Dethroning Moment / Advertising

There are many ads that make you wonder What Were They Selling Again?. These, however, go beyond that.

Keep in mind:

• Sign your entries with your own handle. We can see it in the edit history.
• This is for fan reactions to commercials.
• Do not remove an entry from the page nor create a Justifying Edit to defend a moment - it's an opinion. Caveat: A Moment may be removed if it is blatantly untrue or otherwise breaks the rules. However, if you do remove an entry, move it to discussion and explain what is wrong (blatantly untrue, multiple entries for the same work, unsigned, etc). Even if the rules were broken, people should know what they did wrong.
• No natter.
• Try and make entries actual DMoSs, not just a protracted whinge about how bad an artist has become. Deconstructions of tasteless jokes don't really count.
• No ALLCAPS, no bold, and no italics unless it's the title of a work. We are not yelling the DMoSes out loud.

noreallife

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Automotives

• Mystic Eclectic: From a Kia Cars Commercial: a father rushes home, with the journey ending with him placing a goldfish in an empty bowl a split second before his young daughter enters and greets her pet, with silent commendation from his wife. Deliberately Blunt, lyricised rendition of the William Tell Overture aside, this commercial reads to this troper as: "Have you purchased our shiny, reliable new car? Congratulations! Pets are disposable again, all the while replaceable with your children being none the wiser!" Black comedy parenting dressed in classical oeuvre at its most skewed.
  • Time Traveler Jessica: Plus this fish is going to die too - there's a reason you're supposed to put the bag in the bowl for a while. The water has to be the same temperature or the poor fish will die of shock.
  • fluffything: Even if the gesture of the husband replacing the goldfish were merely an act of genuine concern of not wanting his daughter heartbroken, the way he went about doing it is one of the worst ways possible. Fish are very delicate creatures and must be transported carefully. Even if the car is safe for humans, zooming around at high speeds is going to be extremely stressful for the fish. Not to mention that the fish was kept in only a plastic bag and secured in a seat belt, which should've ruptured giving how the guy was driving and how the bag was moving back and forth so violently. I guess the proper transportation of pet fish isn't a concern for the commercial makers at Kia. Hope that little girl in that ad enjoys her new dead goldfish.
• Blackbird Mizu: Those Toyota Highlander commercials with the little kid. Basically this smug little bastard sits in his parents Highlander and talks about how he and his parents are so cool because of it. Meanwhile, a sad kid sits in the back of an older car while his parents sing. He mouths "Help me". Really? I normally don't mind car commercials that suggest getting the car will make you seem cooler, but the Highlander commercials with the kid piss me off to no end. For one, the implication that parents should buy cars based on what will make their kids popular and "cool". Second, we're supposed to feel sorry for the kid whose parents have the old, ugly car? Uh, no. I get that kids do get embarrassed by their parents, and sometimes there is good reason, but a bad car is not one of them. Not everyone can afford a big, fancy new SUV. Third, the little bastard whose parents have the Highlander acting all cool. His parents bought that car, what right does he have to be so damn smug about it? You don't choose your parents, and he was lucky enough to get parents with a lot of money. He has no right to act like he's so cool because his parents can buy nice things!
• kablammin45: Another Toyota ad, this one involves a dad finding his kids in a Toyota SUV and excitingly telling them about the treehouse he has built in the backyard. Toyota could have handled this better, but no, they had to make these kids smarmy brats too. The kids ask in rather deadpan ways: "Does it have (insert awesome feature that Toyota's newest vehicle has)?" The Dad answers no each time. It ends with them saying: "Ummmm, I think we'll stay in here." Dang it, Toyota, why are all your kids such condescending fatheads? Get it through your head that the world isn't completely like that! It also brings us the unfortunate implication that kids think that if it doesn't have a screen, it's boring.
• Ecojosh 1: There are some commercials for Honda that involve people visiting a competitor, talking about how the Honda is better than what the competitor is selling, and then leaving to buy a Honda. What sort of douche does that? "Let's visit a dealership that doesn't sell what we want, waste the salesman's time, insult him, and then leave."
• Sam Max: The "Don't Touch My Dart" commercials rub me the wrong way mainly because the owner of the car is a Jerkass who's obsessed with his car, and doesn't want anyone touching it, not even his neighbor, who tries various things to touch it. What solidified my hatred for them, and in fact gave me the impression in the first place, is this one. The neighbor puts a birdhouse over the guy's car. He tries to poorly justify his actions, and then explains that he (the owner of the car) had a bird that he used to hang out with all the time. Then owner says, "You're the bird with hurt feelings, are you?" The guy says yes and dumps birdseed on it. The implication is that the owner of the car viewed his car as more important than his friendship with his neighbor, changing the context of the other commercials and making the neighbor seem like a Jerkass Woobie at worst. What's worse was that it was Played for Laughs. That wasn't funny at all, that was depressing!
• Ferigeras: Without a doubt one of the most anger-inducing commercial I have ever seen is one particular Firestone tires commercial. To summarize, a woman comes home from shopping and sees that her husband has fallen asleep while playing video games (for some reason...), and then she instantly decides that it would be a good idea to just take the console (which isn't even a real one) put it outside on the street, have her husband wake up and come outside to watch her... running over his console with her car. To be clear, it's absolutely understandable to be annoyed when you come home, only to witness someone (family member, wife, husband, etc.) fall asleep and the entire room being a mess to top it off, but this next action in the ad reeks of Disproportionate Retribution. The first two times she almost ran over it were just faked just to tease him a little, only for her to actually run over it afterwards. The husband doesn't even remotely show the most accurate reaction someone would really have in such a situation (his reaction was what I can only describe as "Oh dear, what a bummer!"), and just to round it up, the wife gives him the controller that still remained and gives him a kiss on the neck as if this wasn't a big deal. And it turns out that this was to show how durable Firestone tires are. Just a god-awful way of presenting your product.
• BJSnipers: It's another Toyota commercial. Good news is there no spoiled snot-nose kid; it's about the Prius commercials in 2016. It stars four incumbent criminals robbing a bank, and left their getaway car for it to tow away for parking it illegally. So they took a Prius and left some money behind for the owner. Okay, that is nice an all by showing they have a heart, but they are criminals. Okay the last sentence was nit-picky, but we are getting started. All these commercials are showing a stereotype that the police are idiots for not catching those robbers. The chase last twenty-seven days, I repeat twenty-seven days, and the idiot cops came with a plan to use a Prius to catch a Prius. First off, I don't think car chases will last this long. Second, hybrid cars like Prius tend run out of fuel faster than regular cars when in high mileage; and squad cars are mostly regular cars, so using a Prius as a squad car is useless. Now the biggest turnoff to those commercials, the citizens are cheering for the criminals and outright helping them escape with their Prius. Why they are cheering for/helping them, it's never explained. Also like the The Sour Patch Kids ad above, those fifteen second ads are unskippable on Youtube. Because of these ads, I am never buying anything from Toyota.
• Pgj1997: If you've been on YouTube during November of 2016, chances are you've seen (sigh) "Sailor Moon’s Ford Fusion Dream". Now, for the record, I'm not a Sailor Moon fan. However, if I were, I'd be pissed at this. I can tell they chose one of the most iconic scenes from the original animé to catch the viewers' attention. All is normal until Usagi says "the constellation of the new Ford Fusion! (Squee)". Then the whole thing just turns into a generic car commercial. Way to pull at our heartstrings, Ford. Now go enjoy the rabid fans in the comment section. Luckily, the ad's skippable, but still.
• Jade Eyes 1: The early 2000s (2006-7) Volkswagen Jetta "Safe Happens" campaign was pretty controversial. To summarize, the commercials featured ordinary Jetta owners driving quietly and bantering with a passenger before suddenly (and very loudly) being struck by another vehicle — and surviving because, naturally, they were driving a Jetta (with the driver expressing their shock by exclaiming, "Holy shi-"). Some people loved the ads for being memorable and well-executed, others hated them for being overly violent and relying on jump scares. Volkswagen's response to the haters, however, is what provides the Moment of Suck: instead of the usual formula, that particular commercial has the passenger talking about the ad campaign itself, complaining that "they went too far" and are being "shocking for the sake of being shocking", while the driver defends the ads. Guess which of side the car gets violently rammed by an oncoming vehicle, and which occupant is nearly killed? It's so petty and mean-spirited, it took me from being neutral about the campaign, to hating it.
• CloverGoldngreen There's this new Chevrolet commercial where a girl's boyfriend is joining she and her parents on a camping trip. But when the young couple decide to lock hands, the Dad takes the opportunity to show off the camera system on his truck to intimidate the boyfriend out of "any funny business" with the daughter. A Boyfriend-Blocking Dad in 2022? Seriously? Even his wife looks unamused.

Beverages

• Gonzo Link: Two words: Keith Stone. Attempted mascots don't get much more annoying and audience insulting than this abomination of an ad campaign. With the appearance of your stereotypical southern redneck, Keith was someone who managed to somehow fall in with luxury and lots of hot women despite being an insufferable asshole and misogynist prick, all because of his mere association with Keystone beer. The fact that Keystone clearly had high hopes for him as a mascot makes it all the more appealing that I rarely, if ever see it anymore.
  • Aya Reiko: Not only that, but the whole thing was Totally Radical cranked up to 11. Just about everything about the ad campaign screamed at least 10 years out of date at a minimum. I have no earthly idea just who this was supposed to appeal to outside of douchebag Disco Stu's still living in the 90's.
• Blackbird Mizu: The commercials for Dr Pepper 10. It's one thing to try and pass off your product as manly, but they do this by directly saying "This product is not for women!". They imply that women don't like action movies, and overall the whole thing seems like an immature "No Girls Allowed!" type of thing that a 9-year old boy would do.
  • t3hdow: Honestly, when I first watched the commercial, I thought it came off as great satire on the immature "manly" ads that have been all too common at the time. It was so insipid, over-the-top and ridiculous - the guy trying to pour Dr Pepper into a cup while driving and partly spilling it was the highlight - there was no way it couldn't have been parody. Too bad that wasn't the case with the commercial's tagline at the end, which ruined an otherwise hilarious commercial. The DMoS also doubles as a missed opportunity, thanks to the producers not having the hindsight to realize the gem they created. If only they cut out the last few seconds...
  • Lady Norbert: For some extra DMoS, I actually sent a letter to the company when those ads came out, because they bothered me so much. The response I got was completely condescending and rude, saying that I should be glad they challenge my perceptions or some crap like that. It made me glad I've always disliked Dr Pepper...
• Supa Soap 101: For this Troper, it was the Pepsi Next Baby Commercial. The ad shows a mother caring for her newborn child, when suddenly the father comes in with a box of Pepsi Next. The next following scenes show the parents being so excited about the soda, and ignoring their child, who displays amazing talents! This commercial displayed how bad some parents are, to where they care more about a soda over their own child! A. Fucking. Soda. It also angers me, because this troper also was ignored through most of his childhood. If these were real parents, then they would've had their child taken away by Child Services.
• fluffything: For the longest time, the Five Hour Energy Drink commercials have been non-entertaining, but not that bad. Their most recent commercial? Pure utter douchiness. It essentially is just this utterly obnoxious guy going on and on about all the "amazing" things he did in five hours thanks to the aforementioned energy drink. Oh, how annoying this guy is. He's every single stereotype, parody, and whatnot of a Jerk Jock utter douche annoyance completely and utterly played straight. Everything about this commercial from the guy's bragging to the blatant use of Auto-Tune makes me want to reach into the TV and punch him. The guy makes Johnny Bravo look like a upper-class gentleman in comparison. Hey, whoever pitched this commercial idea to Five Hour Energy Drink's executives? Try something less annoying next time.
• dstar95: Is Super Bowl commercials allowed in this page? Because I would like to nominate the infamous Mountain Dew Kickstart commercial Puppy Monkey Baby. Yes, you read right, it's about the creepy mascot with a head of a puppy, body of a monkey and legs of a baby with a diaper. It started with three friends staying about to watching TV bored when the mascot walk through the small door that came out of nowhere while holding a ice bucket of the aforementioned products. Here it gets weird...it starts dancing while saying its species name repeatedly complete with a rattle and it licked one of the guy's face before the music kicks in and they started dancing with it. The slogan? "Three Awesome Things Combined". That's makes everything better! The mascot is in CG so its movements looked forced and stop-motioned, which made it even worse. I get that they tried to appeal a lot of customers by combining a puppy, a monkey, and a baby but it just Came Back Wrong.
  • Space Hunter Drake Redcrest: Thank God someone else agrees with me! This was one of the dumbest Super Bowl commercials I've seen. The whole thing feels like a Forced Meme with the repetition of the name and concept, the concept itself sounds dumb, and there's little build-up for the thing's existence (maybe they could have had one of the guys say "You know who can help us have a good time? Puppy Monkey Baby!"). Also, was I the only one who found it a bit poorly-thought that the black guy drank the grape soda first?
• Star Tropes: "Be not bland, drink not bland!" A flavored water company (don't remember the brand) insists on showing commercials that aren't bland—and their way of doing so involves a family eating dinner on furniture that's been nailed to the ceiling. It Makes Just as Much Sense in Context. And, of course, their food and flavored water keep falling to the floor. Apparently, they're so busy Flipping the Bird at Isaac Newton that they can't hear him laughing his butt off at them.

