Annoying adverts that annoy you

This may be subjective but when ever someone in a marketing adjacent job describes themselves (usually on a show like The Apprentice) as 'a creative' my skin tries to escape up my bumhole. As far as I'm concerned marketing is where creativity goes to die.

Most telly adverts feel like they sit on the cross-section between populist bandwagon jumping and overwrought aspirational plea, but the ones that have consistently frustrated me are the perfume/scent adverts - because they are uniformly about nothing and cannot be about anything because they are trying, in a visual media, to tell you why you need a smell. Cue a random big celebrity dressed in muted colours spewing random wankery from their mouths, like they just hit their head hard and were asked to explain what happened in the film Cosmopolis.

I wouldn't say advertising is completely moribund creatively. There are brilliant ads by Tony Kaye, Jonathan Glazer, David Lynch, Ridley Scott et al.

That Guinness ad by Glazer is my favourite ad of all time.

I know someone who used to work in advertising. Because she was incredibly attractive she was expected to entertain the clients when they came to the office. She left because they were obviously only one step away from asking her to fuck them, it had already got pretty sleazy. So totally Mad Men. Except she wouldn't have got a tonne of shares for doing it, just maybe a nice expense account.

But when was the last time any of them did an advert, let alone a genuinely creative one? The Guinness one you refer to is from 1999. Kids have been born, grown up, finished uni, and got a job since that advert was on.

I think it's fair to say that in the 1990s, TV advertising had something of a creative resurgence (after a lot of very bad/lazy advertising through most of the '80s). As the internet rose, though, that stuff really just died out, and was replaced by brain-dead imitators of the style. You still often see this before movies at the cinema - the product ads often clearly think they're heartbreaking works of staggering genius and originality, but they're just derivative and sad takes on '90s ads. All these horrible xmas ads people like John Lewis spend millions on are basically repeating a formula they worked out in 1997 or perhaps 2004/5 at the latest.

So I think it is fair to say advertising is largely creatively moribund, and doesn't seem likely to revive, because 99% of the effort now seems to be finding ways force people to view adverts that they don't want to see, or micro-targeting adverts in an incredibly creepy way using social media, cookies they shouldn't be allowed to access or be aware exist, and so on. The actual quality, style, and engagingness of the adverts hasn't improved. You could say "Oh well you're 43, no longer the target audience", except some of these micro-targeted ads are clearly targeting men in their 30s-50s, and yet their ability to engage is no better than awful '80s ads.

Re: sleaze, yup, sounds like when I was an intern at a marketing/advertising place in '99/'00. It was just absolutely horrifically sleazy, like horrible British cut-rate Mad Men but with so much less class/style and even more misogyny.

The only David Lynch ad I remember was that Third Place bollocks for PS2. Gaming ads definitely peaked in the PS1 era with Double Life and Mental Wealth.

There's lots of nice kicks in that 😁

It's also weird to think that an entire generation of highly flashy directors came out of advertising in the 70s/80s, then music videos in the 90s. That'll never happen again.

For a brief time in the 90s, music videos were the most expensive visual medium in the world, dollar-per-minute spending.

I didn't understand any of this

I mean, what's the thread that ties all the different parts together? Don't get me wrong, I thought it was peng

So the kid is just noticing all the cool sports wear? I thought there was suppose to be a message or something I wasn't gettiing

Worn by various famous people…

Wut?

Imagine they're all people like Timmy Mallet and Kim Wilde

These ones. Hate them.