Narm / Advertising

Don't you hate it when you accidentally squish an entire class of kids?

Have you ever seen those advertisements that are so over-the-top you wonder, "Wait, What Were They Selling Again?", or commercials that attempt to be serious, but end up just hilarious? These are those commercials.

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PSAs/PIFs and Political Ads:

• There was once a horrific Northern Irish drink-driving PIF in which a car smashes through a garden fence and crushes a young child. In 2014, the DOE decided to ramp this concept up to eleven with this ad, in which a speeding driver loses control of his car and rips through a hedge, killing an entire class of schoolchildren (pictured above). It's too contrived and over the top to take seriously, and, in contrast to the earlier one, there is no blood or injury detail at all. Not helping matters is the shot a boy's face just before he gets crushed flat along with his classmates, whose facial expression makes him look mildly inconvenienced by his impending death more than anything else. The ad was meant to convey the fact that 28 children (roughly the size of a primary school class) have been killed by speeding drivers since 2000. But surely there are better ways of illustrating that.
  • It even says "Shame on you" at the end like it's the viewer's fault.
  • Another PIF from the DOE. Whatever seriousness the ad is going for is ruined by the girl giving off a disinterested pog face just before being hit.
• The UK road safety campaign THINK! has developed a knack for this sort of thing.
  • This ad is definitely narm territory. The narrator (Christopher Eccleston) keeps saying "Now you see him. Now you don't." while the driver of the car looks in the rear view mirror at a motorcyclist who keeps disappearing from view. When the obvious impact happens, Eccleston's narration tries to be dramatic ("Now you see him! Now you see him!") as the camera slowly pans in on the unconscious or dead driver, but fails. Instead he sounds like he's trying to point something out to a birdwatcher.
  • Another THINK! ad was dropped when market research showed that audiences found the ending (in which a pizza splatters against a car windscreen in imitation of a human body) funny rather than shocking.
  • A Jump Scare road-safety ad was briefly shown in the late 90s/early 2000s, wherein a driver would arrive at a junction. He'd stop the car, look both ways, pause a little longer, then slowly start to pull out... and a man on a motorbike suddenly crashes into the window. Smash Cut to the biker on the ground (presumably dead) while a crowd of people stand around and give the driver of the car dirty looks. The message was for motorists to be aware of bikes on the road. A good enough message, certainly, but somewhat ruined by the fact that the driver of the car is clearly not the one at fault, having explicitly followed the proper procedure at a junction, and the biker appeared to be some kind of apparating ninja biker who appeared out of nowhere just for the sole purpose of driving home the Safe Driving Aesop. It would have made more sense for the advert to be aimed at bikers.
  • A drink-driving ad called ''Moment of Doubt'' showed a man walking up to a bar and the barman asks for his order...before embarking on what can only be described as a one-man show which details the man's life once he gets caught drunk-driving (he gets fired, loses his license and apparently somehow ends up with nothing). The barman takes on several characters including a policeman, the man's boss, a car salesman and finally the driver. Then everything goes back to normal and he looks straight at the camera, saying "What's it gonna be?" while the THINK! slogan comes up. The fact that it all happens so fast (the entire ad is 32 seconds long. There is a slighty longer 50 seconds version, but it's not much better) coupled with the threatening glare the barman gives at the end, not to mention the fact that there's no evidence shown for the driver being drunk when he approaches the bar, moves this firmly into narmy territory and makes it seem more like we've just witnessed a man suffering from split-personality disorder having a breakdown than a drink-driving ad. It's become something of a punchline among YouTube's community of PIF reviewers, with easportsbig899 calling it the worst PIF ever made, and making his hatred for it a Running Gag in his top 10 lists.
• Dark and Lonely Water was likely scary back in the day, but hilarious now, mostly because of the kid at the end going "Euw, 'orrible thing!"
• This UK ad from safety on the move is a healthy mix of horror. A young woman crosses the road when she is mowed down by a speeding driver. She lands heavily on the tarmac, blood streaming out of her nose, and her ghost bends down over her own corpse, declaring "You've killed me!" This is where it gets into the narm territory, because she is generally trying to communicate with the driver despite knowing she is dead, even though he obviously can't hear her. The way she lands also ends up looking like slapstick because they use a cartoony stock "SMACK!" effect when her head hits the ground.
• There used to be a Canadian ad about getting tested for colon cancer. As serious as the topic was, it's hard to take it seriously when there are see-through bodies and one telling the other, "Looks like you've got colon cancer," in a casual tone you would use when talking about the weather.
• American anti-drug PSAs seem almost always destined to be a magnet for Narm.
  • Worth special mention is an Above the Influence ad in which a guy's dog tells him to stop smoking marijuana. Left unsaid was that if your dog is talking to you, then you have bigger problems than marijuana, like the powerful hallucinogen you obviously took. The thing is, Marijuana does not work that way. While it wasn't their intent, it was a non-anthropomorphic dog who does nothing in the body of the ad but disapprove of marijuana — and all the dialogue is written on-screen, not spoken. The whole thing is surreal. Family Guy even made a parody of it.
  • Made worse when a live action version of this ad began airing. It's not as surreal as its animated counterpart, but it has the added hilarity of a dog talking for no reason. Also see the CollegeHumor parody.
  • One late 1980s-early 1990s ad had an aggressive drug dealer that turned into a snake man. Subtlety, thy name is not anti-drug ads. Watch it here.
  • In 2007 and 2008, there was a very odd anti-drug PSA from abovetheinfluence.org in which a girl dumped her pot-smoking boyfriend for an alien after it declined his joint. That was the message of the PSA: If you smoke pot, an alien will steal your girlfriend. That it was all drawn with magic marker probably didn't help. The most hilarious part was that the pot smoker sees an alien land, and what's the first thing he does is to offer the alien a joint, of course.
  • The guys smoking pot and circling through a drive-thru at a restaurant four times while a girl on a bicycle rides by; at the end, the producers pull a Bolivian Army Ending and imply she got hit. The ads was parodied in Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle and Chappelle's Show:
    "If you're a girl under the age of 12, and you're high on marijuana, don't ride your bike."
  • In one infamous anti-drug PSA, a solemn tone is set as we go into a darkened room with a shadowed figure sitting in the center. The lights come up and reveal... Pee-wee Herman. Not Paul Reubens, Pee-wee Herman. Who proceeds to pull out a vial of crack and solemnly tell us about the dangers of crack. In the Pee-Wee Herman voice, but with a dead serious tone. Words cannot describe how incredibly surreal this is, so we'll let the ad speak for itself.
  "Deeyus... eeyus kreck."
  • In another anti-drug PSA, starring Henry Rollins, he compares the feeling of using meth or speed (they're closely related) to driving a powerful car very fast. The car in the ad explodes.
    "The difference? You can't rebuild a human heart."
  • And here's this PSA with some good ol' concrete diving.
  • The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' foray into anti-drug PSAs (and, for added value, some nerd's foray into witty comebacks).
    "I'm not a chicken, you're a turkey!"
  • The granddaddy was the fried egg "This is your brain on drugs" spot, which was the endless subject of parody for sketch comics from the mid-80s well into the 1990s.
    "This is your asshole before prison, this is your asshole after prison..."
    "This is your brain on drugs with a side order of bacon."
    • Even more so the sequel, depicting Rachael Leigh Cook using a frying pan to destroy a kitchen while rambling about what drugs will do to your life.
  • "Now let's see if I can still make a straight line!" This ad is an exercise in attempted scare tactics. Adding to the narm is the "whatever, as long as I get paid" expressions worn by the rest of the OR staff as well as the narrator. Also, it seems the actor playing the surgeon is fully aware of the kind of ad he's in.
  • This PSA has kids proudly announcing all the terrible things that happened while they were on drugs as if they were great achievements. If the premise wasn't already goofy, it's capped off with a guy saying "I let people draw on me!" with the dopiest expression.
  • In 2019, South Dakota rolled out a new ad campaign that was meant to be a call to action against the state's increasingly severe epidemic of methamphetamine use. The tagline they chose? "Meth. We're on it." The internet promptly memed the entire campaign to death, while annoyed locals pointed out that it reinforced negative stereotypes about the state by making it sound like everyone in South Dakota was hooked on speed. State officials argued that it at least got people talking about the issue, but the slogan has quietly receded into the background since its debut.
• This commercial on the quite serious effects of drowsy driving has its impact (no pun intended) taken away at the end of the video... let's just say it makes the effects in Birdemic look realistic in comparison.