Breakfast Foods

• Trix commercials:
  • Blackjack 254: All Trix commercials are infuriating (that poor rabbit), but I specifically remember a commercial where the rabbit encounters aliens, and they say something, and the commercial challenges us to find out what they are saying. For those who remember this commercial, who honestly thought for one minute the aliens were saying anything other than "Silly Rabbit, Trix are for kids"?
  • ading: I think the worst Trix commercial is the one where the rabbit tries to get the Trix from the kids by dressing up as a waiter and... giving the kids Trix. It makes even less sense in context.
  • WRM 5: For me, the worst came after the poll. For those who don't remember, in one ad from 1991 the Rabbit entered a race where the prize for winning was a bowl of Trix cereal. He won the race, surprisingly, and just before he got his prize the commercial stopped and asked kids to write in to General Mills and tell them whether they believed the rabbit should get the cereal. The vote was overwhelmingly yes, and so of course in the next commercial they had to keep their word and let him finally have... one bite. Then those horrid brat kids humiliated him yet again (and even worse than usual) and took the cereal away.
  • savagegenius: The one commercial I absolutely is the 2000 Figure Skating ad. In it, the Trix rabbit competes in a figure skating competition in disguise, and ends up winning the first place trophy plus a box of Trix. Just when it seems like he’ll finally get to enjoy the cereal, however, he ends up falling through the ice and those stupid kids proceed steal not only his Trix, but also his damn trophy. Um, Earth to kids-that rabbit won those prizes fair and square. You could’ve easily had him cheat in some way or even distract the audience so he could steal the Trix, but NOPE! You just decided to torture him by taking away what was rightfully his. Fuck you, kids!
• Cheerios commercials:
  • fluffything: One Cheerios commercial makes me seethe with rage whenever I see it; the one where some Bratty Half-Pint girl goes around reacting to everything (and I do mean everything) with "That's for babies" except for the aforementioned Cheerios. Now, the commercial is supposed to imply that you never outgrow loving the cereal. But, instead, the little girl comes off as some smug little brat who treats everything that's not Cheerios with such utter snark and disdain. Hey, Cheerios? Next time you want to show us that people will never outgrow your precious cereal, how about you do so by using something other than some whiny brat?
    • Crazy Luigi: Even I could've done something better for this kind of message. Show a young kid enjoying the Cheerios, then go into an adult version of that same kid still liking it, and then move to that adult going into their grandparent stage still having some enjoyment out of the Cheerios. I admit, it's not a masterpiece myself, but at least it wouldn't be so damn annoying.
    • Gonzo Link: For me, the real DMoS isn't so much the commercial itself (which is terrible, to be sure) but the fact that Cheerios keeps reusing the damn thing. Every time I boot up a video on blip and this abomination resurfaces after months of being dormant, it takes just about all the effort in the world to keep from putting my fist through the screen of my laptop.
    • lilpurplebird: Oh gosh, yes, all the way. It doesn't help that her voice is very jarring. Why they chose this specific girl is beyond me. Just because it may be her first time in front of the camera doesn't mean she's commercial material. And you can tell the mother isn't very happy with her as a whole, that laugh at the end was obviously forced.
  • jccw227: Another Cheerios commercial that particularly bugs me is is one where a dad pours a bowl for his infant son, and as soon as his back is turned, the older brother comes in and steals the cereal and runs off. As soon as he leaves the dad turns around, laughs and says, "The Cheerios bandit got you again?" Implying that this isn't the first time this has happened. So in other words, he knows his older son is stealing, but does nothing to discourage it. The fact that the family is African American doesn't help matters.
• Kittens: Those dang Special K commercials; I just noticed that in a lot of commercials they portray foods like donuts, chocolate and ice cream like its the most satanic thing in the world. I do like the cereal and the bars, they are good and all, but is it really necessary for them to make women think that if they ate something like a doughnut or ice cream one day they're gonna turn into grotesque fat monsters the next day? Really there's nothing wrong with eating fattening foods as long as you exercise and eat healthy things along with it but I really think it's ridiculous that they're making sugary fattening foods look evil.
  • fluffything: By far, the worst of the Special K commercials, in my opinion at least, features a girl going door to door selling donuts. She rings the doorbell and a lady answers it. Said lady then smugly says "You're cute" and slams the door in the poor girl's face. Really, just really? The commercial with the guy in the cupcake costume was bad enough, but at least you could excuse the lady being rude since that was an adult in a costume. This commercial, however, involves a child (emphasis on child) simply trying to sell donuts for what I can only guess is some sort of Girl Scouts-esque fund raiser. What's worse is that the little girl wasn't being mean, she wasn't being pushy, and she wasn't being forceful. She just politely asked if the lady wanted to buy some donuts for her, and the lady acts like a total bitch towards her and slams the door in her face. What kind of message is Special K sending to its demographic? That the only way to lose weight is to eat their product and act like asses towards anyone who offers you unhealthy food? That it's OK to be rude to children? I'm surprised that lady didn't make that poor little girl cry. The whole thing just comes off as mean-spirited.
  • Lady Norbert: My least favorite Special K commercial is one they had in the winter; I think it may have since been pulled, perhaps because other people objected to the same thing I did. A mother helps her young daughter build a snowman; Mom is dressed in a heavily quilted white coat. The daughter giggles and says that the snowman looks like her mother, which prompts Mom to take her inside. Once she takes off the coat, she immediately goes for a bowl of Special K, as though she's been shamed into losing weight. Except without the coat, it's easy to see that Mom is trim and fit and has her red turtleneck tucked into her size-six jeans. In other words, the kid was clearly comparing the snowman with the coat, not the mother's figure, but let's make women feel worse about themselves because even someone as slender as the mother obviously needs to lose weight.
• Pop Tarts commercials:
  • Pikachu 4 Prezident: I remember there being some sort of ad campaign for Pop-Tarts that was basically a parody of Survivor. It started off pretty good and enjoyable, showing every participant slowly get picked off one by one until there was nobody left. Okay, so that's standard issue for the Pop Tarts ads at the time; Pop Tarts exist as sentient beings and meet their ends by getting eaten (and even then, the concept of that is downright terrifying). Double Berry, one of the participants who was supposedly killed off right at the beginning of the event, was revealed to have saved everyone from their fates, and giving everyone a second chance at hope. Alright, awesome! So then, it boiled down to a vote to choose which boat the group would use to get off the island (which Wildberry's motorboat won in what I can assume was a landslide vote for the possible practicality of it), and managed to get off the island. Sounds good, right? Well, everything reaches a bullshit climax. The boat breaks down out in the middle of the ocean despite the fact that it seemed like a good idea, and it looks like they're stranded again. A cruise ship shows up, and it looks like all's well that ends well, right? Nope! Sorry, everyone gets eaten by the patrons on board, making several weeks and months of waiting and anticipation completely and utterly fucking pointless. They only did that because Status Quo Is God and the humans are always gonna eat them no matter whether we had any bearings on their fates or not. Fuck you guys, too! This story had such good potential and could have ended happily, but chances are they planned it all in advance anyways and it left a bitter taste in my mouth. It didn't make me want to eat Pop Tarts, but it sure as hell made me want to massacre all of those gluttonous bastards, all in the name of those Pop Tarts they unceremoniously chowed down on when things looked their best.
  • Kantonkage: This Pop Tart commercial, where a Jelly mom and Peanut Butter dad are looking at their newborn PB&J pop tart. Then at the end a nurse plans to eat the pop tart while the parents are Forced to Watch. Seriously, a nurse's job is to take care of the patient, not to devour them in plain sight.
    • JustHereToComment: What makes this worse is the Jelly Mom's reaction. While the father is understandably horrified, the mom casually says, "Aww, jammit." Who reacts with so little emotion seeing their child being not only killed but eaten alive?
    • Savagegenius: Thirded. I actually would've found the commercial pretty funny, but I can't stand that last line. It's so infuriating for what would have been a heartbreaking moment.
  • Ajwargo: I agree with both of the above. The Great Fruit Escape scenario made me so upset when it ended with such a conclusion, and the PB&J commercial is a sick and cruel joke. But another thing that made me a little upset was an issue of waiting during their "Hide and Seek" campaign. While it made sense to do this for all of the other Pop-Tarts, this was done three times for the last Pop-Tart, Vanilla Milkshake (who was disguised as a ninja). I think making the game longer was a bad move, largely because there wasn't enough content between the second and third wait.
• Rem Tar 85: Very similar to the Cheerios commercial mentioned above, with the kid stealing his baby brother's Cheerios, comes a commercial from the 90's in Puerto Rico for Chef Boyardee Ravioli, which was (thankfully) eventually dropped. In it, a mother makes a baby-sized portion of ravioli for her baby, but must go do other chores, so she asks her baby's pre-teen brother to feed him. While the mother is away, the kid proceeds to eat his baby brother's ravioli. Not just eat it, but he basically makes it torture for the baby, making a show of slowly putting the ravioli in his mouth, savoring it like it's the most delicious thing ever, all the while the hungry baby whimpers and pouts. As the kid finished the ravioli, he hears his mother coming, panics and then uses his fingers to smear the leftover sauce on the baby's lips and chin, and in comes the mother, who happily declares "Oh, what a good baby, you ate it all!", and the older brother just has the most smug smirk on his face you could imagine. Never have I seen a commercial as infuriating as this.
• heartauthor: My original DMOS was the "Snuffy the Seal" Shark Week ad, but then I remembered a Quaker Chewy commercial from when I was younger that I never liked, even back then. The selling point of the Quaker Chewy bars was that it would keep kids' mouths full so they wouldn't talk as much; they demonstrated this by showing different kids saying a goofy or embarrassing secret about their parents. The last child they show is a giggling little girl, and what's her secret? "My daddy cries." ...Uh huh. Because as we all know, men are emotionless robots who should never express themselves in front of others, lest they be perceived as "un-manly." Even the child me could tell how stupid and unfair that was.
• Dah Supah Bloopah: There was a General Mills' commercial starring some of their mascots, like the Trix rabbit, the Coco Puffs bird and... an orange. Suddenly, a kid voiced by Jeremy Shada of Adventure Time says that he has a problem, which is revealed to be that it's Wednesday. One of the mascots gets angry saying how Wednesday stole his car. We then have an art shift to an eight bit style Wreck-It Ralph joke that goes no where, and smacks of them trying to stay relevant, Oh, and then the Trix rabbit gives him some cereal, saying that he was just served! Breakfast, that is! It all smacks of seventy year olds trying to find out what kids like. Oh, and the Orange has the same voice actor as Mr. Gus. Kids like Uncle Grandpa, RIGHT!?!
  • CJ Croen 1393: For me, it's the fact that none of those mascots are in character. Chip the Cookie Crisps Wolf isn't howling "COOOOOKIE CRISP!". Silly Rabbit isn't scheming for Trix. Sonny the Cocoa Puffs Bird isn't going crazy over Cocoa Puffs. None of them are acting like themselves. They don't even have the right voice actors!
  • jmac9345: To make matters worse the same genius (considering the Art Shift, it might not be the same group making the ad, but they still retain the same themes) who came up with that gem also made three (or more, maybe?) Lucky Charms commercials that don't even focus on the misadventures of the kids trying to get Lucky's Lucky Charms. Both literally amount to "Lucky and his Marshmallow-shaped friends are bored, they get involved in some shenanigans with an outside force, BUY OUR CEREAL!!!". Lucky's not the smart, clever leprechaun we all know and love, and like before, he's not even voiced by his usual actor. I'm all for a crossover between all of these beloved mascots, but only if it's done it the style of General Mills regular commercials and don't try to shoehorn in pop culture references.
  • fairygirl567: They keep making these videos, too! I don't get it, why would kids enjoy this? And why is a black guy voicing the coyote? Don't get me wrong all of them sound terrible but the voice actor for the coyote is so out of place the other voices pale in comparison.
• Brittonbubba: Fiber One tastes good and all, but the advertisements just annoy me to no end nowadays. (Not sure if they even make commercials anymore, let alone if they even sell it anymore.) The basic gist of the commercials are this: people eat Fiber One. Sounds okay, right? Now, let's have them believe it doesn't have fiber in it due to the fact it tastes good. What. You declare Fiber One doesn't have fiber in it... because it tastes good? Not only is that logic able to be summed up as "just because it's good, it's going to make you a morbidly obese monster overnight" (Fiber One is usually in the form of cereal bars with chocolate, or just basically anything that's able to have sugar), but it's just... I don't even... Farewell, cruel world. I'm going to kill myself by banging my head against the wall due to that stupid logic until I fracture my skull.

