Line #99 FridgeHorror/Advertising


1	Probably isn't a good idea to read this if you are the one who does the shopping for your household.
2	%% !!!EXAMPLES ARE NOT RECENT!!!
3	%% There have been many examples on this page about "recent" ads. This is bad writing, because in a year or so, the example will
4	%% still be marked as "recent" even though it is not anymore. You cannot trust that someone will remove the "recent" when it no
5	%% longer applies.
6	----
7	* ''Advertising/{{Skittles}}'':
8	** In the advert "Touch the Rainbow", there's a man whose hands' touch turns things into skittles. Everyone seems to think this is fine, except for the man who just that morning killed a man by shaking his hand. The horror of this moment and the others mentioned, such as that he can't touch his son, barely scratches the surface of what his life must look like. Bathroom ablutions must surely be horrendous. Shaving impossible unless it's done for him. He has to mind his every move less he kills by accident. And what if he falls over... would he turn the entire world into skittles? He absolutely has a moral obligation to have his hands sliced off!
9	** "Harvest the Rainbow" doesn't hide that the mother figure is abusive. But considering that the "skittles tree" is coming out of a guy's chest, he wasn't always that way, and his mother is harvesting said skittles to sell... Is she spreading a plague for monetary gain?!
10	** In "Believe the Rainbow", three kids are shown thousands of feet in the air sitting on top of a rainbow while eating skittles. When one of them begins to wonder if the rainbow exists or not, the part of the rainbow he's sitting on opens like a trap door and he begins falling out of the sky while the others showing little to no concern. Although it's not shown, we already know what's going to happen next...
11	* In a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24aujbPtWxc Pediasure commercial]], two mothers are sitting on the sidelines of their children's soccer game. One mother asks if her child looks 'slow'. The child is shown to be a giant container of french fries. The mothers continue to talk and the responding mother says that her daughter has been drinking Pediasure and that 'kids are what they eat.' The mother's child is shown to look like a normal girl, not a giant food, which means that Pediasure is ''[[{{Film/SoylentGreen}} made out of children.]]'' Also, [[{{ImAHumanitarian}} every other child on the field not dressed as a giant food is a cannibal.]]
12	** That, or [[{{Narm}} they all feed on soccer uniforms]]
13	* In a Charter TV commercial, a man is sitting in his arm chair puzzled by the remote control. The advert talks about their DVR and so forth, ending by saying that the record button will not cause the house to blow up or other such effects. It then gives the remote combination for blowing the house up and the man tries it, causing the house to blow up and him to land safely on his lawn. That's fine until you remember that he brushed the child's toy off of the [[FridgeHorror chair]] before he sat down. He just blew up at least two other people.
14	** Assuming, of course, that he a) has a spouse and b) spouse and child were home at the time.
15	* A Christmas commercial for Jimmy Johns shows a child opening a present box which contains a sandwich and beverage. If this were real, that sandwich would be gross and all over the place, and the beverage would be spilled out. You have to wonder how it's not like that in the commercial.
16	* There is a Sprite commercial that shows people walking into each other and jumping into crowds. And then they explode into thousands of droplets of Sprite and splash the bystanders. Which implies that if you drink Sprite, you are [[ImAHumanitarian drinking]] [[Film/SoylentGreen people]]...
17	** Another implies that Sprite contains human semen (this commercial was, of course, banned).
18	* The same could be applied to a razor commercial which showed the cartridge announcing that it was time to change itself out, and cheerfully yelling as it was being shot off the handle into the trash.
19	** Even worse is the Electrashave commercial, in which ''hundreds'' of hairs with the same face as the guy they're on get shaved off. And they enjoy it!
20	* Bug spray commercials tend to anthropomorphize insects into talking, sometimes singing bugs that are cheerfully killed by a compound not too dissimilar to nerve gasses like Sarin.