• A PSA about the example parents set for their kids had this unfortunate effect. The video showed children copying their parents (almost) exact actions right alongside them: the Narm takes over when some of the examples include a young girl smoking, a young boy throwing rocks at the neighbor's dog, a five-year-old flipping off a driver, and a little boy helping batter his mother. The tagline "Children See, Children Do" didn't help.
• Any PSA involving the Power Rangers. It makes it look like the Rangers are more afraid of fast food hamburgers than Omnicidal Maniacs. It's also a Broken Aesop; an ad had Jason and Xander (fully suited; sorry, no return of Austin St. John) at McDonald's, and that back in the 90's, they promoted fast food both in the show and for McDonald's.
  • A particularly humorous example is when Jason uses self control to not beat the shit of a guy who comes in looking for a fight. The lesson is use the least amount of force to solve a conflict. This one is funny not only because have they basically curb stomped mooks every episode, but also because the kid in the video doing tai-chi with the yellow ranger is clearly looking at her breasts.
• High school Scare 'Em Straight "Every 15 Minutes" campaigns against drunk/distracted driving can be very effective if done correctly by a professional video production studio, but they can also often veer into this:
  • One mimicked a real drunk driving accident in varying levels of detail. A movie was also made so that students who didn't see the actual crash scene could still get the gist of it - unfortunately, it opened with a line from the actor playing the drunk driver about getting drunk on wine. People invariably laugh at the idea of a sixteen-year-old getting into a drunk driving accident because he ditched school to sip a bottle of Cabernet, and the opening line ruined the tenor of the movie. (The line was recorded as a joke along with the "real" dialog, but the editors who worked on the video threw it in anyway.)
  • In another one for distracted driving, most of the Narm was provided by the principal and vice principals just standing near the scene, without a care in the world. No staff member pretending to be angry and shocked, they were just watching over like "yep, that's a problem".
  • In a MADD drunk driving movie called "Smashed" the crash victims appear to be bleeding purple. Takes the tension and seriousness right out.
• Oxfam's (a UK aid charity) TV campaign, called Be Humankind. Apparently, you can defeat poverty (depicted as a giant monster) with halitosis.
• Another Oxfam's ad shows analysis of handwriting with one of the loops apparently meaning that "you care deeply about the world and want to help". Even without knowing about the questionable nature of analyzing handwriting to determine personality, it seems like a lot of information packed into one little part of what is written.
• London South Bank University has a poster campaign◊ involving people with giant brains for heads.
• "It Only Takes a Second", a video campaign by the Federated Mutual Insurance Company, depicts unfortunate and painful accidents through dramatization. What makes this safety video so narmy is that many of the situations are poorly acted and sometimes unrealistic. The final scene of the video is a good example of this.
• There's an "Immigration rap" where two guys rap about how to become a U.S. citizen. The best part is probably "Are-you-a drug dee-al-er?"
  • A similar rap (perhaps the same one) plays on a loop in an exhibit at the Boston Prudential Center, and includes the line "Have you ever been a patient in a mental institution?/ Do you swear to defend the US Constitution?"
• In Canada, there was a series of well-made ads with relatively high production values about the hazards of unsafe driving. The impact (pun intended) came from people not expecting to see the impact; while we don't from inside the car, we do get to see a Mack truck make hash out of one half of the little midsize car. The following ads show the aftermath: physical therapy (for the girlfriend of the driver), a funeral (for the driver's little brother), a trial for the driver of the car... All chilling. Then someone noticed that the guy playing the driver is the Villain Protagonist from an older commercial about how to avoid having your car stolen, and people started asking if the car that got smashed was the same one he stole.
• This anti-global-warming PSA from Quercus, a Portuguese environmentalist group. It starts out visually striking with the shots of desolate wastelands and melting ice-caps, but when the monkey hangs itself, the ad becomes complete Narm. The CGI lip-quivering should have been a warning. And that was with the original sad piano score. The second version backed by Peter Gabriel's "Don't Give Up" is even worse.
• The Canadian "Home Front" domestic abuse PSAs. "You stupid BITCH!" Or better yet, "She spilled my coffee!"
• This old British PSA from the late 1970s that warned children not to play in electrical substations could either be considered hilariously Narmy or pure horror.
• A fairly well-known healthcare system in metropolitan Detroit has, as of late, become known not for the quality of their medical services, but for their horribly over-the-top commercials, which skip right past Scare 'Em Straight and into Narm territory. These gems come complete with dim lighting, silently frowning (or gowned and masked) medical staff, pounding Scare Chord music and a deadly serious voiceover actor reading lines like "Choosing a hospital could be the most important decision you'll ever make" and "It's your heart/eyes/life/whatever... Do you have a Beaumont doctor?" The general effect of the commercials has been to generate an epidemic of spontaneous gluteal detachment secondary to laughter overdose in the viewing population. And then they promptly go get treated somewhere that doesn't sound like a Vincent Price film gone wrong.
• One anti-piracy advert with the slogan "Piracy funds organized crime!" (found at the end of UK Battlestar Galactica DVDs and the beginning of certain British Disney tapes from the era) features a man with a suspicious resemblance to Joshamee Gibbs branding a pile of DVDs with an "X" brand and somehow setting them on fire, while the flame is reflected in his eyes and he smiles evilly, giving him a demonic appearance.
• National Organization for Marriage's "Gathering Storm". A dead-serious and deeply-dramatic PSA.....about the supposed evils of gay marriage. And they, without irony, say that they're forming a "rainbow coalition."
  • Their initials spell NOM, and they use them. This may provide narm, especially to those familiar with LOLCats, because the sound of a cat eating can't be taken seriously.
  Da Sturhm. Eez. Kahmming.
• Boys Beware, a horrible 1950s short film that equates gay people with pedophiles. "What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick. You see... RALPH WAS A HOMOSEXUAL." Delivered in a completely serious tone, while inappropriately cheery music plays on the soundtrack.
• There are a number of comedic advertisements in New Zealand that involve housewives doing strange and unusual things. As such, when an advert aired that had a women talking about healthy snack food, only to trip over a toy car and plummet into a glass-topped coffee table, many people burst out laughing... only to find out, as the camera panned away and the woman lay there sobbing amongst the glass shards, that it was meant to be a deadly-serious PSA about the dangers of leaving toys about on the floor. "Most accidents occur IN THE HOME." Because negotiating toy-covered floors whilst filming muesli bar commercials in their own home is something that every housewife has to deal with.
• On the subject of New Zealanders. Drop the lines "Ït's the same day David" and "Don't say sorry to me, say sorry to his kids" into casual conversation with one of them. Odds are they won't put on a grim face and talk about the evils of driving too fast. The ad features a speeding man seriously injuring himself and killing a father of three. The hilarity comes from the man's wife/girlfriend delivering the infamous lines and his own squeaky cries at the end.
• There's an old commercial that still plays late at night which encourages people to get tested for cancer. It would be admirable, but it features various elderly people who survived cancer — not actors. They don't even try to emote; they just squint at the camera and read off cue cards. The worst? Just imagine the following quote read in a nasally monotone by the Church Lady from Saturday Night Live:
  "Norma Ray. Breast cancer. Three years. Survivor."
• War Amps, the Canadian amputee organization, had the infamous PLAYSAFE commercials staring ASTAR, a robot from Planet Danger (the planet with No OSHA Compliance). The silly alien costume and monotone voice during the "I can put my arm back on—you can't" resulted in many parodies in Canadian pop culture.
  • There's also a updated version made in 2000, which takes the first one and renders it in comically terrible CGI, along with rendering ASTAR's voice to sound whiny and almost campy.
• The Belfast City Council embarked on an anti-litter campaign which features pop art characters expressing horror and disgust any time their companion litters. This results in ads like a picture of a crying girl thinking, "All I did was drop my chewing gum on the ground... and now he won't speak to me!"
• South Dakota used to have state-issued radio ads during the wintertime with dramatic, heart-pounding music that is obviously meant to be frightening and a man who sounds like Peter Thomas who drags out the words "DON'T CROWD THE PLOW" in a menacing way. It's utterly hilarious. Sadly, they've realized that and stopped playing it.
• A notorious anti-drunk driving PSA from a alcoholism treatment center circa 1980 with a hysterical housewife chasing after her husband shrieking, "Don't take the car! You'll kill yourself!" The acting and the freeze-frame on the housewife mid-sentence are just the icing on the narm cake.