Dating Services

• Dark Cyber Wolf: For this troper, it's the Cougar Life commercial. A woman goes up and asks the audience "Tired of meeting the same type of women in bars?" Then she tells a random woman that she needs a sandwich, shoves the sandwich in her face, and the woman just goes "Ugh! Meat!" The first woman continues talking to the audience with "Immature girls who think that they're 'all that'?" After that, she tells another random woman who asked her date "Oh, so you're a computer geek," that she "folds sweaters for a living, honey." Then she discusses the idea behind the Cougar Life, and how older women want young guys "just like you!" It ends with a third random woman asking a guy, "Buy me a drink?" before this woman shoves her out of the way and asks the guy, "How 'bout I buy you a drink?" Then the guy smiles. Now, here's my issue with it: The first random woman didn't say something like "Ugh, carbs" or "Ugh, food" (neither of which would have been funny anyway). She says "Ugh! Meat!" To me, that implies that Random Woman #1 might've been a vegetarian. Even if otherwise, there was no reason to just force feed the sandwich to her. Then the second random woman doesn't really seem like she's being rude - computer geeks are getting way more respect these days, but then the woman just goes up to her and says "You fold sweaters for a living." And? What exactly is wrong with that? Now for Random Woman #3, who asked a guy if he'd buy her a drink. Then our "protagonist" shoves her out of the way without the guy answering and asks herself. This was not funny, it does not portray the other women as immature, it just portrays this woman as a total Jerkass.
  • Silvermoon 424: It also has the Unfortunate Implications that young women are all vapid, petulant airheads and that younger men should be hooking up with "real" women (aka cougars). What sucks is that the older commercials for Cougar Life have been inoffensive and straightforward (and even featured a catchy jingle); it feels like this annoying commercial has been airing forever. At least make a new one!
• fluffything: One commercial by Match.com (a dating site) features a little girl telling her grandfather (supposedly the owner of the site) that her teacher met a lady that he is in love with. She then tells the grandfather that she told the teacher the relationship would never work out. Why? Well, it's because he didn't meet said lady on Match.com. And, then she has the nerve to say that she told the teacher that he should check out the site since there's a lot of single ladies for him. Where do I start with how terrible this is? First of all, who does this kid think she is deciding to tell her own teacher who he can date and who he can't date? Kid, it's none of your business. Second, her reasoning that the relationship won't work out just because he didn't meet her on Match.com? Seriously, that's the only reason the girl gives for the relationship not working. From what I could tell, the teacher seemed rather happy with the lady and there were no implications that she was a bad person either. But, the icing on this cake of awful is that the girl had the gall to suggest that her teacher should hook up with some other ladies just because they were on said website. In other words, she was essentially suggesting that her teacher should either dump his girlfriend for absolutely terrible reasons or cheat on her. Just the sheer shallowness of this commercial is enough to make my blood boil in rage.
  • Lady Norbert: I'm right there with you. All of that, plus the kid playing the granddaughter (is that his real granddaughter? I wonder) has an obnoxious voice that's like nails on a chalkboard to my ears. They seem to have gotten rid of that one, thankfully.
• fairygirl567 - Jamster decided to release an ad for on of their text services. What the user does is0 text their name and that of the person they are dating. The commercial starts out with a man running out on his wedding. The bride, I think her name was Kristy, runs out and starts crying and a voiceover flashes back to when the two were a couple and were relaxing on the couch. Kristy sees the commercial for the service ()makes sense in the context) and texts the number with her name and the boyfriends and it came back with a low rating. Kristy pays no mind to it, but the voiceover says she made a big mistake then it goes back to the aftermath with the bride still crying on the steps with no one to comfort her. The voice over comes back telling people to use the service to see if their relationship is the one. This troper gets it's a joke and everything, but the way the writers went about it was freaking insulting. It's basically taking itself way too seriously and says that this poor woman was an idiot for not following a dumb text service so because of that her relationship is ruined. How exactly? It didn't predict he'd run out on her at the altar and even so it's not like she actually married him, seemed like she still dodged a bullet. She can still find love! And what happened if she dumped him? Would she find the right one with this dumb phone service? It's random! She could put her name and Bo Bo the clown and get 100%! The commercial makes it look like the service is a 100% guarantee to decide a relationship.
• Mario And Sponge Bob Fan: I think it goes without saying that E-Harmony's "Matt's Bad Dates" ad is abysmal. It basically entails a man named Matt who talks about how he has trouble dating women, and it cuts to his girlfriend sobbing hysterically. Annoying doesn't even describe how irritating her sobbing is, and it just made me want to change the channel whenever it came on. It also inexplicably features a mime as one of his dates, which Makes Just as Much Sense in Context, and a girl who completely ignores him when he tries to talk to her. To make matters worse, just when it seemed like it had stopped airing, it suddenly came back with no warning whatsoever, giving me an unnecessary Jump Scare when it cut to the sobbing girl. Why, E-Harmony?
  • Star Tropes: All of their commercials are like this. The gist of them is that you absolutely need them because you're too incompetent to find love on your own, and without their help you're doomed to only date losers.

Electronics

• Kellor: Adobe put out a web commercial in which a CEO-type guy calls his "digital media consultant" into his office and keeps slapping him across the face until he says what the CEO wants to hear (which is, "You can definitely measure ROI on social media"). Adobe, and supposedly the viewer, is on the CEO's side. It raises a few questions, such as: If the CEO knows more about social media than his consultant, why does he hire one? Why doesn't the consultant go straight to HR (or quit) after the first slap? And finally, who would ever think this is funny?
• fluffything: Shark (a vacuum company) has a commercial in which they compare their product to Dyson (another vacuum company). So, how do they do this? Do they compare the quality of how the two products clean floors? Nope. Instead, they portray the Dyson salesperson as a stereotypical Cockney-accented British person wearing cliched clothing from the 1920s-1940s (in other words, he looks like an extra out of Mary Poppins). Really, Shark? This is how you decide to portray your competition? By portraying them as a stereotype? Oh, but it gets more ridiculous. Their reasoning why their product is better? Dyson vacuums cost $600, while Shark vacuums are cheaper. You know what? I'd rather spend the $600 than buy a vacuum from someone who resorts to stereotyping other nations.
• fluffything: Direct TV's latest advertising campaign (of course dealing with the old Cable VS Satellite debate) is mind-numbingly dumb in-and-of itself to the point where saying it would only appeal to the Lowest Common Denominator would be an insult to the lowest common denominator. But, until recently, they were never outright offensive. That changed in a recent commercial where a woman says "cable is worse than..." and then cuts to her being knocked over by one of those "wacky arm-waving inflatable people" things and implying that the thing either molested and/or raped her. Whoever made/approved/directed/was involved in any way with that commercial? There's a little something you need to know. Rape is not funny. Molestation is not funny. Saying that something as petty and insignificant as cable TV is worse than rape is Not. Fucking. Funny! I have met rape victims. I have met molestation victims. To undermine what those people had to go through isn't just disrespectful, it's downright inhumane.
  • Just Here To Comment: For me, it was one of the Marionette commercials. The premise is that a guy is married (possibly, it's hard to tell) to a Marionette puppet that is just downright Nightmare Fuel. In one commercial, the guy is lying in bed and watching Direct TV and the puppet walks in, and they talk about if he still loves her, given that Direct TV has no wires, like the kind holding her up. Where it gets really bad is when she takes off her robe to reveal lingerie and starts 'dancing' in a manner similar to a seizure. It's about as Fetish Retardant as you could get and I think it's turned me asexual.
  • Princess Togezo: The "Turn Back Time" commercial started out as decent, with Jon Bon Jovi singing about being able to turn back time with Direct TV and retrieve old programs. But then he decided to change different things, and everything went south as he told the couple in the ad that they could "reconsider having that second child". The child in question, who was coloring on a wall, just vanishes from existence, and the parents don't even care; in fact, they almost seem a bit pleased. I bet if the child had been doing anything else, like reading or playing with a toy (or heck, coloring on paper), the parents would have been rightfully upset. However, since he was coloring on a wall, that apparently means he deserves to be retroactively erased from existence. While I myself am not a second child, I feel bad for any second (or third, etc.) children who see this commercial, especially if their parents have issues with each other like the couple in the commercial apparently did. ^note In fact, I'm not ashamed to say that I could think of a better rhyme for "spicy instead of mild": "And make your old wardrobe a little less wild!" It's not perfect, but at least then there wouldn't be any Fridge Horror involved.
• Drkay: Game console adverts have been controversial before, but the PSP advert Sony did for Australia was benign to the point that I almost wish I didn't buy one. So it takes place in an airport. Enter the young, hip and sexy lad with blonde surfer hair, he places his bag through the x-ray scanner thing. The alarm goes off! Not just at this scanner but throughout the airport, all in relation to this sexy young man's bag! Now enter the old, over-weight security guard. He bravely takes charge of the situation, grabbing the bag and slowly opening it... and out he pulls a PSP. The alarms stop, everyone looks at the security guard with sheer anger and annoyance. How dare he care about everyone's safety! How dare he put himself in danger for the sake of the airport! How dare he do his job! Our dashing young hero rolls his eyes and snatches his PSP back, giving a pitiful glare to his fat and ugly elder. He packs his PSP giving the security guard one last glare.
• hydrix: If asked what would be my most hated commercial of all time I would reply with "The Theater of The Eye". It admittedly has some decent cinematography, but it implies that the anyone who watches it will think that the advertisers think that True Art Is Incomprehensible. If you would see this ad the first time you probably would not be able to guess what it is about (it's about the Sega Saturn), but upon further inspection you might actually realize that it is indeed advertisement for the product and that it has a message, which can be summed up as this: "Our system has the best graphics out of any system out there." Keep in mind that this is by the same guy who actually likes this Atari Jaguar commercial (for anyone wondering why I bring this up look at the Advertising subpage of the "trope" So Bad, It's Horrible). As such I would have preferred that this ad was listed on that subpage instead, but alas.

