Follow TV Tropes

Following

Woobie / Advertising

Go To

  • Watch the Abilify ad and you'll find yourself wanting to cuddle the little depression monster black-hole thing.
  • The polar bear in the Nissan Leaf commercial. The poor guy (or, possibly, girl) walks all the way from the arctic to the suburbs to give a man a hug for purchasing a Nissan Leaf and, as the ad implies, saving earth's polar ice caps from melting.
  • The Trix Rabbit. You got to feel bad for a rabbit that has had to put with years of selfish kids who won't let him have his Trix because "Trix Are For Kids".
    • When a poll was taken to see if the Trix Rabbit should get the Trix, it was almost unanimously agreed that he should. Also, there's several commercials that seem to go out of their way to make the kids look like jerks (one having the Rabbit actually buy a box with his own money and the kids steal it from him because "Trix are for kids").
    • Seth MacFarlane note  says this was why he did the Family Guy "Asian Trix" parody.
  • PC in the Mac vs. PC commercials. If you're thinking of the commercials in a plot-based kind of way, he seems to have gotten progressively desperate. One can only guess that he'll end the commercial runs Lucky Channel-style.
  • I Can't Believe It's Not Butter's The Butter Compartment ads see a stick of butter be abused and belittled by the other food items in the fridge because the titular product is so much better and healthier than she is. Watching Pretty much any one of those ads will make you want to hug the poor stick.
  • The pea in the old Batchelor's advert (UK), made to think about the old days on the farm, in the pod with all his friends, etc. The result? His own tears turn it to mush.
  • "Nobody ever pays me in gum!" Complete with "Aww..." from the other characters in the commercial.
  • The GEICO commercial where the Drill Sergeant Nasty is a therapist. Can you blame his client for being tearful in the end?
  • The broken-hearted lamp sitting on the curb in the IKEA commercial that everyone feels so sorry for. Lampshaded (pun intended) by some guy coming in and saying the lamp has no feelings and asking why we feel bad about it.
    • If you've seen The Brave Little Toaster it's even more heart-wrenching.
    • There isn't even anything wrong with the lamp, it still works. Why throw it away?
    • Fortunately, sixteen years later a new commercial showed the lamp being taken in by a little girl who replaces the bulb and uses it for everything, with the same guy appearing at the end stating that it's not crazy to be happy for the lamp and it's good to reuse things.
  • The Quit Smoking ad with the young boy losing his mother in the busy public place. And his reaction doesn't help one bit.
  • Played for Laughs in this ad with a rooster crowing in the middle of the night, and the lady is annoyed, and makes it leave. Then you see it wandering in the streets, looking pitiful, crowing at a few doors, and it's raining. After a few scenes, it wanders off into the cold darkness. On the bright side, though, the rooster shows up in the end with her coworker, who looks on in sympathy, in the cubicle next to her.
  • The woman in this commercial for Jamster. Say how many of you feel sorry for her when her husband-to-be left her at the altar.
  • The kid in the NSPCC "Cartoon Boy" advert, who is repeatedly thrown across the house, used as an ashtray, and is thrown down the stairs by his own father.
  • The little salt shaker, and his friend the pepper shaker, from the Sidekicks ads. When they start crying, it's a big Tear Jerker.
  • The boy (actor Jesse Eisenberg) from the (circa) 2001 Dr. Pepper commercial. He simply wants a specific soda in the market, and by simply closing the glass door, he gets crushed by boxes. Then, the firemen show up to rescue him, but rip out his pants and underwear in the process. A city-level crowd pays unwanted attention to this “wardrobe malfunction”, and even the news make headline of it, traumatizing the boy.
  • Played for Laughs (albeit dark laughs with The Pepsi Next commercial where it shows a mother fawning over her baby, until the father brings home the soda (marketed as having 60% less sugar than regular Pepsi but having the same taste) and they start fawning over it over their own child who's trying to get their attention by doing amazing things like dancing, playing guitar etc. You're gonna feel very sorry for him.
  • Mr. Whipple, who never stopped trying to keep customers from squeezing the Charmin.
    • It did not help that he had a weakness for doing the same.
  • This little gem features an old, run-down anthropomorphic red bus who is constantly shunned by his modern white cousins, forced to sleep by a garbage container instead of a spot on the parking lot, written on ("DIRTBAG"), despised by adults and minors alike. He finally has enough of his bad luck and decides to commit suicide by hopping into a junkyard crusher. His change of heart just seconds before being crushed and a save by a butterfly make us feel all warm and fuzzy inside... And then the crusher operator flips the switch again, killing him. The narrator tells us to "show no mercy to obsolete and decrepit vehicles", while we are shown a metallic red cube circled by the aforementioned butterfly. Just to drive the point home - or perhaps to ridicule the dead protagonist further - the arrow which was stuck in the rear of the bus through the whole video is still sticking out of the cube.
    • The ad, fittingly titled The Sad Bus, was funded by the Polish Ministry of Interior. It advertises an online bus verification system which supposedly lets you check the technical info and condition of any bus in the country. Most viewers failed to absorb this information, since they were still emotionally reeling from the punchline.
  • Surprisingly played for laughs in this Hey You, Pikachu! ad. You can't help but feel sorry for that poor dog who got fat, walks himself, and is starved for attention.
  • The Eggo Waf-full commercials. These are the strawberry and blueberry commercials. In both stories, the fillings are just minding their own business, living their lives (strawberry is just listening to music and blueberry is coming out of his house with his cat to feed his birds) and then a waffle attacks and both are swallowed whole in each story. Just to be clear, these fillings are just living their daily routines and appear as alive as any human and they're clearly horrified when the waffles attack. It's a miracle the apple-cinnamon commercial never happened.
  • Played for Laughs: The poor boy in this Fruit Gushers commercial gets his big orange head wedged in his friend's locker and is abandoned by the said friend i.e. a girl he tried to impress. No one else walking by bothers to lend a hand despite his cries for help and it goes so far that in an alternate ending, he's still stuck there after-hours when everyone but the custodian has left, and said man barely gives him a glance before passing by! Admittedly it was the kid's own fault for not thinking things through before sticking his head inside, with the girl notably rolling her eyes at him after the fact before walking away, but it was a dick move by her and it didn't warrant leaving him stuck in her own locker.

Top