• The Australian Grim Reaper AIDS PSA from the 1980s. Maybe it was scary back in the day, and in some aspects might still be; but the way the people suddenly fall over when getting hit is done in the most spastic, over-the-top way ever.
  Alwehs yooz CAHN-DAHMS. Alwehs.
• From the 2008 campaign: This John McCain ad, which goes the Viewers Are Morons route: "Is Obama ready to lead? (dramatic pause) NO."
• This ad does something similar: "He promised better. (long pause, with the sound of a ticking clock in the background) HE LIED."
• There is a Canadian road/ambulance safety ad, which starts out with an ambulance with a patient in it and some idiot talking on his cell phone and not paying attention to the road. It's serious up until the point the guy talking on his phone crashes into the ambulance, and you see his face afterwards. It was supposed to come across as the guy feeling awful about what he did, but the Dull Surprise on his face made it look more like he was thinking "Holy shit, that was AWESOME." Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be on Youtube yet.
• This early '90s road safety campaign from the UK starts off dramatically but rapidly dissolves into Narm: "This child needs help! Anybody!"
• This message from PETA about animal testing. That it's from PETA should already convince you that it's narm, but just in case you need further convincing, bear in mind that it's readily apparent that this is probably an attempt at being scary, but their wording in trying to make it seem that way just comes across as laughable. ^note Though how well it works might depend on how much you agree with its message; if you go in with the impression that this is going to be ridiculous, that might help you better notice the amusing aspects of it, but still. The following line is especially hilarious if you say it in a dramatic voice:
  They get hurt. Bad. BAD. The kind of burning, needing, fear-producing, cage-circling, screaming, SCREAMING, screaming hurt we shudder to even imagine.
• A PSA encouraging abstinence bore the tagline "Sex lasts a moment. Being a father lasts your whole life". This was changed from the earlier tagline of "Sex lasts a minute", likely because the only reasonable response would be "Not if you're doing it right".
• This commercial shows that you probably won't see the arresting officer coming, especially if you're wasted. Well, it shows that to a serious-minded person. To anyone else, it shows: "Oh my lord! Invisible ninja cops!"
• ''The Finishing Line'', a railway safety film, was regarded as very scary back when it first aired in the 1970s. However, by today's standards, the bad acting, lines such as "You're like a jellian" (According to Guru Larry, a jellian is "A mop-headed child from the seventies that gives pointless strategic advice") and the Captain Obvious Aesop (Don't hold sporting events on railway lines) propel it firmly into Narm territory.
• Above the Influence really made some of the most bizarre anti-drug PSAs. Take this one, an interview with a girl that has been almost squashed flat. By what? Pressure. The visuals here really detract from the message.
• This Montana Meth Project video, which has a meth-addled teen hamming it up while screaming about shadow people and swinging at the walls with a baseball bat. Nightmare Fuel to some, but comedy gold to others.
• If you ever took swimming lessons through the American Red Cross water safety program sometime during the last two decades, chances are you were shown "Longfellow’s Whale Tales". You didn’t want to laugh, but you did anyway.
• The Above the Influence commercials, showing "testimony" from people who have refused to do drugs (or people who have stopped). The whole thing is goofy, but what really seals it is the footage of the group's Facebook page, which is littered with self-righteous comments (presumably from people who have never been around or offered drugs). It ends with a close-up of several posts, the best (funniest) being: "WE RISE ABOVE. TOGETHER" (caps included in original post).
• The British NSPCC (National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) ran a television advertisement that showed a Drill Sergeant Nasty ordering a woman to cook for him and read him stories, in imitation of a young child. It's trying to make a point that having a child can be really demanding. But the fact that a US Marine is shouting things like "Pay me attention!" and "Read me this story!" kind of ruins the effect. And then there's the ending, where the marine literally reverts back to a child while demanding water, resulting in the mom yelling "AIVEAD ENOUGH!" and charging at the poor child, before we Smash Cut to NSPCC's hotline.
  • "... a door... a table..." *klang* "... a FIST!"
  • Another NSPCC advert at Christmas time tried to depict the horror of a Christmas ruined by an abusive father. Having a fight with a Christmas tree...
• Singapore's "Mentos National Night", urging Singaporeans to have more kids.
• The Narcotics Task Force of the New York City Housing Authority would like you to know that smoking crack is like putting a gun in your mouth and pulling the trigger.
• The "Think Before You Speak" commercials. Sure, the intention is good (telling people to stop using the word "gay" as an insult) but the way they go about it is pretty funny. Having Hilary Duff pop up out of nowhere and say, "You shouldn't say that!" as if she's summoned by casual homophobia probably isn't the best way to go about it. Neither is the passive-aggressive "Knock it off!" at the end.
• An RSA ad trying to show the dangers of ignoring the stoplight on a railroad crossing featured a man performing all sorts of near misses such as getting on his crowded train just as it starts to the tune of happy music and then he crosses a railway crossing on a moped only to get hit by a train while the music is still playing and getting sent flying into the air along with the moped.
• This British road safety ad, where a man appears to be using a dead kid as a draught excluder.
• This "End The R-Word" PSA is no doubt well-meaning, but its comparison to other slurs comes across as amusing when the site it's posted on is one where all those other slurs are popular as well.
• Everyone knows you're not supposed to use your phone during a movie, making this video's annoying and condescending tone all the more grating. Apparently, there's no technology in movie theaters... or something. And this plays before every movie at a Cinemark theater. If you go to a place where the local movie theater is a Cinemark, expect anyone who goes to the movies regularly to have this memorized by heart.
• This Anti Crack PSA is part of Jeffrey Witotsky's mid to late 1980s series of anti drug spots. While the others in the series were obviously going for cheesy cinematics, this one simply has a spokesperson who appears to be imitating Christopher Walken's intense style of delivery. Very badly.
• Christine O'Donnell's infamous "I'm You" political ad. Even if you know the reason behind the statement, it's hard to take anything she says seriously when she starts off by informing the viewer "I'm not a witch." Saturday Night Live summed it up well in their parody of the ad:
  Isn't that what the people of Delaware deserve? A candidate who promises first and foremost that she's not a witch? That's the kind of candidate this country hasn't had since 1692.
• An anti-smoking PSA that states that "cigarettes are bullies". The statement itself is pretty ridiculous (especially when aimed at teens, who are likely to laugh at adults still warning them about "bullies") because you know cigarettes aren't animate. But the PSA doesn't stop there. It features a itty bitty schlubby looking man that is meant to be an anthropomorphization of a cigarette that seems to have 10 times his own strength. The PSA ends with a narration spoken in a deathly serious voice that doesn't seem to fit because the ridiculousness of the whole commercial. One can't help but feel like the people who came up with this ad thought that it was clever but it's all really silly.
• This short bus safety PSA from the 90s informs kids that "It's very cool to follow the rules."
• This SPCA ad, which was listed under "Isn't It Ironic?" because of its song choice. As one YouTube commenter put it, "This is so close to satire it's ridiculous. Why do all the animals look like they're going to cry? Why does the voice over sound like she's going to cry? I feel like there should be a kitten at the end of the video with a cg mouth that asks, 'Are you going to let the bad people kill me, mister? I just want to wuv you...'"
• A 1987 anti-drug ad features a teenager in a waiting room being called on. The ad tells us that many young people like him "have volunteered to take part in a frightening experiment". The ad proceeds to list some of the experiment's side effects, from paranoia and diminished coordination to "adverse effects on reproductive organs". Though the visuals and music are somewhat eerie, the ad would have us believe that the "most frightening part of this experiment" is that it's not conducted in some laboratory by amoral scientists. The teenager is then shown simply smoking marijuana. While this may have been shocking in the late 80s, it's now legal in some places.
• In 1993, Friends of the Earth did an advert in which blood gushes out of a flushing toilet as Jonathan Pryce talks about the real cost of mahogany (which is used to make toilet seats among other things). However, the dark liquid flooding the bathroom looks less like blood and more like... well, see for yourself.
• A 1994 PIF from Partners Against Crime shows a man attempting to break into a house as passers-by gather around and clap slowly in an apparently intimidating manner. The message is that most crimes are stopped with help from the public. Unfortunately, it looks as though the crowd is actually applauding the burglar for his efforts.
• This ad from the Always #LikeAGirl campaign that treats a lack of Emojis representing girls as a serious social issue. Unsurprisingly, there are twice as many dislikes as likes.
• Imagine a world without milk. It would be a tragic, tasteless existence. This PBS commercial straddles the line between Narm and Narm Charm. Highlights include a sign in front of an empty barn saying "We've Mooooved" and the cookie falling into an empty glass.