21	* Those [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUZVsnGpKfY "Disrespectoids" commercials]] for Capri Sun that have the kids transforming into inanimate objects for [[DisproportionateRetribution doing something bad to the drink pouch]]. It's supposed to be funny, but then you realize that these kids are going to be like this ''for the rest of their lives.''
22	** One has a girl turn into a [[AndIMustScream living sand sculpture]], and her ''arm falls off and dissolves''. She is standing near the tide, so it stands to reason that sooner or later she'll completely dissolve into sand, and maybe still be alive.
23	** Thankfully, it's a little better in the games and flash cartoons, where we get to see that the kids are actually getting along fairly well, [[ElementalShapeshifter Sandy Mandy]] [[CursedWithAwesome included]]. Although, it's hard to say for Pancake Peggy, who doesn't even seem capable of moving around much...
24	** [[{{Narm}} There was also one commercial containing the most light-hearted outcome: When one boy tries stepping on the pouch, it just bounces to the side and hits a car, making its alarm go off. His friend says, "You're in so much trouble!"]]
25	* Jelly Babies. How cute, a baby... [[EatsBabies which you will promptly bite the head, torso and legs off of,]] not necessarily in that order.
26	** [[LetsMeetTheMeat The sweets are sentient in the ad campaigns,]] and they are [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_b8D2EOLaw absolutely adorable.]] Boofuls is perpetually crying (which can even be seen on the physical Jelly Baby), and Bonnet hasn't even learned to walk yet. You're not just eating an effigy of a baby, you're eating a cute, giggling, bouncy sapient lifeform!
27	** And as mentioned in various advertisements, [[ImAHumanitarian the babies also eat jelly.]]
28	* What about the Jolly Green Giant? Think about it: The Jolly Green Giant is cultivating and selling his ''own kind'' as food. And why? Why is he doing this? Was he ostracized as a child for being half-human? Is he bitter about being called "Corn Dog" as a child, since he was vegetable on the outside and meat on the inside? And now he's indoctrinating Little Sprout, another of his kind, so that his reign of evil may continue!
29	* During the fifties, Creator/JimHenson made a series of commercials for Advertising/WilkinsCoffee, featuring a Kermit-like Muppet named Wilkins and another Muppet named Wontkins. The general plot of a commercial was thus: Wilkins asks Wontkins to have Wilkins Coffee, Wontkins refuses, Wilkins murders Wontkins. The [[UnfortunateImplications implications]] here are quite clear: buy Wilkins Coffee or Wilkins will murder the shit out of you! Don't believe me? [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIhPKgXeFuk See for yourself!]]
30	** For that matter, what do you suppose happened to these two now that Wilkins Coffee no longer exists? One ad implies Wilkins has the ability to [[CessationOfExistence erase Wontkins from existence]] when he turns down a cup of Wilkins; what might happen if he turned that aggression on other non-Wilkins drinkers, which now includes everybody?
31	** In other Muppet-Advertising FridgeHorror, Miss Piggy was once EATING BACON in an advert for Denny's and Pepe the King Prawn was spokesman for Long John Silver. So Piggy and Pepe want you to eat their family members. Kermit, on the other hand, refused to be the spokesperson for a frog legs restaurant in The Muppet Movie.
32	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLHZi5bJ2So A commercial for Pizza Hut's Full House XL pizza]] featured Audrey II. Yes, [[Film/LittleShopOfHorrors THAT Audrey II.]] That red stuff between the cheese and the crust? It's not tomato sauce, [[ImaHumanitarian it's human blood!]]
33	* [=McDonald's=] once proudly advertised that their Chicken [=McNuggets=] were "now" made with white meat. So what part of the chicken were we eating ''before''? [[http://www.hudin.com/blog/mcnuggets_now_with_white_meat/ Good question]].
34	** [=McDonald's=] chicken nuggets were probably just made with dark meat, which is fattier and more caloric. By advertising their switch to all-white meat, they're also advertising they've greatly reduced the amount of fat and calories in their chicken nuggets.
