minutes of the same thing...over and over...every commercial break.

 

[thylasos]

You're never alone with a Strand?

 

[JezebelinHell]

Back around early 2004/05, Quiznos ran a series of ads, nationally, that featured the Spung-Monkeys. Which were grotesque pieces of shit that were dressed up ala Mr. Potato Head (no really, they looked like turds. As in actual human waste.), then animated and voiced in such a way that was scientifically designed to be memorable/catchy, obnoxious, and irritating.
...and it totally killed your hunger.

Because when I see two screeching singing and dancing turds on TV, I totally want to go eat at an overpriced sandwich shop.

There will be retribution for reminding me about those commercials. >.< I have never had Quizno's because of them.

OT:
I do not watch a lot of shows on TV at this point so I am spared from a lot of recent ones. I am also very good at ignoring them. I hate Flo from Progressive, I would really like to smack her and all of the male enhancement commercials are creepy. A while back, Kleenex put out one for Cottonelle TP (I think) that just used shots of people's rear ends in it. I have not purchased a Kleenex product since. I was so fed up with seeing rear end shots on the TV all the time.

 

[TheNamlessGuy]

DELETED

 

[Lieju]

I go to Blip.tv. I watch a lot of videos there.

So naturally, I must've seen the same 3 or 4 Glee scenes as adverts 20 times each.

It doesn't make me want to watch your fucking show, guys. Especially when the scenes you picked suck.

And you know what? They didn't even mention it was Glee, so I had no idea what I was even watching.
The most annoying Blip ad must have been one with a horrible musical thing where they were singing about the printer being out of ink or whatever. It was so annoying I just learned to mute the computer when starting a video.

Spoiler: Did anybody every actually understand what they were going for here?

I think that's a good example of an advertisement where they try to make the audience go "WTF could they be advertising with this?" and watch it to the end out of curiosity, and even if they go "That? What does that has to do with this?" they at least remember it.

Also, as far as multi-cultural advertisement fail goes, right and left can take on different connotations depending on the culture, as some languages are read from right to left and some left to right instead. A three-panel advertisement for a laundry detergent showed dirty clothes on the left, the laundry detergent being used in the middle, and clean clothes in the right. This add was used unchanged in Arabic countries, where people read it from right to left, and it looked like the product made the clothes dirty.

This is a story which appears in every cross-cultural marketing guide-book, but I haven't found the original story anywhere.