Fast Food Restaurants

• Largo Quagmire: I cannot be the only person who feels like the Jack in the Box commercial where the young man marries a bacon hamburger is completely ridiculous. Barring that we live in a political environment where trivializing the right to marry is bound to piss people off, the whole idea is mind-numbingly stupid, and ends with the man eating the bacon burger. So he just... killed his wife? Consummated his marriage? For the love of God, what does it mean?!
  • lilpurplebird: I don't get it either, but all I know is this makes those Jack's family life commercials look genuine (and I'm shocked they got away with implying Jack has a bondage fetish in one commercial). It's awkward enough to watch as it is, so I just try to ignore it and keep from laughing at its stupidity.
• Bumblebee Magnus: The new Denny's commercial that plays on a lot of Blip videos about the dad explaining the good deal he got on their breakfast to his kids. This wouldn't be so bad if 1) they weren't freakin' preschoolers (ya know, tiny children that don't even fully comprehend money yet), 2) the dad wanted to explain this to his kids, why didn't he just say to the little people who take everything literally what it actually was (he could have easily said 'I got a good price on our meal today') and 3) the dialogue is so stilted that it doesn't come off as cute but as annoyingly bad as George Lucas' script for Episode I.
• fluffything: If there's one fast food mascot I hate in recent years, it's that obnoxious "Now That's Better" ginger lady from the Wendy's commercials. It's bad enough that she has an unhealthy obsession with the product, but that's not the worst of it. No, the worst (and the DMoS ) for this god-awful campaign is the commercial in which two (single?) mothers talk about how they used to have lunch together but now eat a single cracker while the spokeslady brags about her Wendy's meal in front of them. Oh, and then the commercial jokes about a kid eating a pine cone because he's hungry. Because eating disorders and starving kids are funny! Just, who? Why? How? What deranged maniac thought this was a good marketing idea? The Wendy's Mascot lady was merely obnoxious before, but now she's just downright evil. Hey, lady? Stop bragging about how great Wendy's is and give half of your goddamnned sandwich to the kid who's clearly hungry!
  • Wooboo: The one commercial that really annoyed the ever lovin' fluff out of me was the one where the friends are sitting in to watch a movie together. One of their friends (and why he is one, I have no idea) begins rattling off the endings to every single one. The second they mention it, he starts telling them exactly how it ends, to the point where you wonder if he's got some sort of condition. Why are they hanging out with this guy? Not only is this an annoying character to have show up, but it isn't even all that terribly original. Three other advertisements have used this same tired joke in the past, to my memory. But of course, the red-haired Wendy's girl shows up and lets her own obnoxious obsession crop up when she tries to get them all to go to Wendy's. Why? Why would they want to go out to eat when they were already staying home to watch a movie together? One character annoying the crap out of the viewer is bad, but two is enough to make me change the channel whenever I see it starting until it just goes away.
  • Samuel: And furthermore, I can easily go too far of wanting to gouge my eyes out over the thought of her debut appearance. It starts with two guys driving in the car. One of them decide which restaurant they should go to, and out of the blue, the redhead pops up from the back seat, and tells them to go to Wendy's. So they park at Wendy's. There are two problems that involves Fridge Logic. One: What the hell was she even doing hiding in the backseat of their car in the first place? What happened was just utterly creepy, as if she is some sort of psychopath. And two: Why was she dictating the guys into going to eat at Wendy's if they're going to a generic restaurant? If they wanted to eat at any restaurant other than Wendy's, why couldn't they just turn down her advice? When a fast-food company hires a smoking hot redhead with a huge personality flaw, that's when you know something is definitely wrong. Congratulations, Wendy's. You've made it easier for me to avoid your restaurant.
  • Silver 06: Yeah, a lot of the Wendy's commercials come off as overly condescending and even downright insulting when they're not bragging about their "Fresh" square shaped meat-filler patties, and the new commercials push that even further. I sometimes wonder how the real Wendy Thomas (the founder's daughter and face of Wendy's) can tolerate this butchering of her image.
  • The Farmboy: Their most recent commercial in regards to everyone's reactions for eating a burger, while glaringly trying to interject web culture in it. They had one reaction a "memer", resembling an Image Macro (down to using the same font while saying "Like a Boss!" which was popular in 2009.) Then there were two girls taking selfies (one of them one-ups another by taking a picture while taking it.) However it comes to one say saying it was the bomb just for his peers to look at him annoyingly. So using 90's slang makes you an outdated loser while having memes and selfies would make it timeless.
    • BoredMe: For extra fun points, consider that the ad exec who signed off on that,probably still lives in the 70's.
• fluffything: Subway's commercials have been annoying as of late, but they are nothing compared to their latest commercial. It's nothing but two women bragging competitively at one another about how much they love avocados. That's it. That's the entire commercial. It's like listening to two teenage girls arguing over who is a bigger fan of the latest teen heartthrob. It doesn't make me want to buy a Subway sandwich. It makes me want to take some avocados and shove them in my ears so I can finally stop hearing those two annoying women.
  • Star Tropes: Is that the one where one of the women has named her son "Avocado"? Aren't there enough kids out there with humiliating names?
• Exxolon: The latest Subway commercial "Reverse Restraining Order" just makes me want to beat the living crap out of the writer/director. If you haven't seen it, essentially it's a colossal douchebag of a guy explaining to reporters why and how he has four gorgeous women flanking him - he took out "reverse restraining orders" requiring them to stay within 1 foot of him at all times (a reference to the 'footlong' sub) followed by a cutaway shot of an older female judge flanked by two muscular guys implying that he got them by pointing out the advantages of them to the judge. Right Subway - so we have what is essentially chattel slavery and belittling the very serious nature of restraining orders which are taken out by people undergoing serious criminal harassment or stalking. The whole thing comes across as misogynistic and sexist in the extreme with the female judge & male models tacked on as a fig leaf to deflect any accusations of that.
• Samuel: Burger King's "Ringmaster Whopper" campaign ad that showcased the said Whopper nearly made me want to stop eating at their restaurant. It starts with a couple in the restaurant, ready to have their whoppers. The girlfriend is a blonde in case you haven't noticed. The boyfriend asks her to open her whopper and sees a diamond ring in it. Excited, she makes an announcement that "Burger King" had put a diamond ring in it, but what she didn't know is that it was the boyfriend that gave her the ring. What made me despise this commercial with a hot, scalding passion is that not only the stereotypical blonde joke is really tiresome (and her acting is irritating), but the fact that the guy had worked his hands to the bone just to get her the engagement ring. But no, let's have her think Burger King has proposed to her and not the boyfriend! Hard work and money down the toilet! This is one of the worst ads to ever been shat out of the anus of a human being.
• Kittens: There's this recent commercial for the McDonald's shamrock shakes that has this guy come home and his wife comes straight out of nowhere and she acts like the guy slept with another woman but it turns out he had a shamrock shake and the wife gets angry and tells him "I hate you." But then he gives her one too and then she suddenly turns happy and says "I love you." and acts like its the most romantic thing ever. Really, McDonald's? Do they really think we women are that gullible? I can understand if they're trying to be funny but this was just unfunny and irritating and I thought they should have just stuck with the commercials with ol' Grimace or the one where the people do Irish dances because at least they're less irritating than this.
• Star Tropes: Let us also include those Sonic commercials (a fast-food chain, for those of you who don't know) featuring Those Two Guys having the most inane conversations ever, such as one of them acting like he's training his hot dog to do tricks or some other such nonsense. And they just keep getting worse...
• Batmany: I've never been a fan of Dominoes, and, after seeing their latest commercial, I don't think I ever will be. Said commercial depicts people who like salads as elitist (and always female) snobs who exist only to "ruin" pizza night. Then Dominoes has the gall to act like they're "saving" pizza night by adding salads to their menu. So, who is this commercial supposed to be aimed for? It can't be fore pizza fans because Dominoes has always sold pizza. And, if Dominoes is aiming this towards people who like salads, then they missed by a huge margin. Not only are they insulting their audience by insulting them via sterotypes (Only girls like salads, right?), but then they act all elitist by demeaning them for not wanting pizza (With such memorable lines like "Eat a pizza once and a while!" and "Pizza's good!"). It's insulting to both fans of pizza and salad.
  • Star Tropes: And if they're acting like the idea of a pizza joint selling salads is a novel one, they're a little late to the party. Little Caesar's can tell you that.
  • KoopaKid17: The ad campaign introduced in November 2021 where Domino's finally says they're supporting small businesses. Yeah, better late than never, I suppose. And they also had the audacity to report that 110,000+ restaurants have closed due to COVID-19. Businesses they never reached out to in the first place for the purpose of statistics. Then again, it's to be expected from a large corporation that never has to worry about failure. Thanks for reminding me why I only order from local pizzerias.
• Mighty Mewtron: There's a Little Caesar's ad that starts off with a cute little kid in a chef's outfit talking to his class about his dream to change the history of pizza and make a pizza with the most cheese and the most pepperoni, who believes he can do it because his parents say he can do anything he puts his mind to and he believes in himself. Everyone else in the classroom looks absolutely touched by his aspirations. Is this the kid who's going to grow up to invent the newest Little Caesar's pizza? No, sadly, the punchline is the smug CEO bluntly saying, "Sorry, kid, it's been done." The kid starts to say "But my dream!" but the announcer cuts him off to talk about the new pizza with the most cheese and pepperoni. It isn't very funny, and doesn't make me crave pizza, just makes me angry at the guy shooting down a kindergartner's dreams because Little Caesar's is already so good that no one should aspire to improve upon it (not to mention the amount of cheese and pepperoni obviously isn't the maximum amount, so the kid could always create something even better, but not that the company would ever admit they aren't the best).
  • A Sus Nun Company: I have to admit that it's kinda plagiarizing a way better commercial for a fast food burger joint, maybe Burger King, where an announcer talks about the latest burger that also had fries stuffed between the buns, then asking something along the lines of "Wonder where we got it?" Pan over to a family, with the little girl at the table saying, adorably, "Daddy, they stole my idea."
• Batmany: Jimmy Johns' latest campaign to only deliver within five minutes of their restaurant locations is bad enough. However, it's their most recent series of ads that takes it into DMOS levels. How? Well, they're currently running a contest for someone to win a house within their delivery range. The levels of ignorance astound me to no end. That's right, folks. You can win a house just so you are able to get a mediocre sandwich delivered to you. You know what Jimmy Johns could've done instead? Oh, I dunno, maybe build more restaurants that are able to deliver to more houses? That would've made way more sense. Likewise, it angers me that Jimmy Johns' is so utterly ignorant to think that their sandwiches are the only reason someone deserves a house (IE: "Because Sandwich") when there are so many people who deserve a home for far more important reasons. Contrast with Firehouse Subs, a restaurant franchise that donates money to firemen so they have the proper equipment to save people, and you can see why Jimmy Johns' latest campaign is such a mess.
  • Star Tropes: Or they can ditch the whole focus on speedy delivery (Domino's had a similar campaign that went horribly wrong) and just advertise good food.
• Maths Angelic Version: To me, the low point of Burger King advertising is the disgusting February 2020 ad "The Moldy Whopper". It's a video of a Whopper being left to rot until it grows a thick fur of turquoise mold after 34 days (which is shown in all its "glory"), followed by the tagline "the beauty of no artificial preservatives". I don't see any beauty in that. It's just Nausea Fuel to make a point about artificial preservatives, which I wasn't terribly concerned about in the first place. It stinks of this annoying "natural = good, artificial = bad" attitude,^note Of course artificial stuff can be bad, but you need a better argument than "it's not natural!" and getting rid of some preservatives won't change that fast food isn't healthy. Even if they had to go the All-Natural Snake Oil route, couldn't they at least have used some more appealing imagery? A few nice shots of fresh ingredients may be a clichéd choice, but at least it would've been far less off-putting.
  • Miracle @ St. Olaf: Atop that, it's deceptive and manipulative to start with. BK is obviously playing on the now-infamous bit from Super Size Me where several specimens of McDonald's burgers and fries did not grow mold after several weeks, conveniently leaving out how the food turned dry from a lack of moisture (not, as the film suggests, from any sort of scary embalming chemicals). So basically, the ad only works on people who both A: don't understand very basic food science, and B: can get a close-up look at a disgusting rotted sandwich and still have an appetite.
  • Almighty King Prawn: What I hate, in addition to what is stated above, is that somehow, this campaign sweeped the awards circuit! Somehow, between the Clios, Epica Awards, The One Show, the D&AD Awards, and many others, a picture of a disgusting moldy Whopper is one of the most decorated ads of all time. I am utterly baffled, to say the least. True Art Is Incomprehensible indeed.
• Maths Angelic Version: There's a Norwegian McDonald's ad where a woman casually dumps her dog in a garbage can, followed by the tagline "Eat before you do something stupid" and various deals on McDonald's food. This woman doesn't need MacFries. She needs a heart.

Financial Services

• legomaniac90: Turbo Tax's 2015 SuperBowl commercial. Artistic License – History and Unfortunate Implications combine to drive this commercial into the red zone (no, Turbo Tax, we didn't fight the American Revolution merely because of tax problems).
• fluffything: Credit Karma has one of the most offensively stupid commercials to come out in recent years. Long story short, the commercial features a woman looking up her credit online. When her sister asks why she's doing that, the other sister responds by asking if she wants to live with her parents for the rest of her life. Cue annoying clips of the sister being miserable while her mother is an obnoxious asshole for no reason whatsoever. Seriously, where do I start with how obnoxiously bad this is? Well, how about the fact that they make it seem like someone's credit score is the only reason why people might still live with their parents? Y'know, instead of all the other, more legitimate reasons. Second, nothing that shows the sister being miserable living with her parents has anything to do with her credit score. Instead, like I mentioned earlier, they just show her mother being a loud obnoxious asshole for absolutely no reason. So, the message of the commercial is "Have good credit or you'll be a miserable loser living with your asshole parents"? What kind of message is that? I'm sorry, but that doesn't make me want to check my credit score. It just makes me want to check the sanity of whoever thought this commercial was a good idea.
  • Star Tropes: Then I'm sure you'll be pleased to know that they made another one like it, this one featuring a young man whose annoying father is obsessed with the word "Bazang!" (At least, I think that's how it's spelled.)
  • Lady Norbert: I hate every single Credit Karma commercial. The one that really made me roll my eyes is/was the one where the woman had her credit score tattooed on her arm, and when her friend pointed out that "Those things change," she replied, "Tattoos don't change!" as though her friend was the stupid one.

Health Products

• Darkton: There was a commercial for... something, I can't remember what, but the way they advertised it was "You're a whole new you!" How do they demonstrate this? Well, the man tries to talk to his child, the child 'realizes' he's not the real dad. He tries to talk to his wife, his wife turns him down, too. He tries to get attention from the dog, the dog starts growling at him. For a moment, I thought this was going to be a commercial for identity theft protection, but it wasn't. While what they attempted was "Use our product and you'll be a changed man," what they managed was "Use our product and you'll be mistrusted by your loved ones."
  • Emperor Oshron: For those wondering, the product in question was Dr. Scholl's, if I remember correctly, suggesting that having the right footwear will improve your health/posture and make you feel physically better. It still doesn't justify the over-the-top reactions that the man's family have towards him.
  • Lady Norbert: Right - the idea was that now that Dad's shoes fit properly and he feels great even after being on his feet all day, he's no longer a grouch to his family... and as a result, they don't recognize him. It was dumb and pointless.
  • Star Tropes: So if I use Dr. Scholl's, people will think I've been replaced by a pod person? Remind me to never use Dr. Scholl's.
• batmany: Pop culture references are a staple of commercials. When done right, they're entertaining. When done wrong, well, that's where this DMOS comes in. The commercial in question is an ad for VSP (a company that sells glasses and contacts). Throughout the commercial, the spokesman (a guy named "Ken") talks about VSP while people constantly mistake him for Superman (Get it? Ken sounds a lot like "Kent".). Not only that, but the commercial constantly throws in references to the Superman franchise such as when two ladies are looking out a window and saying "It's a bird." "No. I think it's a plane.". The problem? The whole thing comes off forced and unfunny. There's no reason for the other people in the commercial to mistake Ken for Clark Kent other than the similar-sounding name and that both wear glasses. Likewise, the references have nothing to do with the product or company in question. Instead, they're just there to essentially go "Hey! We just referenced Superman! Get it?". It's not funny, and it's far from clever. All VSP has succeeded in doing is producing a terrible commercial.