35	* A commercial for Acorn Stairlifts portrays an old man walking down the stairs with his cane, but he drops it down and he's stuck. It then cuts to the man riding down the stairs on the stair lift from the same position he was in when he dropped his cane... with the cane still on the floor. Was he stuck on that stairwell the entire time until the Stair Lift was installed?
36	** He probably used the stairlift to ascend the stairs in the first place and was just demonstrating what to him would've been his worst nightmare. Before, he probably didn't even dare walk up to the second story, which is rather sad and depressing to think about.
37	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VT64sfNWEbw This]] Axe commercial is disturbing enough [[LetsMeetTheMeat in its own right]], but a ''Website/{{Cracked}}'' [[http://www.cracked.com/article_17093_10-awesome-ads-for-traumatizing-children_p2.html commentator]] gives us an even more upsetting fact to add to this:
38	-->"Chocostein [[StepfordSmiler has not appeared able to express any emotion other than the trauma inducing frozen grin]]; so for all we know, [[AndIMustScream he might be screaming in horrible pain from the inside, begging for death]]."
39	* The Mini Wheat commercials. They seem a little happy with the singing and what not, considering we're going to eat them alive. It doesn't help that the new product is [[EatsBabies "Mini-Wheats Mini-Bites".]]
40	* Goldfish commercials. They may seem light hearted, but once you realize that one goldfish is basically putting his friends and family up to be eaten by us, they don't seem as happy as they used to.
41	** The Goldfish commercials have always been creepy. "The wholesome snack that smiles back -- until you bite their heads off!"
42	* The Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercial where they keep trying to lick/eat one another is basically an instance of cannibalism.
43	* Any "anthropomorphic food" ads; the happy pig selling barbeque, the Happy Meal guys, etc. The whole cheerful, sentient, wants to be eaten, and sometime alive is pervasive and horrifying.
44	* Advertising/MAndMs commercials, especially the ones depicting individual M&M's trying desperately to hide themselves from humans who want nothing more than to mash them apart with their teeth. Seeing the look of pure horror on their colorful faces is enough to make anyone think twice about that next handful...
45	* The adverts in the UK for Mazuma, a company that specialise in recycling old unwanted mobile phones and throwing a bit of money your way for the trouble. The cute little cartoon phones happily leap into the envelope, but no mention is made of what horrors happen when the envelope is opened in the recycling plant and the phones are gutted for their parts...
46	* A K9 Advantix commercial shows a white dog singing "there may be bugs on some of you mugs, but there ain't no bugs on me". This sounds cute until it sounds like it says "mutts"; where it almost sounds like a doggie version of racism. Plus due to the fact that the singing dog was white and the itchy dogs were not. I am not saying it was racist; just pointing this out.
47	** Also reeks of UnfortunateImplications
48	* The Mucinex commercials feature anthropomorphized mucus that are moving into a human's lungs, throwing family reunions, and playing with their children. At the end of the commercial, with the aid of Mucinex, the human coughs up the mucus, evicting them from their lungs. Congratulations, you just made an entire family homeless.
49	** It's OK, we're obviously supposed to hate the guy because he looks like a disgusting working class luddite. Or maybe he's supposed to be a jew? Lesson: evicting the mucus wouldn't be OK if it were a respectable middle class family.
50	** As bad as the original was, Mucinex went and doubled down with a touch of UnfortunateImplications. To highlight how much longer Mucinex lasts than 4, 6, or even 8 hour cold medicines, they decided to show a guy minding his own business being stalked and harassed by "Mr. Mucus." First, Mr. Mucus drops out of a tree next to him going "heh, heh, missed ya." Later, Mr. Mucus tries to break into his car...''''through the windshield while he's driving.'''''Finally, when the poor guy gets home, Mr. Mucus is there... waiting for him in the kitchen... next to the cutlery. So finally, our poor, battered victim takes a Mucinex, and Mr. Mucus proceeds to panhandle on the street... right in front of the guy's house! Ya know, because Mr. Mucus "just lost his job." So the commercial's message is "buy Mucinex, or somebody's going to hire homeless weirdos to stalk you." [[DoesThisRemindYouOfAnything Guess we know now why Mucinex is so expensive.]]