• The "truthorange" PSAs, which try to encourage teens and young adults to quit smoking. That's a noble enough goal. However, they try so hard to appeal to their chosen demographic that it becomes ridiculous. Special mention goes to the dogs and cats campaign, which undermines its point ("Smoking can hurt your pets") with what appears to be random animal videos taken off of YouTube. It doesn't help that the crux of the campaign is essentially "there will be no more cute animal videos if they die of cancer", rather than, you know, losing a beloved pet to cancer is painful. And then there is their #PEEtition follow-up, which adds an element of random Squick.
• This (NSFW) PSA for Greenpeace makes no sense. It has a naked foam woman on a beach being covered in crude oil. The tagline is "Nature is beautiful. Let's keep it that way;" how that's best represented by the imagery shown is beyond us.
• A Woman's Day #throughglass is an infamous PSA for domestic abuse. It's about two and a half minutes long, and plays out mostly like an extended commercial for Google Glass. The PSA is filmed from the first-person perspective of a woman cheerily going about her day with help from her high-tech eyeglasses, while upbeat music plays in the background. The music stops when she gets home, and her husband beats her for not getting there earlier. The twist at the end comes totally out of nowhere, and is an extreme example of Mood Whiplash. What was supposed to be serious and disturbing instead comes across as a piece of unintentional Black Comedy that has to be seen to be believed. It received a Colbert Bump when it was discussed on an episode of OneyPlays, and most of the recent comments on the video are references to that.
• There was once an anti-gambling ad featuring several homeless people around a bonfire explaining how they ended up there, with one noting how he lost everything because of his son gambling on the Internet. While problems with gambling can be serious and damaging, the kid's whiny "I said I was sorry!" and the dad's reply of "go to your box," like he's punishing him for missing curfew instead of bankrupting the family and causing them to live on the street, makes it too hilarious to take seriously.
• This PSA from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration starts off grim, with a father talking about his daughter in a funeral, while relatives grieve in the background. At the end, it tries to give the message that the last text message you send could be the message engraved in your tombstone. While this is an interesting concept, it's entirely ruined by the final shot: a tombstone reading "Smh."
• The "You Wouldn't" anti-piracy ads put on DVDs in the 2000s. To the few people who might not have seen them, a woman is sitting at a computer with a large download button, after which several captions appear detailing things you wouldn't do (i.e. "You wouldn't steal a car"). This culminates in the caption "You wouldn't steal a movie. Piracy is stealing. Stealing is against the law" after which the woman cancels the download and leaves the room. The problem is that apart from the Captain Obvious factor of the last set of captions, each of the captions is followed by a short scene showing someone doing the exact thing they've told you that you wouldn't do. Not to mention the fact that the editing and shots of the woman attempting to pirate...something are so awkward that it's actually easy to miss the fact that she cancelled the download. In short, it almost seems as if the captions are an anti-piracy ad while the actual pictures are pro-piracy.
  • The IT Crowd riffed on the silliness of these ads in an episode from Series Two, which culminated in a man shooting a police officer, stealing his helmet, taking a dump in it, then mailing the poop-filled helmet to the man's widow before stealing it again, after which an American FBI agent shoots the English teenager who was about to download a pirated movie, all narrated with utmost seriousness by Matt Berry.
    Roy: Man, these anti-piracy ads are gettin' really mean.
• The Mexican Vive Sin Drogas campaign, aimed at young children and starring a rapping flower, is supposed to teach that Drugs Are Bad. However, due to it having creepy-looking CGI animation, bizarre and vague rap lyrics, and the rap itself being Totally Radical but sung by a singer who is not really suited for such a song, the entire campaign is hard to take seriously and is remembered more as a joke than anything else.
• A UK ad about reporting suspicious images online features a teenage boy searching for porn on his laptop, while a cheerful talking sock watches with him. And no, that's not an unfortunate coincidence — it's strongly implied that the boy has indeed used that sock in his moments of adolescent relaxation.
• In the late 1980s in the Los Angeles area, a public health PSA related to healthy eating was briefly aired. The camera slowly panned over vegetables, menacing music playing. Then the announcer comes in, "Don't drown your veggies in ranch."
• A 2020 PSA opens with some parents looking dramatically into the camera and saying, "No!" and "Get out of my face!" without context. Then we get the context, and it doesn't really help: they're yelling at cancer. It's a PSA to get children vaccinated for HPV to prevent further cancer complications, but instead it looks like the parents think you keep cancer away by sternly talking to it.
  "Hey, cancer? Not. My. Child."
• One Australian PSA for the Meningococcal W vaccine had a group of teens asking each other about their friend Lucy, only for another friend to walk in, and in a dramatic tone, tell them that Lucy died. Sad piano music and the sound of the teens crying plays immediately afterwards, but what really takes the cake is one of the teens yelling a bleeped out "FUCK OFF!" at another teen, and a random shot of one of them running away.
• This memetic PSA encouraging people to stop sexual violence. It features two teen actors with monotone, slurred speech. After one boy says he didn't do anything when he saw a guy trying to get his girlfriend to do something she didn't want to do, his friend says, "Whoa, what?" and freezes his friend in place. The other boy then delivers his message to the camera and walks away with his friend still frozen.
• A 2020 PSA by the Dallas Police Department, which concerned celebratory gunfire and the illegal use of fireworks on New Year's Eve, begins with a man shouting "Happy New Year!" before firing a bullet from his pistol in the air. The video then cuts to the Dallas 9-1-1 Call Center receiving a call from a crying woman, briefly shown cradling her pet's corpse after it was just struck by the same bullet from before. This scene was meant to be a serious portrayal of the realistic and lethal consequences of firing bullets in the air. However, the fact that the pet in question is very obviously a plush toy (not even a plush cat or a dog, but a small cow) completely ruined the intended impact. The PSA was ultimately pulled from television broadcast shortly after, simply because that particular scene made it too silly for the public to take seriously.
• A 2021 ad for the Mexican Partido del Trabajo political party has a pregnant woman and her partner looking at their baby through an ultrasound. The woman asks the doctor, in regards to the baby's gender, "What's it going to be, doctor?," to which the doctor responds, "Just like the both of you... poor!", leading to the ad getting mocked on social media.
• A series of anti-piracy ads produced by UBV (Brazilian association of audio-visual publishers), included on DVDs in 2007, tried to alert the public that piracy funds organized crime, particularly drug trafficking. However, because of the forced dialogue and unrealistic situations shown, these ads turned out hilarious instead of serious or scary.
  • In one of these adverts, a family is having dinner, and the father proudly announces that the family will be watching a pirated movie he bought at a very low price. The daughter rolls her eyes and retorts: "A pirated DVD, dad? Don't you see you're helping crime? Tomorrow I'll be selling drugs at school because of that DVD!". She then gets up and walks away without finishing her plate. The rest of the family, visibly disappointed at the father, does the same, leaving him alone at the dinner table.
  • Another ad shows a woman bringing home a pirated DVD to watch with her daughter. As it plays, the TV screen displays a message saying "Thank you for your special cooperation in buying this pirated DVD". It then cuts to a slum, where criminals with rifles thank the woman for helping them buy their armament. What makes it even better is the over-the-top acting of the criminals, all of them very loud, speaking in slang and even offering a gun salute to her at the end.
    Criminal: A GUN SALUTE TO THE TIAAA! ^note "Tia" (aunt) is a very informal (and often rude) way of referring to a woman, usually older than the speaker(everyone cheers and starts firing their guns)
  • Another one has a man buying pirated DVDs from two street vendors. The man pays for the DVDs, and one of the vendors asks "May I give you the change in bala?" ^note This is a pun on the word "bala", which means "caramel candy" or "bullet" depending on the context. In Brazil, some small businesses, such as local bars, newsstands and bakeries, don't have sufficient change for very small/fractioned amounts such as 5 or 10 cents, so they ask customers if they're fine with receiving the equivalent amount in candy instead of coins. The man agrees, receives a handful of bullets and looks at them in concern, while the vendor gives a brief Aside Glance.
• This spot by the Illinois Council Against Handgun Violence calls attention to the lack of safety regulations on guns, inspired by gun violence rates in Chicago. It shows the slowly-rotating silhouette of a teddy bear, while sinister music-box music plays and an overdramatic narrator talks about the many safety standards required to produce a teddy bear. The narm comes in when the narrator solemnly (and hilariously) intones "Unless that teddy bear...is a gun" as the camera reveals that the teddy bear is made of metal and has a gun for a face.