Insurance

• The Dog Sage: Those Allstate "Mayhem" commercials which have the 'Mayhem' guy basically trying to scare you into buying their insurance by showing possible "mayhem". Why don't they scream "Danger! Danger! Booga! Booga! Booga!" at the audience instead?
• Ithoughtyouwere Luigi: In the Progressive commercials, there is Flo; usually she's annoying, but the recent commercial takes the cake for her. First a man scoffs at the bored in the "shop," asking "What else can it do, zero gravity, remove particles?" Cue Flo making the room zero gravity, probably scarring the customers, but then she hits one of her own employees with the particle remover! She's not just annoying, but she's also pure evil!
  • Star Tropes: That might explain one of their newest commercials, where Flo is helping to insure a woman's home and the Kool-Aid Man bursts in because...um...because...okay, what the hell is Kool-Aid Man doing in this commercial?
  • fluffything: Oh, boy, is the ad campaign involving Flo and her family one major train wreck. Ok, Flo is considered The Scrappy by many people. And, while I don't find her as bad as other people do, I can see why people find her annoying. But, good lord, is her family worse. They're just a bunch of miserable, unlikeable, complete assholes who serve no other purpose than to make Flo look better. And, as one can guess, they fail miserably. It doesn't help that Flo seems to be able to only talk about Progressive even when she's at home. The whole thing just comes off as painfully awkward. Hey, Progressive? Little hint? If you want to make your spokeslady look better, maybe try improving her character instead of just adding a bunch of pointless unlikeable family members.
  • CLCN: I'm not sure if this counts as contesting because I'm still talking about Progressive, but I think Jamie and the weird sentient Progressive box man thing (At least I think he's a box. I can't really figure out what exactly he's supposed to be. It's never specified, but he sounds like Chris Parnell.) are a million times more annoying than Flo.
  • Mighty Mewtron: Progressive ads have been pretty tolerable for me. They're pretty stupid and loosely connected to the product, but I never fully hated them. But they aired a radio commercial in 2020 that genuinely upset me. It's called "Sounds From the Old World," and the joke is that they play audio from things that couldn't be done during the COVID-19 Pandemic. The one I heard was a scene of people sitting in a movie theater eating popcorn. Essentially, it's mocking the audience for no longer being able to do things that used to be commonplace. The intention is probably just to be "relatable" and appeal to people who miss public activities (they had some TV ads about Zoom calls that I found funny), but all it did was remind me of how much I and so many others had to give up in the past year, all while implying this was an "old world" we can never get back, which is a pretty pessimistic idea to promote even ironically. There's barely any connection to the insurance either - their tagline is something meaningless like "Deals so good, you'll feel like it's 2019 again." Instead of a harmless meme, it's "staying relevant" by going, "Sucks that your entire year was ruined. Anyway, buy our insurance!" Newsflash, companies: when you talk about the pandemic, try not to take such a defeatist tone.
  • KoopaKid17: One Progressive ad that featured Flo was completely insensitive. It was a mobile one that advertised the "Name Your Own Price" gimmick, and it depicted Flo holding a scanner like a gun towards the audience. On top of the ad using what looks like a threat to sell insurance, it was being used around the same time as the Sandy Hook school shooting and its aftermath. You'd think Progressive would have known better than to treat gun violence as tomfoolery, especially in the face of tragedy.
• Falcon Pain: GEICO ads are hit-or-miss with their attempts at humor, but even when they're not funny, and even when you are aware of the misleading nature of their central message (it's true that people who switch to GEICO save hundreds of dollars on average... but that's mainly because company rates differ based on customers' experiences and needs, and people don't usually switch to a company that will charge higher rates), there's a solid idea that viewers can at least consider comparing rates and seeing if they can get a better deal. So they typically don't offend me... until I saw one installment of their "artwork/motivational poster" campaign. A painting of a man flirts with a painting of two women, until one of them points out that he didn't save hundreds of dollars by switching to GEICO, so they instead take interest in a painting of an ugly geek who did. It's not funny, it's not clever, and the presentation borders on insulting. But worst of all, by changing the message from "people who switch are happy/you could save by switching" to an outright implication that the savings are guaranteed and that there's something wrong with anyone who doesn't switch, the ad is now officially a lie.
• Zeh Monsieur: A few of my other alternatives were already listed, so let me nominate a certain Allstate commercial; in it, a man and a woman are in a cafe, with the latter bragging about how, despite her friend's statement of men being better drivers, Allstate rewarded her with a check for safe driving, going so far as to almost literally rub the check in the man's face and generally act like an smug, insufferable bitch while the man feebly attempts to defend his statement. The commercial relies on nothing but an overplayed stereotype and almost seems like it was made just to offend people of both genders.
• Larkmarn: The Allstate ads that have someone just talking about what could happen to "you" are pretty bad in general, with the second person sounding just condescending. But the worst is one where a woman is talking about how "you" are a bad parallel parker... so "it's only a matter of time before you rip someone's bumper off." She then says the only possible way to avoid it is to just take the bus. So buy Allstate! Putting aside the insulting nature of the second person, is it really that hard to parallel park? Even people who are bad at it usually wind up not ripping anyone's bumper off, but just being far away from the curb or at worst bumping the other car. Boiling it down to "you will destroy someone's car or you can't drive" is just nonsensical.
  • Scsigs: Now that you bring up Allstate, the one that pisses me off when I actually think about it is the one where there's a couple eating a meal & the woman starts the commercial saying to the guy, "You know how you said men are superior drivers?", he agrees, & she goes on to talk about how she got the "safe-driving bonus check" & when he tries to defend, or maybe take back, what he said, or say, "you know you need to wait a while with something to see if you can keep up with it so your track record is pretty spotless," she says, "silence." Both times with the usual dude, Dennis is what the subtitles say, as that's his actor's name, dubs over her voice like in several other ads they've done in the same/a similar style. Where to even begin with this...First off, I've become incredibly salty towards the idea of gender politics in media in the last year or so. It's why I'll never have an inkling to see Ghostbusters (2016), since the controversy around that movie overshadowed what was more or less a meh-to-bad comedy from what I've heard from reviews. Second, we have no idea how long they've been at the restaurant. It could've been a few minutes, or 20 (the amount of food on her plate makes it look like they've been there for a bit). So, to have this be the start of the commercial is really making the woman look stuck up & pretentious, if not downright petty, especially since it's her first check. Third, you don't give the guy a second to retract his claims? Fourth, what was this guy's reasonings for saying such a thing like that? Was it based in logic & facts, or was he just being an idiot? I've been driven by female drivers plenty of times & they were good drivers. To be honest, I've been more questionable of some male drivers I've gotten rides from. This isn't the 50s, or a terrible sitcom, girls drive as much as guys do & can be pretty damn good at it. So, why was this guy being like that? This is what I hate about the whole "2010s identity/gender/sexism" politics. No one who makes things that get shown on TV, for the most part, knows how to portray these things rationally, so we get baiting things like this. I get that the whole point of the ad was that she was standing up to a sexist asshole, but why does that have to be the focus of the commercial? The slogan says that the point was supposed to be that Allstate can give you the confidence to be a good driver, or something like that, but what does sexism have to do with confidence other than standing up to the asshole who's sexist (and even then, in this day & age, you're more likely to find someone who'll call someone out on sexist bullshit than not, so it's not exactly what needs confidence boosting if more people do it)? Here's an idea, Allstate, free of charge, have a few to several different commercials of people being nervous to drive because of either poor car insurance, or none whatsoever. Dennis, or someone, comes to them at work or something, asks why they seem like a nervous wreck, they explain, then the other person tells them about Allstate & the confidence they can get from knowing they're fully covered, they sign up, then are seen driving with the full knowledge they'll be all right if they get into an accident on the car side of things. Maybe throw in the check at the end as a bonus. There, done. If that's what they used to do, which I don't think they have, but I don't really remember either, then I don't see why they thought this was such a good idea. You can even have a lot of people from all walks of life; Whites, Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, etc. Maybe they speak a different language & have to be subtitled, I don't know, just something better than this piece of gender-baiting garbage. Who was the commercial supposed to appeal to besides 2010s man-hating feminists & SJWs anyways? Seriously, read the comments on that video. More people are calling it out than not.
• batmany: Priceline's current "Whatever's on the line" ad campaign is terrible to the point where either of the two commercials currently airing could qualify for a DMOS. But, the "Family Reunion in Mexico" commercial wins by sheer amounts of how disturbing it is. The commercial features a woman who is torn between going to see her family in Mexico or staying home. It then shows what happens in two "what if" scenarios. In the first scenario, she books a trip via Priceline and goes to see her family and meets her cousin who is moving to the same city she lives in. And, the second scenario is where we get to Squick levels of "what were they thinking?". The woman decides not to go, ends up in a dance club, meets her cousin (whom neither realize are related), and it implies they're about to....yeah, I'm sure anyone can see where this is going. It's just awful on so many levels. Why the incest jokes? Why the huge lack of logic? Everything about it is just wrong. They were trying to be funny, and they failed spectacularly. Heck, even William Shatner sounds like he'd rather be doing anything else than provide a voice-over for this commercial.
• Poke Nirvash: Early in 2017, the insurance company Safe Auto put out an ad where a young employee at a generic office was told by his shrewish boss to finish a report by a set deadline instead of moving it to accommodate for his cat's surgery, and then tells a female co-worker that she's the worst boss ever. The co-worker then tells the employee that the boss is her mother, to which he responds with the awkward, on-the-fly response of "Everyone has moms." Now, there are two ways the ad could have gone. It could have gone the way of previous ads, where the announcer says "This is a terrible quote", advertises Safe Auto's easy means of getting car insurance quotes, and the employee, leaving the office with his belongings after getting fired, looks at his phone and says "That's a great quote!" Instead, the geniuses in promotions decided to have the employee just leave the office with his belongings while awkwardly saying "Everyone has moms," over and over again like a mentally challenged parrot. The jingle at the end switching from "Safe Auto" to "You're Fired" failed to help matters and cemented the commercial as being the worst in Safe Auto's history. The follow-up with the college student sending his mother three text messages, each autocorrected from "Leaving in a sec" to "Leaving in a sex" was much better, but with its portrayal of the mother as one who neglected to figure out what he was actually trying to say in favor of telling him she's "#disappointed" and demanding to know where her twentysomething son learned "that word", it wasn't really all that good either. Thank god that series of ads was done away with after the first two.
• Erin582: Many of State Farm Insurance's commercials are hit or miss, one from the mid 2000s was a definite miss. It featured a woman happily singing along to "Waterfalls" by TLC on a karaoke machine in a living room when her husband walks in while holding their baby and sarcastically says to the child how she wasted money on it. When she insists that she was able to buy both insurance and the machine, he still acts like a dick, refuses to believe her and "conjures" up a male State Farm insurance agent and asks him like she's not even there why the wife is lying to him. The agent is able to set him straight and tells him how a reduced price of the insurance did permit her to buy both, but then when she asks for an apology for insulting her and calling her a liar, both men just stare at her blankly and indignantly like she's an idiot. Fuck you, State Farm! Misogyny (even the "soft" kind featured here) sells in a commercial just as well as misandry would, and let's not forget what a lovely message to teach their child and so early, too. Also, why did they have to waste the usage of a popular and deep-meaning song like "Waterfalls" in this nothing commercial?

Mobile Phone Services

• Mosquito Man: The Christmastime adverts where the phone that belonged to the rival company was sent to live on the Island of Misfit Toys. That's just arrogant.
• Fox Fleet: Another series of phone commercials (maybe Sprint? I can’t remember) involved people receiving bad news by text. In one of them, a football player who has suffered a knee injury receives a text from the team doctor (who is in the same room!) saying he is out for the season. Dismayed, he asks the doctor about it, and the doctor tells him not to worry about it because he sent the text using his unlimited phone plan, so he doesn’t have to pay any more for it (as though that’s what the player was worrying about). These commercials felt really mean-spirited to me, as they showed their customers as being extremely self absorbed and uncaring towards others as though that was supposed to be a good thing.
• Mystic Eclectic: In June 2014, a Verizon ad was posted on blip.tv promoting the "Inspire Her Mind" campaign, further promoting women having careers in the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (abbreviated STEM). It's a solid campaign with good examples to further its aims, but the commercial is quite suspect. In Time-Lapse, a girl named Sam is told time and again by her parents not to do certain things, such as "don't get your dress dirty," while rock climbing, "don't mess with that" when picking up a starfish on a beach, or even telling her a project is becoming too much to handle, said project being an impressive Solar System Mobile in her bedroom. The most egregious example comes in the form of this remark: "why don't you hand [the drill] to your brother" in the midst of building a model rocket. With all this together, the message can be misread as an attack against parents as promoting inadvertently androgynous ideals, limiting the feminine opportunity to just one that's saccharine and confining to certain archetypes, as well as their insecurities. Before it's over, this can be seen as less girl-power oriented and more of a cry of "don't let your stubborn, obsolete family get in the way of your ambitions." A silver lining arrives at the end, where Sam notices a Science Fair poster in school and a narrator says that "it's time to tell her she's brilliant." Consider the commercial's structure: this young woman has had at least 15 years of this overshadowing, as well as the divine patience to deal with it, only to still be isolated to showing brilliance when the family is out of sight. Even for how inadvertently it's been delivered, the commercial's unintentional attack seems just as prominent when taking all of these happenings into account. In short, the campaign has great points and makes for another great display of Equality in Occupation [1], but this commercial only takes into account the Fridge Horror of how any child's insecurities can be formed, especially in regards to the female psyche, in addition to the imposed superiority of parental ambitions and the inferiority complex in general.
  • Cabbit Girl Emi: While not the worst commercial ever, it was good in theory and poor in execution at worst. However, I don't understand why Sam's mother reacted to her science project so negatively. We get it, poor Sam is being suppressed, we didn't need that.
  • Mimic 1990: Personally, the implication I got from this ad was that all of the stuff the family said wasn't really what they were saying. It was meant to be dramatized — what they were actually saying was some variant of "wow, look how pretty our daughter looks doing this stuff" which she only took as "stop trying to be smart." To be fair, that might just be me reading too much into it, but honestly... even if that wasn't the intention, it still feels less like the moral of the story is "encourage your children" and more like the moral is "girls have no free will." Such a messed up commercial.
• The Farmboy: There was a commercial that I remember for a phone plan (was it Voyage? I don't remember). It had a husband telling his wife about what he did (Spoiler Alert: He signed on to the phone plan). The wife replies coldly and bitterly assumes it was another money draining scheme, and added that she should've married another guy to his face. A little context would've have her remark hold more water. Why not have a brief montage of all the poor financial decisions her husband have made over the years with the wife just asking what he did? I know there's little time in advertising, but just having her say this without any knowledge about her husband's decisions kinda makes her a total asswipe.
• Hotheart123: I'm one of the many people who think Android Pay's ad series titled A Clerk's Life is abysmal. Right away, the AD starts off with a crying baby. Because that sound is totally not annoying! There are also a woman wiping her sweaty card, which is plain Nausea Fuel, and three women too attached to their smartphones to pay attention to the clerk. I heard about this AD on Reddit, and now I'm seriously glad I have an ad blocker installed on Chrome. Two words: Why, Android?
  • MurlocAggroB: Even worse are the 5-second versions that pop up all the time on YouTube. By squeezing the showcase of the product and the company's logo into that short window, they leave no time to explain the joke. All shots of the clerk are cut out, and what's left is about two seconds of someone standing somewhere and fumbling. It's so brief you can't even digest the scene (until I saw the full version, I honestly thought the sweaty woman had spilled water all over herself trying to get her card out or something). Not to mention, the crying baby one extends the crying sound over the company's logo. Because that needed to be longer.
• Trialman: There's this Vodafone ad where a man is on a train, and soon finds everyone else on the train playing music or watching films or other such things on their phones. He moves to another car, finds the same thing, he goes to complain to the staff, and they're doing the same thing as well. He then goes to one car, and asks the people to turn it down, and then they stare at him like he committed some horrible crime. He's then seen moping in the back of the train, with a tag line about an exciting future popping up. The man is obviously meant to be painted as a grumpy old spoilsport, but I can only see him as a regular guy who wants some peace and quiet on his journey. I personally don't have a smartphone, but if I ever do get one, this has ensured that it won't be from Vodafone.
• Grotadmorv: In the mid-2010s, there was a TV ad for a phone plan company (I can't remember which, but I think it was LG). It had a narrator state that "This phone plan just got satisfying. Oddly satisfying." Accompanying this was a disgusting animation featuring close-ups of some fuzzy shapes merging to form the company's logo. It wasn't oddly satisfying; it was putrid and I had to look away whenever I saw the ad come on.
• Aj Wargo: Here’s a tiny commercial that really made me mad- one brief series of ads for Sprint had one of their salesmen challenging people to a downloading contest. Sounds harmless enough, right? Well, here’s the kicker- he forces them to bet their personal belongings in doing so, and the whole point is that his Sprint phone is so fast that he’s guaranteed to win! And, of course, the jackass doesn’t return what he takes, either. This guy's not a spokesperson- he's a con-artist who’s committing theft! I’d have really liked to see Sprint end this campaign with him biting off more than he can chew and being arrested after trying to scam a cop or something, but that never happened.
• savagegenius: This Verizon ad for their iPhone 15 Pro deal. Even ignoring the blatant False Advertising at play here (15 Pros are made of stainless steel, not titanium; Verizon does not just take “any phone”, as shown by them allegedly refusing to take an iPhone 5s; the iPhone itself must be paid at inflated price, despite the ad stating it’s “on them”), this ad is absolutely horrible, especially when I first saw it. It starts off with a family celebrating a young girl’s birthday until some random immature prick (Sean Hayes) openly wishes for the new iPhone before proceeding to blow the candles out in front of her. The guy’s friend (Jason Bateman) then pulls him all and explains that Verizon has a new deal that he can use to get it. And what does Mr. Asshat do? He proclaims, “Now I won’t have to ruin any more birthdays!” (which implies he did this several times before) right before stealing a piece of cake and blowing a party horn at the family’s face, all while having this shit-eating grin on his face. All I wanted to do at that point was deck him in the jaw.