51	* Advertising/{{Trix\|Rabbit}}: children starve a rabbit, insisting that their cereal is for them and not to be consumed by rabbits.
52	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q3CcKvU4NXg This]] commercial for gushers has a kid with gushers for an eye. Everybody loves him because his eye is so delicious...
53	** That's nothing. While on the topic of fruit snacks, there's [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eFvIJ_GD0Y this]] Fruit by the Foot commercial with two kids that keep wishing stuff onto each other. After wishing hands and hair into fruit by the foot, one kid wishes the other person's ''DNA'' was made of fruit by the foot. Cue a human-shaped lump of fruit by the foot with clothes on. ''He just killed the person by switching his molecules with a sugary food substance''. That he'll probably [[Film/SoylentGreen eat]].
54	* An ad for Campbell's Soup involves a snowman melting away from the warmth of the soup into a little boy. The FridgeHorror comes when you think about how he got that way...
55	** [[{{Lampshaded}} Lampshaded]] by WebVideo/TheNostalgiaCritic in his "Rise of the Commercials" special, in which the kid [[{{HumanPopsicle}}actually has frozen to death]], and to make it worse, ''[[{{AnArmAndALeg}} the father tears off her arm.]]''
56	* The Swiffer commercials. You mean I'm sweeping up and then throwing away tiny people?
57	** Tiny people who are actually enjoying being swept up and thrown away...because they equate being carried away by a cleaning product with true love.
58	* The commercials for Dow Bathroom Cleaner with scrubbing bubbles. You have all these sophisticated, anthropomorphic bubble-creatures meticulously cleaning up a bathtub. But they all get washed down the drain at the end, with an echoic, signature "...so you don't have toooooo....." emanating from the pipes. Mister Rogers actually wrote a song to allay kids' fears of going down bathtub drains.
59	* In a commercial for Ancestry.com a woman says, I believe, her "great great(?) grandmother had five children and only one survived. It can be so easy to forget just how lucky you are." I used to think she meant that she was lucky ''she'' didn't lose four out of five children like that woman; but I later saw it a different way: did she mean she was lucky that one child survived for her to descend from?
60	** She's fortunate because she could've very easily not existed at all, considering only 1/3 (she mentioned only three children in the actual commercial) of her great-grandmother's children survived.
61	** A less scary alternative is that she means she's lucky to live in a time and a place where infant/child mortality rates are so low.
62	* There's this one Buffalo Wild Wings commercial in which one of the employees pulled a switch to inform a power plant worker to shut off all power in the entire city except for the restaurant itself. A city that includes hospitals with patients hooks up to respiratory systems or babies in life support.
63	* A commercial for an insurance company shows people being inspired to commit random acts of kindness by seeing others do the same. The ad starts with a woman preventing a distracted pedestrian from wandering into traffic. A driver sees this and is nice to someone else later, which is seen by another person who...yada yada yada. In the penultimate scene, a man at an airport helps an elderly gentleman retrieve his suitcase. This is witnessed by...the same woman from the first act of kindness, and the last scene sees her saving a distracted pedestrian from wandering into traffic. Dear God. What kind of cyclic hellscape have we wandered into here?
64	* A commercial for Chef Boyardee has a girl picking a can of the stuff out of the grocery store, only for her mom to put it back as they've had Chef all week. Luckily for the girl, the can gains sentience and rolls all the way home towards her. That's cute, until you realize the mom is gonna think that she stole it. Better hope the can is capable of explaining itself, too!
65	** You also have to wonder if the can realizes that the girl didn't want it for a pet or anything, she wants to open it up and consume its insides!