• This UNICEF child abuse PSA compares how children can remember growing up in an abusive home to how parrots can remember it as well. How do they convey this message? By showing us a montage of Fowl-Mouthed Parrots displaying their colorful vocabulary. The sudden shift in tone when the message at the end about how "1 in 4 young children are exposed to domestic violence" as one of the parrots could still be heard shouting "YOU LITTLE BITCH!" makes it all the more ridiculous. Moreover, most of the footage was from YouTube videos of parrots who were likely trained to swear just to make people laugh, making this PSA even more ridiculous. Special mentions go to the subtitles for the Moluccan Cockatoo's nearly-unintelligible Cluster F-Bomb and the parrot with a thick New Zealand accent threatening to kick someone's ass^note In the video from which the footage is sourced, the parrot, named Tui, is having a tantrum in response to her owner, who had earlier made the mistake of yelling at her for making too much noise, telling her not to squeal..
  YouTube Commenter: I was watching it laughing at the cursing and when the ending came I laughed even harder. Bruh that is serious don't get me wrong, but I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready!
• This local PSA about talking to your kids about underage drinking has a mother warn her child about teens drinking at a party, saying that they're also "doing other things they shouldn't be." It then cuts to... scenes of the teens just hanging around and talking with their drinks in hand, with one fairly chaste kiss between two of them. Then it cuts back to the mother about to tell her daughter why what they're doing is dangerous. While the message is well-intended, the editing implies we should warn our children about the dangers of age-appropriate socialization and kissing. It also makes the mother look ridiculous by either showing her as so paranoid she doesn't want teens to kiss at parties, or serves as a Gilligan Cut to imply drinking isn't really that bad.
• Around the San Diego-Tijuana area, border blaster radio stations, which transmit from Mexico but are aimed at listeners in the U.S., are obligated by Mexican law to air PSAs and political advertising during breaks. Not wanting listeners to confuse them for Spanish-language stations, some border blasters (most notoriously 91X) air these in translated and dubbed English. The problem is that since the messages were originally intended for a Mexican audience and not a U.S. audience, there is absolutely zero effort made when the messages are dubbed into English:
  • As the voice actors literally read the script monotonously, any expressions from the original Spanish versions are completely absent from the English version, and an "Oh no!" is instead read out as "Oh no."
  • The number of voice actors seems to be rather small, as its not uncommon to get an ad promoting a political party read by one voice actor, only for the next ad to be from a rival party voiced by the same actor, disparaging the same party they were just promoting.
  • One ad for the Labor Party is a song with the chorus repeating "PT is the 4T!". The English version does away with the song and is just a voice actor reading out the lyrics without any changes. As a result, "PT is the 4T" is duly repeated several times in a row, coming off as some kind of incomprehensible Madness Mantra for anyone who isn't following Mexican politics.

Other

• This glorious Ad. It confused everyone when it came out. It is an ad for a lawyer and has heavy metal, fire and a scene where he hits a tombstone with a sledge.
  • And here's the follow-up: involving government class in high school, a scene where the lawyer literally interrogates injustice, and a scene where an angel forges the sledgehammer in the previous video.
  • What makes these extra narmy is the guy's backstory- he was a criminal defense lawyer who got rich defending scumbags, but then his brother was murdered so he became a super lawyer. It sounds like the plot to an 80's movie.
• At one point, Edmonton-based radio station The Bounce aired ads which mashed together songs it plays. These were hilariously awful and mashed together Katy Perry's "E.T.," Ke$ha's "We R Who We R," Lady Gaga's "Born this Way," Martin Solveig and Dragonette's "Hello", etc. None of the choices fit together, and it was simply hilarious.
• The WaxVac infomercials that advertise a vacuum that removes earwax from your ears. As soon as the scenes with the couple practicing ear candling and the guy yelling "OW!" while barely poking a Q-tip into his ears come on, it's no longer possible to take the commercial seriously. (Though it's worse in that it dampens the seriousness of anything said by the experts that follow in the commercial. It's hard to take the words of a doctor seriously on the risks of using Q-tips when people are too distracted by the unintentionally humorous agony of a man from the result of a Q-tip. Unsurprisingly, the narm factor is made fun of by The Soup.)
• Anna Blue, a CGI girl who sings a song called "So Alone" in a Jamster commercial. The repeated mirror throwing, mixed with the over-dramatic, stereotypical emo behavior makes the song hardly anything to take seriously. As if the emo appeal weren't cheesy enough, Jamster took the liberty of making a second song called "Your Heart," sung by a Twilight-esque CGI vampire guy named Damien Dawn. Not only does it use the same Stock Footage from "So Alone," but it also adds its own cheesy clips. Like Damien climbing up and singing on Anna's roof, and him jumping in the moonlight.
  • Jamster commercials in general were driven by truckloads of narm. This one, which will probably trigger flashbacks to those who watched TeenNick in the early 2010s, implies that if you don't use their love calculator service, then you will be dumped and left at the altar by your boyfriend. The narm isn't helped by the overacting and how often this commercial was recycled (the names of the two leads would often change, i.e. "Miley and Nick", "Justin and Selena").
• The 2010 TV ad for Cirque du Soleil's winter production Wintuk has this narration:
  This is the magic of Wintuk. This is the thrill of Wintuk. This is the season of Wintuk! ... Don't miss the final season of this wonderful, winterful show that The New York Times calls "a family-oriented holiday extravaganza"!
• In 2009, an Alberta-based carpeting company called End of the Roll issued a series of ads with images of people buying carpets, laying down carpets, people smiling over their carpets and what not. The song in the background is "The Look" by Roxette. Furthermore the ads having the over-excited narrator saying "Give your house... THE LOOK!!!!" followed by "Na na na na na, she's got the look..." just heightened the narm up to 11.
• This ad for a CD called "Cheers to You". The very fact that such a product exists (each of the CD's tracks consist of words of encouragement towards the listener) is depressing enough (ironically), but the "HOORAY FOR YOU!" at the end of the commercial really push it off the edge.
  • Parodied by this video.
• "I've fallen and I can't get up!" — originally supposed to be a shocking line in an ad for "Life Alert" ads depicting a helpless elderly woman who had fallen from her walker, it quickly descended into farce. There were even T-shirts once. Life Alert now has the phrase trademarked, and it appears at the bottom of some ads.
  • From a later commercial:
    All. Senior. Citizens. Should. Have. Life Alert.
  • Then there's the scene where an elderly woman is lying on the floor and trying to reach a phone that's sitting on a desk a few feet away — sort of. She doesn't try to move towards it; she just reaches for it as if she believes that she can make her arm stretch the rest of the way.
  • AAAAND there's another one, which tries to go for a dark and serious tone but ends up being somehow even narmier than the other examples; dark and moody music is heard while a camera pans through different rooms in the house and a woman can be heard yelping "HEEEELP!!! I've fallen... It hurts!!! Help me... HELP ME!" and the elderly woman can be seen at the foot of the stairs sobbing with a laundry basket dropped on her. There seems to be nobody home, making it even more hilarious. And shortly after such a dramatic scene, they cut to happy music and bright colors as if nothing happened.
  • Bonus narm points for the weird shift between blue and amber tints, and the fact that woman doesn't even try to look like she really took a fall; she's laying on her back in the Chalk Outline pose with her feet resting on the stairs.
  • The commercial also comes with a trigger warning.
    The following is based on reality. You may be offended.
  • In another Life Alert commercial, a little girl happens to be home with her grandmother and actually hears the crash, and she asks: "Grandma, are you OK?" instead of calling 911. It's one of the few times in these commercials a person didn't actually need the product advertised.
  • The newest commercial features an elderly woman taking a shower, but at some point she may have forgotten she wasn't in an anti-drug PSA and hears voices in her head, then falls and takes the curtain down with her (thankfully).
  • An elderly woman falling down the stairs should theoretically not be a humorous sight, but here we are.
• All of the commercials for Michael's Furniture in Los Angeles. You can tell that the producers of the commercial didn't bother with trying with costumes, advertising, and even special effects.
• The ad for the movie One Missed Call is unintentionally hilarious, with an ominous announcer voice saying, "When your call goes straight to voicemail, your world goes straight to Hell." Bonus points for the victim saying "That's not my ringtone" in a terrified almost-whisper. With skill, it's possible to make nearly anything scary; but it seems cell phones (and rabbits) are a rare exception.