Personal Care Items

• Tell All 111: Ah, Lynx... dear, dear old Lynx (or Axe as it is known in the US). The "2012: The Final Edition" commercials were eye-rolling at worst, but Lynx Apollo... good God, Lynx Apollo. There is quite a lot that is wrong with them. Astronauts have made a positive contribution to society and risked their lives doing so and if you want to show them as something to aspire to be, fine, but you can do that without making firemen and lifeguards seem like lesser men, especially when their profession is saving lives. Not to mention the portrayal of women as superficial human beings who run to the more macho man. Seriously Lynx, I know your target demographic is primarily men under 30, but as a member of that demographic, even I have to say that if you're going to use gimmicks, you need to go back to the drawing board.
  • ading: I completely agree, but there's one thing you're missing. Why is the woman even kissing the fireman/lifeguard in the first place? If they're not in a relationship, then women are apparently expected to just suddenly fall in love with anyone who saves their life. And if they're not in a relationship, then that makes the women bitches for running to the astronaut immediately. Hell, how do they even know it's a real astronaut? I mean, an astronaut doesn't need to wear his space suit on Earth, and someone could dress up as an astronaut without actually being one, so how do they know?
• Star Tropes: A new contender for "Worst Commercials Ever" is the Dollar Shave Club. All of their commercials follow the same pattern: some guy goes to the store to buy some razors, but is actively stymied by the store employees, and ends up physically attacked and incapacitated. Then, some other guy (whose name I don't know and don't care about) shows up and says, "It's almost like they don't want you to buy razors." What? Okay, who doesn't want you to buy razors? Certainly not the employees, whose job it is to sell them. (For the record, I've bought razors on several occasions, and I've never suffered any such misfortune while doing so.) Seriously, what is the point of this?
• Zmister 517: Old Spice ran a slew of commercials centering on mothers stalking their sons on dates, ostensibly upset by their growing up, but it just comes off as creepy jealousy.
• Metal Jesus: This commercial for Shick Xtreme 3 razors. This commercial will surely infuriate anyone who has been struggling to find a job. Imagine that you've been called in along with about four or five other people for a big job interview and then all of a sudden one guy runs out and comes back a little while later with his head shaved because the pictures up on the wall of the company founders all depicted men with shaved heads. It's ass-kissing taken to a new level. What absolutely drives the last into the coffin for this commercial is way the other applicants all slump down in their chairs looking defeated while Kojak sits there with a smug look on his face. As someone who's seen the consequences of blatant favoritism in the workplace, this commercial does not send a positive message at all.

Public Service Announcements

• D Yellow Madness: The commercial where a tiny slobbish fat guy keeps making a teenage boy stop hanging out with his friends for unspecified reasons. At the end of the commercial, he drags the kid outside and says "pucker up" with a "this is happening whether you like it or not" tone and the slogan is "cigarettes are bullies." It's like they're comparing being addicted to cigarettes and being bullied to being raped. That's all kinds of messed up and so is the fact that they're showing this commercial on Teen Nick. I wanna be able to watch some channel without hearing the beginning of a metaphorical rape scene.
• supernintendo128: PETA's Silent Screams ad is bar-none the worst PSA I have ever seen. It starts with a shot of a woman being yelled at by her husband while the daughter watches in horror before the husband beats the woman off-screen. We then cut to a couple of muggers robbing an old woman while one is holding her down keeping her from running and then we see a group of bullies kicking a high-school student lying on the floor while he in vain yells for help. Finally, we cut to a chef preparing a fish dinner while the fish on the cutting board opens his mouth silently trying to call for help, implying that if you like to eat meat, you are just as horrible as someone who beats, abuses, and robs other people. This PSA is very disrespectful to victims of domestic abuse, violent muggings and bullying for comparing them to a fish on a cutting board and everyone at PETA should be ashamed of themselves for making this PSA.
  • Maxiboy136: It's nice to know that there are plenty of other people who share my seething hatred for this godawful ad. To add to your points, there's also the matter of Fridge Logic. Do the people at PETA think that eating fish is only comparable to abuse when it's people who do it, or does it apply to other fish-eating animals as well, like puffins or crocodiles or, y'know, other fish?
  • James76: This also comes off as hypocritical, considering how not only does PETA support the eco-terrorist groups Animal Liberation Front (ALF), Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC), and Earth Liberation Front (ELF), but also one of its members, Bruce Friedrich, told a convention that "blowing up buildings and smashing windows" is "a great way to bring about animal liberation," adding "hallelujah to the people who are willing to do it." So, technically, PETA are the violent ones, not meat-eaters. You can find out more about PETA and their radical agenda at this (NSFW) site.
• Yuki-Akuma: I just recently saw an Australian advertisement online for staying in school and just had to add it here. It starts off well, with a group of teenagers ditching their school uniforms and driving in a van to a beach where they have the time of their lives, playing in the water, laughing, kissing, all that stuff, and then... a girl blows up. Then, all the other teenagers start blowing up, until one last girl is left and screams before she too is blown up offscreen. What. The. Fuck. This ad rubbed me the wrong way because of how mean-spirited it is in delivering the message of not skipping school. Not just that, but it's not even the slightest bit comical, it's horrific and disturbing as all hell. The ad would count as an unfunny excuse of a "joke" but I don't think it was meant to be funny at all. This ad makes me want to leave school and never come back.
  • Bengson 26: My issue is how intelligent they're making the teens look. The reason why they were blowing up is because they were in a fucking explosives testing site. This would have been fine if weren't for the fact that were shown crossing a fence to the site. In other words, these kids aren't rock stupid, they're dark matter stupid.
• AxMachina: Honestly, when it comes to public service announcements, there's not a lot of bad ones that come to my mind. But then there's this anti-smoking campaign from Truth. The gist of it is that when someone starts to make an excuse to smoke, a meme comes on and says "It's a trap." It just comes off as a really bad attempt to "connect" with the younger demographic. Obviously it's going to be seen as a timeless work of art and not as something that future generations will see as dated and behind the times.
  • Candhfan621: What's even worse is the lack of Admiral Ackbar. I mean, you used the phrase, why not just go all the way with it?
  • MoPete: On the subject of Truth, one of the ones I'll give the shake my head to is the "#Catmageddon" one. They make a valid point about how cigarette smoking can cause cancer in cats as well as in people, but how do they do it? By showing clips of cat videos. It's like they just went on YouTube, did a search for "Cat Videos," slapped them together, put words over it, and called it a commercial. And the only one that's even relevant to the point of the commercial is the one of the cat "burying" an ashtray.
    • Mighty Mewtron: The means of conveying the message also felt somewhat distasteful and even disrespectful to the demographic. It reads like they think teenagers only care about cats dying from smoking-induced cancer because we can't watch funny cat videos anymore.
• Cabbit Girl Emi: I can easily let Truth slide with their cat ad because I like cats, but I will not do the same for a certain ad from The Real Cost. Which one? The one where anyone who smokes get their mouths replaced with USB ports. It's one thing to Scare 'Em Straight, but this ad makes my eyes bleed! The worst part is that it's plastered over sites such as DeviantArt, which I have been going to more often in the past few months. (Honestly, this ad should be restricted to TV only as that version gets a little more leeway with the woman stomping out a USB drive.)
• Almighty King Prawn: There is a The Real Cost animated banner PSA that is currently playing on Bulbapedia that shows a person Googling "mandiblectomy" and seeing some REALLY graphic images of blood-and-gore covered mouths being torn apart by surgeons. Thank you, that was totally what I wanted to see while peacefully reading about Pokémon.
  • Aj Wargo: If you can believe it, the FDA (who run the Real Cost) honestly topped this in how horrible this is for their stupid anti-smoking campaign. They made a series of commercials and a game called "Only One Leaves". It centers around trapping teenagers in a horrifying labyrinth, presumably for the rest of their lives... all because they smoke. Excuse me, but isn’t this Disproportionate Retribution? Leaving someone to die in a maze for smoking is like beating someone to death because they drink beer! The worst part is, these public safety announcements and all the others for this annoyingly disturbing campaign are still circulating on the internet (and especially on YouTube) as well. Watch yourself out there, Tropers, and try to avoid these vile things when you can! (The ads, I mean, not the cigarettes and vape devices, though you should still not do that.)
• savagegenius: If there’s one thing I hate in TV shows, it’s when the only person that gets punished in a conflict is the one who (albeit over)reacted at someone who wronged them, and the person breaking up the fight doesn’t even consider the other side of the story that much. That brings me to my dethroning moment: a 1994 PSA from-out of all shows that could’ve done this-fucking Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers. In it, a little boy steals his sisters’ cassette tapes, and deliberately breaks them after she tries to snatch them in a scuffle, all while mercilessly teasing her. Just as she’s about to retaliate by throwing them at him, Jason and Zack come in and scold her for her actions, with the boy simply smiling at her for getting into trouble. After a montage of them trying to get her to release her frustrations away from him, she eventually apologizes to her brother and hugs it out after explaining to him that she really doesn’t like when he takes her stuff. And what does the boy do? He fucking shrugs it off with a smirk! What’s worse, the two rangers never call the boy out for his schadenfreude, even though he was the one who went out of his way to cause the conflict in the first place. Excuse me, Fox, but doesn’t the entire theme of power rangers revolve around justice and nobility? In fact, I can think of two prime example of this tripe done right: Bulk and Skull, who always get punished for their actions whenever they cause trouble or decide to act like dicks (which is why many people consider them to be two of the best characters in the franchise). Bottom line, maybe you writers should stop condoning bullying between siblings and deal with the problem at hand!