66	** Another Chef Boyardee commercial features a monster breaking into the car of a camping couple, eating a can of Chef Boyardee, then turning into a boy. On top of that, it eats the Chef Boyardee raw.
67	* A commercial for a cell phone company has two parent phones cooing over their new baby phone. While remarking about how much better their child is, another phone in the nursery has a low signal and a battery runs out on a third and shuts off.
68	** Speaking of cellphones, extend the [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEcvgj-AfnQ Verizon Galaxy Nexus]] commercial using the same sort of thinking. These real life friends rush into various circles when the phone categorizes them. Now, what happens when people get ''deleted'' from your contact list?
69	*** Also, all his friends are in a category, but there's nobody in ''his circle'' besides him.
70	* The [[http://www.bestads.tv/view/5579/jello-temptations-/ Jell-O Temptations ads]] are ''full'' of this. AbusiveParents played for ''laughs.''
71	** Also, if the kids are punished like that for ''eating goddamn pudding'', what would their parents do if they did something genuinely bad?
72	** The parents probably bought the Jell-O Temptations for themselves and the regular Jell-O pudding cups for the children. They probably also explained this to the children. Therefore, I see absolutely nothing wrong with the parents punishing their children for consciously and knowingly taking something that wasn't theirs to have, especially since this is the parents' money to spend. If you're an adult who buys all your own stuff, you'd understand.
73	*** Though that is a possibility, the fact that we never actually ''see'' it keeps this in FridgeHorror territory, since for all we know these children really were being punished just for eating pudding, which they may or may not have known they weren't supposed to take.
74	* The Bing commercials, where you have all these people looking blankly ahead reciting random information in a blank voice. While one sane person looks around in utter horror.
75	** The Christmas one especially as you see the little kid get more and more desperate to find a non-pod person.
76	* I forget what the company was, but in the late '90s/early 2000's (forget which), there was a commercial for high speed internet. A guy who had it proudly proclaimed that due to the fast internet connection, he had been across the internet and back. If you think about it, that could mean he looked at every single site on the internet, which means every twisted, disgusting porn site (including [[PaedoHunt the underage variety...]]), every shock site, every hate site, and probably downloaded everything illegal in existence. Yikes. ([[JustForFun/TVTropesWillRuinYourLife On the bright side]], this commercial predates Website/TVTropes.)
77	* In one of the early commercials for the UsefulNotes/NintendoDS commercials the protagonist is almost omnipotent with his ''touch-''powers. There is a lot of Horror looking at the portrayed sketches. In one of them there are 5 guys in the showers, and 2 throw their towels at the protagonist, and laugh at them, it is later seen that he shrinks their reproductive organs, not enough to make them unusable or infertile, but enough to socially ''kill'' the guys in the showers. Now imagine the rejections of future potential girlfriend, or the daily confrontations these guys must face for the REST OF THEIR LIVES, only 2 were actually teasing the protagonist so the rest are just being the VictimizedBystander, they will all probably get into depressions, and 1 of them might commit suicide in the short term, and the rest maybe in long terms since they will no longer able to lead normal lives anymore. Later in the same commercial the protagonist is featured moving a plane to form a ''heart-shape'', and you see the pilot and the co-pilot vomiting, now imagine if their would be a pregnant woman inside that aeroplane, she could give birth to a mentally and physically damaged baby, or worse get a miscarriage due to the aforementioned event. Imagine if you would sit on that plane and was on the toilet when the protagonist moves the plane, YIKE!
78	* In one [=DirectTV=] commercial, man with cable + scrambled cable divided by work ethic ---> An innocent man goes to JAIL! Flash forward and we see the defendant working out thinking of the lawyer that had failed to defend him before getting release; what is the first thing that man does the moment he gets out of prison? [[spoiler: HE BLOWS UP THE LAWYER'S FRICKING HOUSE!]]