• The ad for the movie The Darkest Hour, Holiday Mode. Watching something unrelated, just seeing the super-serious "Survive (beat) The Holidays" and seeing the dog disintegrate, was just hilarious.
• "More Ovaltine, please!" Ovaltine hasn't changed their commercials from Bad "Bad Acting" cutesy children since the product came on the market. And while at one time, it went into Narm Charm category with how long they'd kept it up, now the gimmick is squarely back in the eyeroll-worthy box.
• Call Liberty Medical and ask them about your DAHH'BEETUS. This message brought to you by Wilford Brimley (a.k.a. the "Quaker Oats" guy). Here:
  • "Ah haet prickin mah fingahs! With Liberty Meter, it's much less painful. And it even talks to me." This is ridiculous because testing one's blood sugar levels via any regular meter that's been introduced to the market since 2000 has become so refined that it requires one tiny little finger prick that you barely feel. The insulin jab hurts a heck of a lot more. Granted, the hospital meters still require the old fashioned ginormous pricks that would hurt, but...
  • The poorly acted commercials for those "free" diabetic cookbooks ("Free" is in quotation marks since there's always a catch to these things.), where Nicole Johnson tries her hardest, but puts across a creepy Sandra Lee kind of vibe, and the black woman sasses it up so much that it's almost worthy of giving the NAACP a conniption.
• Multiple House Alarm commercials that play out pretend scenarios where a burglar, rapist, etc. would be scared away by the alarm. These scenarios, however, were frequently farfetched and downright funny.
  • One involves two burglars attempting to break into a house in the middle of the day by loudly breaking a window with a crowbar because they spotted overgrown grass and multiple newspapers in the porch. It turns out a single mother with her children were all in the laundry room (why they let the grass over-grow and didn't pick up the paper for days on end is a mystery), but they were gladly protected by the incredible threat of a loud noise.
  • A more ridiculous scenario involves a single woman coming back to her (two-story, full-sized, middle-class) house from a date, only to have another man spy on them. Immediately after the man on a date left, the spying man runs up to the house and kicks open the door in the most obnoxious and over-dramatic way, setting off the alarm that baffles him and causes him to run away. The woman gets a call from the alarm system technicians to ask what's wrong, and she says her ex-boyfriend knocked down the door.
  • A third commercial of equal ridiculous nature involves a burglar breaking open a front door in the middle of the night in the most obnoxious and loudest way possible, then acts surprised before running away because of a house alarm. Narm moment indeed.
  • There's also "this" Broadview Security ad, where the man breaking in looks straight at the woman before punching through her window (which sets off the alarm), lets her run upstairs, and then runs away. It's even more narm-y and ridiculous because the commercial made it clear that he'd just been to this woman's house while she was having a party (probably casing the joint, as neither the woman nor her friends seemed to know who he was) - he could have easily gotten in with a lie about leaving his keys or wallet behind and then incapacitated the woman. Instead he seems to think that if he waits fifteen minutes she'll magically be gone from her own home and manages to miss the security keypad next to the front door.
  • Another security system ad has a jacket-wearing man in a neighborhood at about noon watch a jogger go past. Once the jogger's gone, the man in the jacket flips his hoodie up like a low-rent supervillain and proceeds to loudly kick open the door to a house, setting off the alarm and sending him running.
• "Our world is under constant attack". The start of a trailer for Mega Disasters on the History Channel's UK version.
• In the 1980s, video games were given some narmful adverts. For instance, every commercial for an Atari 2600 video game, ever.
  • A Castlevania II: Simon's Quest ad had a random blonde with a shirt with mega-shoulder pads and big hair, and a guy in a cheap Dracula costume with stiff, almost zombie-like poses and weird faces, standing in dry ice and tombstones that were obviously pieces of styrofoam painted gray.
• The ad for the horror film Mirrors had a scene at the end that features Kiefer Sutherland sitting in a car saying, "mirrors are everywhere." Then he looks at the rearview mirror, sees a monster in it, lets out the most narmy yells, and dramatically flinches away from the mirror. Ironically it's more or less correctly done as the entire film is like that, with the absolute peak coming from his vision of a burning woman in a large ceiling-to-floor mirror, and his then being afflicted with this condition himself. Nearly a minute is devoted to just him writhing on the floor yelling, "THE FIRE! IT BURNS! AAAAAHHHHHH!"
• "We just finished level three, and need to tighten up the graphics a little bit." This commercial suggests that video game testers have the cushiest job in the world, but the attempt to replicate what video game testers say just sounds like somebody who has no idea what they're talking about.
  • Neatly put to bed in this strip.
  • Also parodied in this strip
• Have you been injured at home or at work in the last 4 years and it wasn't your fault? You could claim money. This line is normally given after a poorly acted reconstruction, though it sometimes is used on screens which should have people suing the law firms for causing epilepsy.
• The protagonist yelling out "JUNNNIIOOOORRRR!" with added repetition and echoes in the trailer for the film "Waist Deep" at about 0:40.
• "Thank You Sarah Palin".
• The Magic Bullet To Go infomercial. While the first had the distinction of colorful, wacky characters congregating over a small machine after a party the previous night, it didn't have Dino. Dino makes his first appearance in the To Go infomercial, and the actor playing him is so bad that it makes every line top-grade Narm fuel. Just check out the way he says "Whoa! That is magic." at 3:49. Also, the background music at the start of the infomercial bears a strange resemblance to that of "We're All Dudes".
• This Final Fantasy Tactics Advance ad. Their version of "Marche" is just... so... wrong.
  Feel free to call, otherwise I may become irritable!
• One TV spot for Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen features Shia LaBeouf's character screaming "Bumblebee!!" in an anguished tone of voice — which may send viewers not familiar with the character named Bumblebee into hysterics. But heck, even if you are, it's still funny — especially if you have someone nearby who decides to snark, "Hey Shia, what's your favorite brand of tuna?" just before the line comes up.
• The Australian advert for Sci Fi Original Boa is quite bizarre. All it shows is a factory at night, a guy looking at something, and a big snake. The narmy narration is apparently the result of a schizophrenic howler monkey who'd been handed various hallucinogens and a broken-down typewriter from 1935.
  Narrator: *ominously* If it had legs... maybe you could tie them together... and capture it. But it doesn't... so you can't. Boa.
  • Protip: Never argue against your own narration.
• The ad campaign for the BIONICLE Piraka. The first ad is kinda cool, even with (or because of) Thok blowing a presumably Antidermis bubble; but as soon as the painfully gangsta announcer opens his mouth, it's hilarious. And even more hilarious is the Piraka Rap. The video isn't official, but the music is.
  • The following year, they had a promotional mini-movie for the Toa Mahri setline, in which the characters actually talked. Leading to the lines...
  Hewkii, as a giant Gadunka appears: Holy Gadunka!
  Matoro, ramming a sea-craft into it: Eat this, Gadunka!
• Book commercials in general, or at least the ones that try to adapt the contents to live action. They're often plagued by cheesy narration over exceedingly low budget footage that make them look more like bargain-bin DVD movies than literature.
• This Orangina ad. Before, it was simply Furry Fandom hijinks ramped up to eleven. But this muscled puma looks silly.
  • Look at this dominatrix panther.
• There's a commercial that talks about a medical service that will give you a supply of fresh, disposable catheters. The first commercial showed a woman whining that she had to boil and reuse her catheters. This is amusing until you are informed about the reality of the situation, when it becomes a Harsher in Hindsight. The second was for the same service and had an old lady and a handicapped man who delivered their lines in a ridiculously fake-sounding way.
• Any attempt by ABC Family to use their slogan "A new kind of X". It gets silly. Absolutely everything has to be described this way by the network. How it began: When Disney wanted to rename the channel to "XYZ" to remarket it to a different audience, they were forced to change it to ABC Family instead (the debacle about the word "Family" remaining in the name as part of a contract turned out to be a hoax when the network rebranded as Freeform in 2016). Disney being Disney, "A new kind of Family" was their way of explaining what they were doing (which would eventually be like The WB of basic cable). It snowballed (snowcloned?) from there.
• A commercial for a Time-Life documentary of Those Wacky Nazis is hard to take seriously because the voice-over announcer is attempting a terrible Don LaFontaine impression. It doesn't help when the end-of-infomercial voiceover guy cheerfully pipes up to instruct you how to "order your copy of The Nazis."
  • There's also a version of the commercial with an alternate opening that's so MoodWhiplash-y, it should be grounds for a lawsuit.