Snack Foods

• Cabbit Girl Emi: You may disagree, but their 2016 Super Bowl commercial makes me cringe. A pregnant woman is about due when her husband eats some Doritos. For some reason, the unborn baby wants one, and eventually, the woman takes the Dorito and throws it across the room, and the commercial ends with everyone reacting in fear before the baby possibly gets brain damage on the way out. How can anybody find this funny?
• Klondike Bars commercials:
  • SickBoy: This commercial for Klondike Bars from last year ^note  For those of you who are unaware, this is based off of their classic campaign, "What Would You Do For a Klondike Bar?" where people do dangerous or humiliating things to get one. First of all, it isn't funny. Second of all, why are we still using stale jokes based on tired gender stereotypes (men are insensitive simpletons, women are boring and only good as eye candy)? It isn't often that you find something that's sexist toward men, but this commercial actually manages to be sexist toward both genders using jokes that were old when they were used 10 years ago on According to Jim. I've never actually had a Klondike Bar, but this commercial certainly doesn't make me want one.
  • Wooboo: There's a new one where a guy stands miserable in an elevator where a couple are giving each other "baby talk". Maybe it is just me, but seeing a couple showing affection for each other in public would make me smile, not stand there like I was forced to hear nails scratching a chalkboard. It makes the guy who wants a Klondike look like a irritable, cynical ass who can't stand to see others happy. It also doesn't help that the couple who are being cute and affectionate are thin and wearing jogging wear, where the guy in question is overweight and alone, much less the fact that he's basically being bribed into doing this with an ice-cream bar. What are you trying to say about your customers, Klondike?
• Saiyan Warrior 006: The new M&Ms mascot Brown (is that her name?) Apparently they wanted a new female lead in place of Green. But they failed spectacularly as Brown is pretty much a smug know it all bitch who acts like she's better than everyone. The latest commercial featuring her has her trick Red into getting into a girl who loves chocolate and it's implied at the end she's going to eat him and Brown has a smile on her face when she sends him off. Honestly can't we just have Red and Yellow, or bring back Blue instead of this broad?

  • Lawand Disorder: Just M&Ms commercials in general these days bug me. You're talking about cartoon characters, whose main appeal has historically been (and continues to be) very young children, and pretty well all the commercials now have a heavy focus on their sex lives. Not in the 'nod to the parents' sort of way cartoons use so families will watch shows together, but in a way that seems to say the executives didn't consider children might watch at all.
  • The Snow Squirrel: Your post inspired me to bring something up, check this out: Mars claims they try not to market to kids! Um...what? I figure the company's trying to discourage little kids' exposure to junk food, but then why on earth do you keep putting characters from the latest Pixar films on the wrappers, still have ads for all your other candy littering Nickelodeon commercial breaks, or still market those candy tubes with the cute little figurine on top every burger-flippin' holiday, which are meant specifically as gifts for small children? It's my personal DMoS simply because this strategy makes no sense at all. Mars M&Ms: now in Broken Aesop flavor.

• Mesousa 2877: Dear lord, the new Twix commercials are the type of concept that is no doubt DOA. Basically, the Twix company decided to split up to represent each bar, despite, well, both have them tasting the exact same. This gimmick would work if they had the second bar taste completely different as a test run, but instead, they have this "Left Twix" and "Right Twix" crap. Since day 1, I've thought this was inane, and it doesn't seem to want to get away at the moment.
  • kablammin45: This ad just makes things even more annoying. A guy touring the "Left" factory actually makes the points stated above and basically that this whole debate is pointless several times during the tour and promptly gets packing tape slapped over his mouth. Strawman Has a Point, much?
  • Axelsonfire: It's exactly the same thing Shreddies did years ago. They brought out Diamond Shreddies. The cereal is square. Tilt it, it becomes a diamond. It's exactly the same thing with the gimmick of being "new". It drove me insane, especially since I knew a lot of people who were convinced they were actually different.
  • Mythril Moth V 3: As of Spring 2017 they've officially taken it too far by releasing "Left Twix/Right Twix packs" to carry the stupid ad campaign over into the product itself. Why do they feel this is necessary or appropriate? This is a candy bar that's been a mainstay for decades, all it needs to do to sell itself is exist. It certainly doesn't need this weird, confusing ad campaign some brilliant person came up with.
• ilovedededeAGAIN: This commercial for those Fruit-to-Go bars. For starters, the CGI animation is half-assed and so poorly done it doesn't even look like they're trying (either that, or they were trying too hard), making it a case of Unintentional Uncanny Valley. Then, there's the kid himself, who for some random reason has an acid trip when he comes across those dumb bars. No, just no. Being excited over Fruit-to-Go bars is okay, but having a random acid trip upon encountering one is just creepy. The kid himself is creepy as well, honestly he looks like he wants to kill someone.
• Dastardly Demolition: The Halo mandarin oranges ads. Here's an example. I you can't see the video goes down, the ads go like this; parent is going to eat one of the Halos, child gets mad, parent sheepishly asks for one, kid in a rude tone reveals something childish about parent such as playing in the sprinklers in their underwear, parent backs down out of embarrassment, slogan. I don't hate these ads but I feel that they belong here on account of how bratty those kids are behaving to their parents.
  • Princess Togezo: While most of those commercials (the ones I've seen, anyway) just annoyed me, there was one that actually made me mad. It involved the dad trying to take the last orange out of the box, but then the kid, who is holding a growling cat, points a laser pointer at him and demands that he put the box down, even moving the laser pointer up to the dad's head. Soon, there's a match cut to the store, where the dad clearly has scratch marks on his head (and even a bandage), thus implying that the kid sicced the cat on him. Yeah... the kid was perfectly willing to make a cat attack someone (on the head, no less!) just for the sake of some oranges. And the kid never gets told off in any capacity. I mean, what if the cat's claws got too close to the dad's eye? What if the wounds got infected or something? I'm normally a pretty easygoing person, but after seeing that commercial, I just wanted to read that kid the riot act.
  • fluffything: At first, the Halo commercials were merely annoying at first with their use of Bratty Half-Pint kids not getting their just desserts for their deplorable behavior. However, one commercial in particular has managed to catch my rage. In said commercial, a mother tells her daughter that she gave the last of the oranges to the child's little brother. The daughter calmly tells her that it's ok. Does the commercial subvert the trend of kids being assholes for not getting what they want? Nope. Instead, we are treated to a shot of the mother closing the door revealing the little brother duct-taped to said door and crying in fear. I just want to make something perfectly clear to the makers of these commercials: Child! Abuse! Is! Not! Funny! Yes, this even applies to a child abusing another child. Keep in mind that all the little brother did was eat the last orange. And, for the horrible crime of eating one of her precious Halos, his sister saw no problem in causing him emotional and physical harm. Let's recap, shall we? Kids being brats over not getting what they want? Annoying but tolerable. Kids being abusive sociopaths? Not fucking funny!
• LightTigerGrandPrix: As horrifically as selfies/emojis/etc. have infected media, I thought they would only reach cartoons and newspaper comics. Then this Goldfish commercial happened. The way they tried using duck faces, which haven't been relevant for about a year now, to be hip and cool makes me want to curl up and rot in a compost bin. But even taking that out of the question, how a bunch of snack crackers managed to obtain and use an iiPhone, and how said iPhone found its way under the bed, is never explained. Ice the cake with a groan-worthy Selfie stick pun and the fact that this commercial has almost nothing to do with the main point of their new contest involving Go-karts, and you get a commercial I certainly don't smile back at.
  • Pgj1997: I couldn't have said it better myself. The only problem is that most of those trends died out ages ago, or aren't as popular as they used to be. That and iPhones are severely underpowered compared to the competition, so very few people own them anymore. This is why I hate most marketing firms nowadays.
• Blood Red Knight: I love Christmas and the Hershey's Kiss bell jingle is just something that was soothing and enjoyable. Well just like everything good in 2020, they defecated all over it. They took classic commercial and out of nowhere had a girl take a Hershey's Kiss from the chorus and the music changed to an R & B tune and using it to make cookies with her day. What was the point of that? You ruined a classic commercial and just completely stepped on what made it great. And the tagline was "Heartwarming the holidays". What is heartwarming about ruining a classic commercial that was might be the closest things we've had to a perfect commercial? If they wanted to use that tagline and have a family moment, they could've just made a separate commercial.
  • Aj Wargo: You wanna know what’s really offensive about this disgusting commercial? Go back and watch the original one, and then go back and watch this new trash one. Notice anything about it? The Kiss that stupid girl takes is the same one that concludes the jingle and wipes itself off! That’s right, it’s not like she has to take any other Kiss, she has to take that one in particular! And what’s to say that this dumb girl and her equally bad father didn’t use the rest of the choir in their baking as well? They just murdered and ate an entire icon of the Christmas season right before your eyes! This is on par with a Crazy Good Pop-Tarts commercial in how utterly disgusting this is!
• Maths Angelic Version: The Norwegian snack company Totenflak once aired some commercials based on a recording of a potato slice slowly being fried. The versions that only used short clips of it were fine and could even serve as a welcome break from noisier ads. Unfortunately, someone had the brilliant idea to air the whole thing — all six minutes of nothing — in one sitting. "Boring" is an understatement.
• Zeo Gosei Prime 68: During the 2021 Super Bowl, they showed a Pringles ad where some Astronauts made it back to Earth and think they are being rescued. Only, to find out that in mission control, they are staking up different flavors of Pringles when they are supposed to go fetch them. After an incredibly long time wait to be rescued, a boat of fishermen approaches and they think they are finally rescued. Well, guess what, they too are busy stacking pringles just like mission control. And to add insult to injury, a thunderstorm approaches them. That. is. so. wrong. I'd just wish they could do their jobs instead of stacking pringles.

Stores

• Star Tropes: Can anything good be said for this Norton Furniture commercial? Hey, Mr. Salesman! Stop talking about credit and save that poor girl from being raped!
• Rosiemom 112629: There was an ad for Walgreens that promoted healthy eating. A husband and wife were having a powdered doughnut and a health drink, respectively. The wife grows more and more irritated until she rips the doughnut out of her husband's hand, destroys it, flings down the pieces, and then hands him a bottle of her drink. It got so irritating that I wanted to see the husband throw the bottle across the room while yelling "I don't want your drink, you bitch! I wanted my doughnut!".
  • CJ Croen 1393: The basic idea of that ad sounds like "it's totally okay to force people to eat healthy, 'cause y'know, it's for their health!" One of these days we're gonna see a health food advertisement involving someone putting a funnel in some unfortunate person's mouth and cramming as much health food down their throat as they can.
• Shining Armor 87: A radio advertisement for the shore store New Balance North Jersey, in which a man tries to get his pet parrot to talk, only for him to recite the amazing features of the store because he listened to the radio and heard commercials for them in the pet store. It just reeks of a lack of creativity and could have been for literally anything else.

Television Shows/Networks

• Latios 2: [adult swim] thought of a brilliant way to advertise the second season The Heart, She Holler during the summer of 2013. How so did they you ask? Well, during advertisements of the other shows on their line up, most of them would for a split second get cut off by a screaming woman from the mentioned show. Oh but wait, It got worse; a few weeks after it started happening it got more frequent, longer and even louder! But the worst of it all came to a peak around the end of August, when they made a full commercial of the woman in the commercial just starring at the viewer blood thirsty in a painfully awful version of Nothing Is Scarier for about a good 10 or so seconds. Fuck you [adult swim], you have made me decide to actively avoid watching the second season now.
  • Silvermoon 424: That commercial was pure Nightmare Fuel. To make matters even worse, not only was the commercial ridiculously long by the end of August, it was played constantly (usually at least once per show). It got to the point where I ended up just changing the channel whenever it came on and switching back a couple of minutes later.
• Pgj1997: Nickelodeon has a certain advertisement for Miraculous Ladybug that's beyond insulting. Seriously, if you thought the trailer for Mighty No. 9 is bad, you haven't seen nothing yet. All the ad boils down to is a random assortment of video files, that I presume are takes from ShutterStock and the like, superglued together in a way that bears no resemblance to the actual show their advertising. And to top things off, they decided to add a narration that's clearly pandering to a younger audience, because that's clearly worked in the past. This just says to me that Nickelodeon has no faith in this show, and just wants to kill this thing as soon as possible. And given that Miraculous Ladybug is already Screwed by the Network as it is, I can only dread what's going to happen later on.
  • SparkPlugTheTroper: Speaking of terrible Nickelodeon advertising, here is a promo for SpongeBob SquarePants and LEGO City Adventures from 2019 that proves just how stingy the network is when it comes to the first of those shows. It would be an unremarkable ad if not for the fact that it briefly uses someone's fanart based on SpongeBob without their permission and removes the signature they wrote in the corner of the art. To me, this move feels literally unnecessary on Nick's part - I don't see how using someone's art at all, let alone passing it off as their own, is going to boost their money intake. I do hope that artist got some kind of compensation for this incident; I never checked.