79	* For this [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tTc8__lXkM Pokemon Blue And Red]] commercial, you should be worried about the fact that they thought it was okay to show an advertisement of 151 different creatures being trapped on bus, then violently crushed into a single tiny rectangular console, by some sadist bus driver, just to [[WhatDoYouMeanItsForKids advertise a childrens game!]]
80	* In an aluminum foil advertisement, it shows sentient beings like humans, and animals made of aluminum foil. There is one wearing a chefs hat, and that to is aluminum foil. And they cook what seems to be sentient chicken nuggets, which is horrifying enough, in an oven, in aluminum foil. That all came from the same roll. That aluminum foil is probably, to them, flayed skin or muscle fibers or other giblets along that vein. They seem perfectly fine with it, is the worst part
81	* A promotional comic for the Chocapic's cereal brand had the brand's mascot go back to ancient Aztec time. There, he helps the local prince, who suspiciously looks like his human friend ([[MightyWhitey Who, by the way, is a white, blond kid]]), to win a ball game. Everything's looks cool... Until you remember a detail that got mentioned earlier (and that is historically correct): the losing team is ''to be sacrificed to the Aztec gods''. Yay ! The prince's team won ! It still means that a dozen men will have their hearts painfully removed from their chest while they're still alive ! Yippee !
82	** Except that there's evidence that it may actually be the WINNERS that get sacrificed...
83	* A [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMuLzRxrNYI commercial]] for ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBros2'' has a bunch of coins popping up and things turning into Mario coins. At one point a ice cream van turns into coins and the driver falls through it. The next scene has a whole city of skyscrapers turning into coin. Now if a car turning into coin means the driver can no longer sit in it, what happened to all the people in the upper floors of the Skyscraper?
84	* Once upon a time there was [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7AUiD0lNvOo a commercial for Subway]] which featured a man making a wish... causing his wife to turn into a sandwich.
85	** And what spouse hasn't told their spouse, "Oooooh, you're so sweet, I could just eat you up!"
86	* In an ad for a pertussis foundation, the speech from the concerned woman about how pertussis can be spread from parent to child is inter-cut with the child in question showing the side effects. The sound effect of a child enduring whooping cough is bad enough, but then you realize that they sat beside a child, put a microphone on him, then sat and listened to him hack himself unconscious for the sake of the commercial.
87	** For a disease that has a distinct auditory symptom, it's only sensible to make a recording for the purpose of educating patients and training medical professionals. And the point of the commercial is education, they're not exploiting a sick kid to sell something. It's still a horrifying sound, but it's deliberate.
88	** Indeed, the people making the commercial probably obtained that sound by re-using ''training audio'' intended for medical and nursing schools.
89	* There was an ad for Ribena fruit drink where a group of animated sentient berries drink the sugary drink while SMILING. One would think this would be like humans drinking each other's blood. Maybe they're vampire berries?
90	* A commercial aired for MLK that started with telling us on his gravestone, he has "Free at last" written. This isn't the problem. They then go on to say that [[UnfortunateImplications death is the "free man's freedom"]] (exact words). The scary part comes in when they say ''[[GrimReaper they want to]]'' '''[[GrimReaper spread this freedom to everyone]]'''. It is perfectly acceptable to cower in fear.
91	* The wall decor in Pita Pit restaurants shows whole chickens and turkeys frolicking with anthropomorphic body parts of butchered animals, including a bacon strip, a ham, and a T-bone steak.
92	* In a commercial for genital herpes medication, it was stated that nearly 70% of people with genital herpes got it from their partners when they had no signs or symptoms. The horror comes in when you realize the implication - over 30% of people with genital herpes saw the herpes and didn't care.
93	** Actually, some of them might have gotten oral from someone with a cold sore and either thought nothing of it, or not looked close enough to spot it. And ''that'' person probably got it from a family member, who Kissed The Baby while they had an active sore.