  "They sang...laughed...played..."*gunshots suddenly ring out*"...And murdered MILLIONS."
• Even Adbot isn't immune. Every so often, a truly groan-worthy ad will pop up on the left on the screen. Notable examples are ads like the "Are You A Vampire? Find Out Now!", "Which Naruto are you?", and, of course, the Evony ads.
  • Some advertisements are only pictures of actual screenshots from media like Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Phineas and Ferb with nothing else added onto them.
• Ads for the NBC show The Event before it started airing. They all take the same form: "(insert random, standard plot driving event here) is not the Event. What is the Event?" with a line from the show saying "he's going to tell people about the Event." The whole thing is so overwrought and so generic that many viewers find it impossible to take seriously.
  • Even better, they strung this series of commercials out so long that some viewers were actually sick of the show before it ever hit the air.
• There's a Nesquik advert, and the gist of it is 'kids only grow up once, enjoy it.' This would be quite touching if it weren't for the Nesquik bunny's voice. With it, the advert becomes ridiculous and seems to be trying too hard.
• Jamster has been running these advertisements for a "Ghost Camera" for your cellphone. It starts with a voiceover of a woman showing you pictures of various locales from her European trip. She gets increasing confused and edgy from the images of "ghosts" on each of her photos, but by the third photo she freaks out and lets out one of the most unconvincing screams of terror ever. Any iota of suspense built up to that point is completely ruined and turned into narm. To give you an idea, it sounded like the voice actor just flatly read the word "Aaaaaah" aloud from the script.
• An ad slogan for Tyson Chicken: "It's what your family deserves."
  • As in a big, fat cock.
• The 24-hour news networks have been showing an ad by the oil companies featuring people on the street talking about taxing energy. Naturally, these people are all smarter about macroeconomics than real economists, even though all economics is inherently uncertain. And they are so not reading from teleprompters; it's just natural to talk like a fourth-grader reading from his reader (i.e., flat and pausing at awkward times).
• The commercials for the St. Louis and Kansas City-based Midwest Hemorrhoid Treatment Center have become a huge joke across the state of Missouri. You've got to wonder which poor saps were stuck with composing and singing the jingle. Not to mention the whole "don't suffer in silence" thing, which is probably more appropriate for victims of domestic abuse or something along those lines, not hemorrhoids.
• This Kay commercial features some spectacularly Bad "Bad Acting", as well as the gem (no pun intended) that the cold piece of shiny metal "captures the comfort found in each other's arms."
  • Strangely, the way the woman reacted to the lightning, she acted as though she'd never seen anything brighter than a full moon, or louder than a vacuum. Not to mention - a line that is supposed to be delivered as a sweet platitude comes off more like a threat.
• The trailers for the 2011 Green Lantern (2011) movie. Dramatic music, a dying alien dramatically intoning, "Become one of us... become... a Green Lantern!" If you're not familiar with the comics, that's a pretty bizarre request to make in a dramatic scene.
• The otherwise pretty spooky trailer for the film The Skeptic ends with an intense montage of quick clips, including two shots of people... goofily tumbling down the stairs. Obviously they're supposed to be violently falling, but both actors (especially the woman) just drew their arms in and sort of roll in an un-alarming fashion.
  • Jump scares featured in the trailer quickly become predictable when you notice that they repeatedly use a stock Scare Chord which quickly loses its scare factor.
• There is a commercial for Montgomery's Furniture (a local furniture store in South Dakota) that basically consists of music that sounds like it should be featured in an action movie... accompanied by random shots of furniture. In other words, the commercial is trying to make furniture seem "Edgy" and "Awesome", but the commercial is just too hilariously bad for it to work.
• One of the trailers for the 2001 remake of Thir13en Ghosts was also quite Narm-ish. It didn't give us any hints or things to look forward to about the movie; it just listed why it was rated R. Not to mention the things it was rated R for were pretty much standard fare by that point in film history. However, R-rated movies with violence, nudity, and colorful metaphors already existed, despite what the trailer wanted people to believe.
• This ad for a furniture shop definitely qualifies, although there's horror as well; the man's awkward, stilted dialogue, his subtle threat about your credit and the fact that he talks to mannequins are quite alarming.
• With T-Mobile's ads about its 4G network came an ad in which a man impatiently pounds on his cellphone for the "slow 3G buffering" occurring on his screen, unable to wait a few seconds.
• You Deserve The Redshirt Treatment. Not the sort of thing you want to hear at a hospital.
• Northern Irish presenter Julian Simmons has a tendency to deliver hilarious, ridiculous introductions to the popular soap opera Coronation Street which cross into Narm territory. He's pretty much the single reason why UTV still uses continuity announcements.
  But now on the UTV...
• The Devil Inside looks like a pretty horrific movie, except for one part in the trailer where the possessed mother motions for her daughter to come closer. After a few seconds of awkward silence, she lets out a hilarious scream.
  • The TV spot shows the rather Adorkable Father Ben letting out a hilariously girly scream as well, and his facial expression doesn't help matters either.
• Subaru's "Keepsake" ad. There was also another advertisement from Subaru where a hip young man delivered a forlorn narration as he put his old Subaru out to pasture... Literally.
• The TV spots for the 2012 action movie Chronicle show a character being hit by a flying bus. It's hard not to laugh at it.
  • Likewise for the scene where the kid sits cross-legged, staring into the camera with a dead serious facial expression, clenching a fist, crushing a car.
    • And the "B-BLING, B-BLING!" at the beginning.
• A trailer for the horror film House at the End of the Street uses a "rewind" gimmick a la the Dead Island trailer, to show how fine and dandy everything started out before the horror stuff happened. A couple of shots — such as a teenager backflipping out of a swimming pool and a child flying back onto a swing — merit at least a chuckle.
• The commercial for James Patterson's new novel, I, Michael Bennett, is pretty funny. It starts with a little girl asking if her dad would take a bullet for her, then cuts to a little boy asking a similar question, followed by a man awkwardly leaning toward the camera and saying, "I will," as slowly and dramatically as possible.
• This advertisement for the Accu-Check Nano blood testing machine. The song sounds like something meant for advertising a My Little Pony doll, not a diabetes-management device.
• An old commercial for debt recovery featured low-quality footage and Bad "Bad Acting". It opens with a woman with some papers in her hands and others strewn in front of her and saying, in the blandest, most monotonous voice possible, "Bills, bills, I don't know how we're gonna pay them," then pursing her lips and shaking her head. It was very hard to take the rest of the commercial seriously after watching that.
• The actors in this advert for The Money Shop, especially the petrol guy:
  Ugh! AAAAAAAAAARGH!!!
• This Totally Radical ad from The '80s, which features two nerds rapping about The Legend of Zelda.
  Yeah, go Link yeah, get some!
• The second ad has no painful rapping, but makes up for it by being certifiably nuts, featuring a spastic young man in what appears to be an abandoned loony bin hallucinating monsters from the game and calling out for Zelda repeatedly. Pe-pe-Peahats! For bonus geek points, horror-loving boils and ghouls may recognize the kid in the ad as none other than John Kassir, the voice of the Crypt Keeper himself.
• A DIY book commercial at one point runs down pest species you can repel with tips from the book. It inexplicably decides to show this by pasting up a picture of a screaming child's face with wasps photoshopped onto him.
• In the mid-90's, Duncan Yo-Yo (like just about everybody marketing to kids at the time) tried to make their commercials hipper and more modern by depicting a stereotypical "cool kid" enthusiastically playing with a yo-yo, while comparing him to a nerd sitting at home playing... a Sega Genesis with Atari 2600 sound effects. As if that (both the whole comparison and its execution) wasn't crazy enough, the ad ended with this classic line: "You want speed, action and excitement? GET A YO-YO!!!"
• Another 90's toy commercial: A board game called Ask Zendar. During the ad, one of the players asks the plastic toy in the center "Am I going to the prom with a geek?" Zendar answers in the affirmative, being sagacious enough to know that a girl who consorts with an electronic warlock is almost certainly a geek herself.
• This TCF bank commercial with polka dancers and a singer on an accordion. The narm should speak for itself.
• RPG Maker has a couple of narmy trailers. Unfortunately, later versions lack the hilarious narrators and just pan across the different editors while showing off the pre-installed resources.
  • The trailer for RPG Maker XP has the narrator constantly repeat the product's name in an increasingly over-the-top voice, and ends with footage of an RPG starring Captain Ersatzes of Star Wars characters fighting "Dark Vader", who says "You Don't know the power!!!" before dying in one hit, followed by not-Luke Skywalker saying "Download this!!!"