Video Games

• King Lyger: The magazine ads in Nintendo Power for EarthBound (1994), archived here. The ads make it seem as if the game smells really bad, even including the phrase "because this game stinks!" on it. While the idea of an ad with scratch-and-sniff stickers on it was pretty innovative at the time, outright saying that your product stinks isn't the way to sell it. There was very little about how the game was played or what it was about, just that it was an RPG; the few screenshots included in the ads tell you very little about the combat, the characters, or the setting. It seems to have been going for the sort of "Totally Radical mid-1990s" obsession with gross-out humor, and fails miserably at it. To this troper, this ad campaign was part of the reason that EarthBound eventually became Vindicated by History as a classic, since it sold poorly at the time of its release. Who can blame the public for not buying this game when all they had to go on about the game was "it smells bad"?
• Dr Zulu 2010: This Australian commercial for the game Jam Sessions. Apparently, the guy who made the commercial didn't get the memo about it being a game for everyone (or worse, he is aware) as the kid throws a massive Precision F-Strike. I'm sorry but it's not funny, nor endearing, it's outright immature. Though it does allows it to remember the product... for a game who is about playing a guitar with the DS.
• This ad for the video game Blur:
  • Samuel: It is a Shallow Parody of the Mario Kart franchise. The Sickeningly Sweet imagery is an exaggeration and unlike the break-neck speeds from Mario Kart the karts shown in the parody are driven at a sluggish pace. This ad finishes with the pink monster saying "Racing's not about winning, it's about making friends," followed by a punch in the stomach by a Toad lookalike. The message the advertisers were trying to send is condescending and the ad itself looked like a huge middle finger to Nintendo.
  • Maths Angelic Version: The blatant research failure is what really gets me. Mario Kart is a series of Driving Games with no plot. It has never been about promoting friendship (if you believe that, try throwing a blue shell at someone). Heck, the Mario franchise in general uses The Power of Friendship pretty rarely. The whole ad comes across as nothing but pandering to people who believe the "Nintendo games are for babies" stereotype and think you have to play realistic and edgy games to be "cool". The awful slogan "Blur — race like a big boy" was at least a fitting way to end this terrible ad.
• BlackBaroness: The Masterclass trailer for Mighty No. 9 was bad enough to turn much of its core demographic away from the game, but what single-handedly ruined it is when the narrator states that the player can "make the bad guys cry like an anime fan on prom night." Even though a large chunk of potential buyers were anime fans.
  • Senor Cornholio: Hey, you. Editing this page. Let me ask you a question: do you like awesome things that are awesome? Then don't watch this trailer, dude; it's anything but, and it's super lame. Like, Mega Man X7 lame. Believe me when I say that the above line about anime fans is simply the icing on this crud cake. Check out this Totally Radical dialogue that makes the 90s facepalm in embarrassment; this is supposed to be a parody, but it's so over the top in your face that it might as well have a baseball cap and shades on. The point is, it's dated and thinks it's being creative. Oh, and look at this: it wants to show you what you should look forward to in this game, but all we see are pizza explosions, gameplay that's more bare bones than your average Disney knockoff, and graphics so disappointingly low-res that they belong on the PS2. But I've saved the worst for last: "comedy" that tries to be funny, but really isn't even trying that hard. You could literally train a brain-dead donkey to write a better script, and they don't have any hands! Makes you wonder if the voice actor was being forced to read these lines, but what would he be forced to do? Play Mighty No. 9?
    
    * Chirping Crickets*
    
    Okay, enough of that shtick. In a shellnut, this trailer made people weep like the game devs on opening night. This was such a terrible trailer that it turned backers away from the game altogether, the higher ups apparently hated it, and you'd have to wonder if the people behind the trailer were secretly working for Capcom.
• Captain Tedium: That Ty the Tasmanian Tiger ad where he hospitalized Spyro, Sonic, and Crash Bandicoot really irritated me. I get that making jabs toward the competition is a common tactic in advertising, but that doesn't change the fact that boasting about the advertised product being better than others is needlessly petty. It was especially in bad taste to have Sonic, Crash, and Spyro flatline after Ty scares them. Having your game's character beat up and indirectly kill his competition with no remorse is not the way to get your game to sell!
• Cookieman: I felt like a lot of Super Nintendo commercial ads were strange, but one I felt like was terrible at telling its product was for Final Fantasy IV (known as Final Fantasy II during the time). Basically it's a bunch of random footage spliced together (not even showing battle footage and having some scenes out of order) - and even spoils the True Final Boss at the very end. It also brings up Final Fantasy Legend 2 and Final Fantasy Adventure out of nowhere as well. The Japanese commercials were also really weird at not showing any gameplay footage at all, but at least the ostriches with the Chocobo theme are humorous.
• Thepenguinking2: The ads to the mobile game Hero Wars embody everything I hate about mobile game advertisements: blatantly fake gameplay, terrible and janky animation, "gameplay" that insults your intelligence, so on and so forth. But then at some point in time, they must've had a lot of complaints from people, or the player count was so small in spite of these incredibly well-thought out ads, so they had a new idea; they were going to start to appeal to fetishes. By somewhere around 2023, they started shamelessly adding references to scantily clad monster girls, face-stepping, giantesses, vore, cuckoldry, bestiality, and even masturbation in one ad... all while still sticking to the same old blatantly fake, poorly animated gameplay that insults your intelligence. And I've seen these while playing mobile games that are family friendly and are probably played by several children. Do they want those innocent kids to see this!?

Unsorted

• Kenya Starflight: The University of Phoenix's solution to revamping its image has been a commercial featuring a reworked version of "If I Only Had a Brain" from The Wizard of Oz. While there's nothing inherently wrong with appropriating a well-known and beloved song for a commercial (even if it's annoying), it feels jarring to have a light-hearted number twisted to fit this condescending commercial, which implies that women are inherently superior (no mention whatsoever is made of male college graduates) and anyone who doesn't hire a University of Phoenix graduate for their company is brainless. The fact that the singer is off-key at several points in the song doesn't help things.
• As For My Handle: The Great Wolf Lodge Commercial. There are two kids waiting in a nurse's office, and one of them is shown to be considerably injured. The other kid just complains about how he would have to wait three weeks before he could go to the water-park. It seems to try to be funny, but it really just makes the kid look whiny and ungrateful that he had a chance to go to the water-park in the first place.
• Cabbit Girl Emi: Here is something I have wanted to say for a while. I can't seem to go one video on YouTube without coming across one of the ads for Prager University. Apparently, Prager U was founded by a conservative talk show host, and just about every ad has the audacity to insult anyone watching. Not just insulting liberals ^note such as myself, but that's another story, they insult every last one of you. I don't even bother to pay attention to any of their beliefs because some ads can be about 5 MINUTES in length. Prager U, do us a huge favor and STOP pushing your propaganda on us during our favorite videos!
  • Hawkatana: Just so you guys know, they tried to say that we have the British Empire to thank for all that we enjoy in the world & that they never did anything wrong, ever.
• Akkun_K: As I write this, the ad is about a year old, but I chose to put it here anyway because it still annoys me. It's for the microwave meal brand Devour, and the main premise is that this one guy is talking dirty to his bacon mac n' cheese, culminating in him "spanking" it with his fork. His coworker walks in at this moment, but instead of being weirded out and/or calling HR, he actually likes what he sees! The commercial ends with the slogan "Food you wanna fork." Uuuuuuggggghhhh. I normally love a good pun, but that in conjunction with the above is just painful! Apparently, Devour realized how much people hated this ad, because I haven't seen any from them since.
• Izzy Uneasy: I can handle commercial banners when they're not too sassy. The one that made me lose it spelt, "You can look at the naked dog-thing down there or you can get distracted by a maze in this ad. The choice is up to you!" Fuck yo maze, dipshit! I came to FurAffinity to (surprise-surprise) see all kinds of beasts and beasties lewding each other, and you can take your maze and shove it so far up your ass that it will crawl out of your mouth.
• charun: The Cory Carson ad on Spotify is insufferable...it's a pretty standard kid's show theme, but when it's played in between your thrash metal and punk rock and such it makes me wanna watch a few demolition derbies.
• Erin582: Back around 2002, there was a medicine commercial for Tylenol Kids featuring a little girl who was talking about what an irritating pest her kid brother was and shows him busting up a game of checkers she and her friends were having just because he could. So she's thankful that he's sick just to get some reprieve from his terror, only for him to then bust in on the girls again with a water gun while they're playing dress up. She then goes to the mother, clearly unhappy and soaking wet, whose only response is to laugh at her and tell her that she "had to give it to him", to the little girl's annoyance. WTF?! Not only does the little bastard get away with being a bastard because he was previously sick, but the mother does nothing to resolve the issue whatsoever for glaring reasons. What an mean-spirited and unfunny "lesson" to teach children and other viewers, especially those who went through similar experiences growing up.
• Maths Angelic Version: In January 2021, Gudbrandsdal Energi (a Norwegian energy company) released an ad intended to emphasize their low prices. It follows their so-called motivator doing lovely things like yelling at someone for daring to put a slice of bell pepper on his sandwich, yelling at someone for wearing "big" shoes, following a guy to the bathroom to make sure he doesn't spend more than two minutes on the toilet, verbally abusing employees for their poor performances while barely trying to help them do better, and generally acting like an obnoxious Jerkass. I get that it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but the motivator is extremely annoying and not funny at all, and the whole concept just reminds me of companies that actually mistreat their workers to keep prices down.
• batmany: Recently, there's been an advertisement shown on game apps for a product called "Flex" (a reusable menstrual cup). Now, advertising for a woman's bodily needs isn't a problem. The way this ad goes about advertising it, however, is nothing short of absolutely disgusting. What happens in the ad? Well, a woman (who is on her period) is finishing her job interview. She stands up, and there's a stain of blood on the boss's white chair. That's nasty enough, but it gets worse. The boss and the lady then start shaking hands with increased vigor as the lady starts bleeding profusely from her, well, you know. They then just both start staring awkwardly at each other as blood oozes down the lady's leg. Just, what the hell where these advertisers thinking? Yes, women have accidents during their monthly. Yes, it can lead to some uncomfortable moments. However, that's not how you advertise your product! Nobody wants to see a woman bleeding profusely from her lady parts! Not to mention, no human being bleeds that much out their lady parts unless they've been severely injured or they have some sort of medical condition. It is one of the most appalling things I have seen in a long time. I'm not only offended as a woman, but I'm also offended as a human being in general. To the people who invented Flex, why in the name of Lady Gaga's meat suit would you ever think I would want to try your product after seeing that?
• Demetrios: The new commercial for Sheba's cat food is definitely bad. It shows a lady sitting on the couch reading with her cat over her shoulder. Then her young son calls to her from offscreen saying that he fell, and adding that he's bleeding from it... and the mom continues sitting there with a detached, vacant smile and only tells him to help himself, while she more enthusiastically gives her cat the food the commercial is promoting. That commercial is a big pile of Unfortunate Implications. It makes it look like thanks to your cat, your child could be badly injured and you're off in La La Land.
• Erin582: While Extra Gum has been around for decades, one of their commercials rubbed me the wrong way. It premiered in the Christmas 2021 season and features a young man with his family at Christmas and opens the "touching" gift from his parents of a book called Don't Worry! You'll Find Love and then the father gives him a patronizing thumbs-up like this is okay. As bad as this was, while the guy is clearly and understandably hurt and upset over the gift, before he can properly react, he reaches down to put a stick of gum into his mouth and chews it, forcing a shit-eating smile on his face as the "slogan" of the commercial says "Chew It Before You Do It", or in other words, "You Aren't Allowed To React Or Be Offended By Your Terrible Family's Antics Because It's Christmas. Happy Holidays!" What an awful message and a grossly unfunny "joke", especially to people who grew up with abusive or otherwise toxic family members. Furthermore, not everyone will find love and others have resolved themselves to this, so to see it in an ad for a company that wants to "appeal" to me (or wants my business rather) is appalling. Shame on you, Extra.^note And for added suckiness, right before the man opens his gift, another man (presumably his brother) is seen sitting nearby and reacting favorably to his own gift. Why even single out and embarrass a family member, even with "good" intentions in mind?
• Nightfurywitch: I keep getting this one ad for a crypto app that drives me *insane.* The app is showing tons of monumental inventions, i.e. the wheel, indoor plumbing, the moon launch, etc, and adds in this old guy who mocks them at every single turn. The ad ends with the app, and the guy dismissing it, leading to the slogan "Don't be a Larry". Seriously? Cryptobros really think they're as important as the wheel? I'm not surprised, but I am irritated to no end.
  • Almighty King Prawn: That ad is for FTX, and "Larry" is actually Larry David. I hate how this ad is actually really funny in the same way most of Larry David's material is until we see what it is selling. Then it is just insulting. Apparently Larry David knows nothing about crypto and the ad was taking advantage of that fact. Hey FTX, can we not make fun of people for not understanding crypto? The making fun of people for disliking crypto that many cryptobros like to do is already beyond obnoxious.
• Erin582: A 2021 commercial for Greenies Dental Treats I consider to be awful. In it, an obviously deserted man is sitting on an island next to his wrecked boat waiting for anyone to come by to rescue him and even manages to spell out "HELP" in branches to passing-by planes... only for his dog to grab a stick away, potentially ruining his chances. Even worse, two pilots in a plane happens to fly by and see this poor man trying to get their attention, only for the co-pilot to not notice and the pilot to see this bearded, desperate man frantically waving his arms only for him to stupidly and condescendingly wave back and now interpret his "HELo" sign as "Hello" and shouts it back at him. First of all, you see this poor guy, obviously in trouble and you don't put two and two together? Second, what kind of moron would think the word "hello" would be spelled like that? Third, the way he was waving both of his arms was not as a friendly gesture like the dumbass pilot was doing, and if it were, it would be like that. And lastly, you're a pilot? WTF?! The commercial ends with the man still on the island, hoping for someone to rescue him in spite of him realizing he's probably screwed and his "faithful" companion biting into the stupid Greenies stick, unaware of the damage he just caused. I get that Madison Avenue firmly believes that cynical sells, but this is just cruel. Who is this commercial even for? I can tell you who it's not for: it's not for dogs, as it plays up one of the oldest stereotypes about them. It's not for pilots: they're portrayed as morons in an elevated, undeserved position. It's certainly not for disaster survivors: the company thinks your plight is funny. And I'm gonna go out on a whim and say that it's not for dog owners or lovers either: they may get the underlying message of "feed your dogs regularly", but a more fitting or just plain nasty message could be "don't train your dog to be an idiot" or "feed your dogs our product regularly or this could happen to you!" Just like with the aforementioned Sheba commercial with the thoughtless mother, I may not own a pet, but I at least now know what products not to give them.