94	* In a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNjQishYOy0 Gatorade]] commercial, the Oklahoma City Thunder is playing the Miami Heat. Kevin Durant of the Thunder is about to dunk the ball, but then Dwyane Wade of the Heat blocks Durant's shot...only to reveal it is [[AllJustADream All Just A Dream]] by Kevin Durant. So Durant decides to step up his game by [[TrainingFromHell intensely practicing]], so when the Thunder/Heat game actually takes place, Durant is able to successfully dunk the ball despite Dwyane Wade's attempt at blocking it...only to reveal it is [[spoiler: [[AllJustADream All Just A Dream]] by Dwyane Wade. It seems like a clever twist at first, until you realize that Dwyane Wade is going to step up his game by intensely practicing, where he successfully blocks Kevin Durant's shot, then Kevin Durant will wake up, decides he needs to step up his game...[[GroundhogDayLoop and so on...and so on...]]]]
95	* The "Crazy Good" animated Pop Tarts commercials which are in the same vein as the aforementioned cannibalistic Cinnamon Toast Crunch commercials. We see these poor, unsuspecting treats being tricked in a variety of ways (going on a tour bus to meet a beloved band of theirs, a day at the spa, even one method which was used as a means of escape, etc.) by people who not only want to ''burn them alive'' '''and then''' consume their corpses. The commercials are usually played during daytime hours on Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network.
96	** The worst yet have been the new PB&J commercials, featuring ''a nurse eating a baby.'' '''In front of its parents.'''
97	** And now with the A&W Root Beer and Orange Crush variants we have a [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZ4clg-FIt8 commercial]] that's basically a girl getting the two Pop-Tarts drunk on their own sodas. Made worse by the fact that she utters a line to the effect of "Can't handle your soda boys?", implying that she's going to do something with the Pop-Tarts. (And no, not eat them.)
98	** What's worse is that it's implied that the Pop-Tarts have actual lives. ''They are being taken from their lives in order to be eaten.''
99	* This [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Z91YkPatw State Farm]] commercial. It starts off really cute with the way every time the couple says they're "never" going to do something, they turn right around and do it. It's cute up until the last "never" where the husband/dad looks down at his asleep family and says softly, "I'm never letting go." Except he's shown to have contradicted every single "never" throughout his life to this point, which just means [[TearJerker he probably left them a few weeks/months/years later]].
100	** Bear that in mind when State Farm subtly reminds you they also sell ''life'' insurance...
101	** I'm pretty sure he meant that last statement figuratively, but still...
102	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw4qlXALA2c This Polish campaign]] regarding [[spoiler: sexual abuse of children]].
103	* The old "Mac Tonite" UsefulNotes/McDonalds commercials had a faintly spooky central figure with a crescent moon head. [[RetroactiveRecognition The actor has moved on]] to, among other things, the [[Film/PansLabyrinth Pale Man at the dinner table with eyes in his hands.]]
104	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RdHTeMFPko This Japanese battery commercial]] [[HilariousInHindsight (predating the Duracell and Energizer bunny commercials)]] with the guy telling you the many ways to use the battery, until the end, when we find out he's a robot and then... [[spoiler: DrivenToSuicide, anybody?]]
105	* [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF4bGNocwV8 The]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQ-6Aoq1zyo "Sorry I was Eating a Milky Way"]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhIagtp-4fs commercials]] have people eating Milky Ways while simultaneously absentmindedly trying to perform another task. I guess it's funny when the tattoo artist accidentally misspells "No Regrets" on a biker's arm, but what if a mother was eating one while her child was ''in danger''?
106	* There's a rather touching Duracell [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA7xYeiWg54 commercial]] based around ''Franchise/StarWars'' where kids bring an R2-D2 toy to a fellow kid. It's nice and all, but then you realize those kids were in a hospital playing rebels and you think of what they could possibly rebel against, be it the medical system or the God that placed them in the hospital in the first place. What makes this worse is that the commercial is based heavily off of ''Film/RogueOne'', and if you have seen it, you'd know that [[spoiler:all the protagonists, i.e. rebels, die. Considering ''why'' they're in the hospital [[LittlestCancerPatient to begin with]], and it just becomes [[TearJerker sad]].]]
107	* One Mountain Dew ad features a man [[GenderBender turning his friend into a woman]] against his will. First, it also alters his personality and memories with the implication that she is now this guy's girlfriend. With this power, what else could he decide to do? You also have to wonder if the transformation altered everything so that this new girlfriend is always viewed to exist or whether people will wonder where the man she formerly was disappeared to.
108	* One [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qfMWU6xSeo 1-800-CONTACTS ad]] has a helmet-less astronaut in a spacecraft going towards the restroom. He goes to a room with 2 doors: the restroom, and an exit to outer space. Not having his contacts, he doesn't know which door to choose. He ends up opening the outer space door, ''and gets sucked into space, probably getting killed in the process.''
109	** Even worse, his partner doesn't have a helmet either. 2 astronauts are now dead because one of them didn't have contacts.
110	* One radio ad for a healthy breakfast cereal is ''entirely based around a home invasion''. The ad starts with a mom getting her kids ready for school, when a stranger forcibly enters their house. When asked who he is, he replies that "I'm the man who's going to swap this cereal (sound effect) for new Grainberry cereal with onyx sorghum!" The son asks, "What's onyx sorghum?" and is told "It's an ancient grain with lots of antioxidants. Ancient Egyptians ate it... you want to build pyramids, don't you Billy?" The mother is completely unconcerned by the fact that not only did somebody break into her house, but he is also now forcing her kids to consume an unidentified product. Instead, she says to the invader, "But my kids like (switch to whisper) ''sugar cereals!''" The man's reply, also in a whisper, is, "What your kids like is ''flavor!''" At this point, the (very young) daughter makes an "Oooh!" sound, which does not exactly sound like she's reacting to something that she's enjoying.
111	** The whole ad is full of [[NightmareFuel Nightmare Fuel]], but the [[FridgeHorror Fridge Horror]] comes from the realization that the pyramids [[ArtisticLicenseHistory typically depicted as being built by slaves.]] ''The man was threatening to sell the son into slavery!''
112	*** Someone must have realized how terrifying the ad was, because later a version started being aired that changed the "Ancient Egyptians" part to being about prefessional baseball players instead, and much of the rest of the ad was completely cut out, leaving only the initial break-in and the concern about flavor.
113	* A commercial for Juicy Drop Gum has a joke at the end where a girl dressed as a magician turns a boy into a monkey. The problem comes in when you see another commercial where a different boy has a monkey he's named Mr. Drops. If these ads happen to air pretty close to each other, or you see the magician one first, you might get the idea in your head that [[ForcedTransformation after the kid became a monkey, the magician girl sold him off to someone else, or he was simply found and made a pet.]]
114	* This [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95AoHKi9EI Miller Lite ad]] depicts a lowly gas station clerk being accosted by [[Series/TheSopranos Phil Leotardo]] and another Mafia goon. The joke is that the clerk keeps mistaking the [[ShameIfSomethingHappened "protection"]] they're offering as sealing in the Miller Lite's taste, but [[PoorCommunicationKills he doesn't specify this to the mobsters themselves]]. From their perspective, he's just turned down their "offer", despite [[BullyingADragon being much shorter and weaker than them]]. Given how they end the commercial saying they'll [[CurbstompBattle "mop the floor with this guy"]] and Phil's AxCrazy nature, it's pretty clear that the poor clerk is going to get roughed up at best, murdered at worst.
115	* In recent times, [=AirHeads=] ad campaigns have featured people eating the candy to have fun by floating around with cartoonishly-inflated heads. Let's just say that they'd better hope they're close to the ground again when their heads deflate, as opposed to dozens of feet in the air, or above cloud level, or at the Pearly Gates, or else they'll be going there for ''real''.

Context FridgeHorror / Advertising