  • The trailer for RPG Maker VX has some truly awful lines such as "Wow! Check this out! Pixel art is awesome!" and "It's almost like cheating!"
• Principal Wilson has an epic breakdown over someone parking in his spot.
• Whilst we imagine none of the men in the audience have ever found these funny; a lot of women tend to find tampon adverts unintentionally hilarious. There are quite a few that try to claim that their product is so amazing, stress-free and revolutionary that after using it you will like nothing more than to go roller-skating or rock climbing or dancing in a packed nightclub (and more often than not whilst wearing a huge contented grin upon your face.) What makes this scenario so funny is that A) Tampons have historically never lived up to their claims and B) They fail to take into account that its far more likely to be the cramps and the aching muscles that stop you from enjoying yourself on a period rather than your lack of a God-like tampon that can solve all of your worldly problems for you.
• Value Village is a Canadian chain of second-hand stores that were once infamous for selling clothes that were clearly gotten rid of for a reason, and not just for being several years out of style but also for things like visible threadbare patches or stains, because they would literally accept all donations and actually attempted to sell them. At the height of this infamy, it released a commercial wherein shoppers would gleefully proclaim "Funky!" "Bargains!" "Value Village is stylin'!" (said by a young woman who was dressed like she was in a Tiffany video) or a little girl, holding up a piece of clothing that her grandmother might wear, and proclaiming "excellent" as though heavily sedated).
• The Star Wars Holiday Special is generally considered either narm or too awful to even be considered narm. However, the commercials that were preserved on some bootlegs of the special are narm in their purest form. Highlights include:
  • The most well-known is a local news promo from the New York airing of the special consisting of a news anchor saying: "Fighting the frizzies, at 11." A famous South Park Running Gag sprinkled a parody of this promo throughout their Christmas special and ended with the newscaster in a boxing match with a frizzy monster.
  • The hilariously dated promo for a CBS special called "Bobby Vinton's Rock 'N Rollers": "From the creators of Donny & Marie, it's like Grease on wheels!" To quote Mike Nelson: Funny what passed for selling points back then."
  • "There's more in the middle of an Egg McMuffin than an egg in the middle of a muffin!"
  • This commercial promotes the high standards of Whirlpool appliances, but is coated in so much Patriotic Fervor (the only visuals in the commercial are clips of an bald eagle flying around) that it becomes ridiculous. The narration ends with, "If we can't keep this simple idea alive, then indeed we are the endangered species," as if the fate of America depends on where you buy your dishwasher.
• A possibly intentional example with the Perfect Bacon Bowl. The over-the-top singing, overwrought reactions to people eating it, the general presentation of it as if were the most epic thing known to man. Just all of it.
• A Colombian TV ad for a brand of powdered juice similar to Tang has two mothers, one of them pregnant, talking about the benefits of the product for their kids, when the one promoting it says: 'And it helps the immune system to work proficiently!'. This causes the pregnant mother to ask 'Immune system?' with a very bewildered expression and tone. The fact a grown-up woman, pregnant at least twice, hasn't heard about a concept taught in school and mentioned in many environments among them some related to pregnancy development, has caused a lot of laughs and mocking towards the writer of the ad. The ad doesn't really help itself, as the reply to that question is a short explanation as if it were given to a child despite the audience the ad is targeted at are adults.
• TeenNick advertised their block The Splat (now known as NickRewind) with a Facebook post that read "Saturdays are all about Splat and chill". Funny thing is, "Netflix and chill" (the original meme) is meant to be an Unusual Euphemism for inviting someone to your place to hook up.
• Commercials for AT&T U-Verse Internet have families talking about how reliable the service is—while within a house where everything else is breaking down rather catastrophically. For example, in one commercial a bathtub falls through the floor above right near a girl sitting on the couch with her tablet. The last concern on a person's mind after that would be whether or not their Internet was working.
• A series of commercials from 2000-2001 for American Express Travelers Checks featured a middle-aged woman in New York City calling the police about losing her purse filled with $1,000 in a taxi. As sad as it aims to be, it loses some luster and becomes this when the woman cries out in a thick Southern twang, "You don't understand, I'm on vacation. Everything is in that cab!" Fortunately, the other commercials from this era had the other individuals' reactions being more believable and serious.
• "If you build it, people will come." So says Freddie Flintoff in Morrisons' 2011 Christmas advert. What starts off as a Shout-Out to Field of Dreams gradually becomes an Accidental Innuendo through sheer overuse of the word "come". In the words of Charlie Brooker, "I've been impressed by an aubergine in Morrisons, but not once have I felt like coming."
• This famously terrible Chanel No. 5 advert, in which Brad Pitt stands alone in a room and talks complete nonsense for half a minute. When it first aired, it was roundly ridiculed for being one of the most laughably pretentious things ever.
• The people behind this print advert◊ for Locum, a Swedish property management company, had the idea of replacing the "o" in the logo (which is all lower case) with a love heart... accidentally resulting in something NSFW. Hilarity ensued when people saw the logo and immediately realised what it looked like.
• One of many sorts of misdirected advertising agency effort identified and vilified on name-and-shame-crap-adverts site Ad Turds.
• This commercial for Sakura Con, which quickly became Memetic Mutation when it was originally released. Highlights include everyone in the Japanese restaurant proclaiming their love for Japanese things, and especially the goth guy who yells "GIRUGAMESH!".
• The Story of Lucy is a three-minute long prestige ad featuring soft soulful music, as we watch a montage of moments in the life of a man who has a daughter. We see her born, watch as she grows up, gets married, and has a child of her own. Throughout this touching and heart-string tugging commercial, you can't help but wonder what it is they're selling. Life insurance? Cars? Cell phones? It's not very clear. Then, at the end of it all, as the father looks through a pane of nursery-ward glass at his new granddaughter, we see the message, "What's between us, connects us"... then it cuts to a logo for Windex.
• An advert that began airing in 2016 featured a woman in a wedding dress being driven away from a church having abandoned the groom at the altar. We're informed that the man has money, a good job and a nice car, "but that still doesn't mean he gets you". The product? Chewing gum, specifically Wrigley's Extra. No, we don't get it either.
• The horror-thriller film The Snowman may have generated some hype with its trailer, only to shoot itself in the foot with quite possibly one of the worst movie posters of all time. It has a juvenile vibe with simplistic handwriting over a doodle of a snowman whose expression is best described as "disappointed". It was so bad that it became a meme. The fact that the juvenile vibe and snowman drawing are original to the film and not the novel it adapts hasn't helped.
  MISTER POLICE.
  YOU COULD HAVE SAVED HER
  I GAVE YOU ALL THE CLUES
  • On top of that, the stilted wording brings to mind the Twin Peaks parody from "Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part Two". "Chief Wiggum! Dooon't eat the cluuues!"
• While this commercial for The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is rather creepy, there's an alternative version for a wrestling cross-promotion where a wrestling match is interrupted by footage of the kid playing the video game. Matt Hardy unenthusiastically says "He's got 72 hours to save the world" as Jeff nods in agreement and we see a close-up of the gamer's sweaty face as a dramatic THUD plays in the background. It just makes the commercial look silly.
• Both of these adverts for Fiftylife life insurance, featuring what must be the most hilariously forced conversations about bereavement ever put on film. Special mention goes to the second one, in which there is absolutely no change of tone between the woman's cheerful "Mum loved coming here!" and the subsequent "Her death was such a shock."
  AdTurds: Is there a right way to broach the cost of your own mother's funeral? Perhaps, but reserving the manner you'd normally adopt for feigning interest in someone boasting about their double glazing probably isn't the ideal tone to adopt.
• The old Marks and Spencer adverts of the early 2000s. AKA the "This is not just X, this is M&S X" era. Literally everyone in the UK was making fun of these. The gist was that you'd be shown a slow-motion pan over a fork or spoon cutting into some kind of food while a woman narrated exactly what kind of food it was. There'd usually be about 3 or 4 of these per ad and it would end with the slogan: "This is not just food. This is M&S food". Not bad in and of itself, but when you factor in the woman speaking in the kind of voice often reserved for more...adult scenarios, and some combination of the slow-mo, the close-ups and the descriptions of the food making it all seem less than appetising, it quickly became utterly ridiculous.
  • For more M&S silliness, look no further than their infamous "I'm Normal" advert from 2000, in which a size-16 woman runs to the top of a hill while stripping off, where she loudly declares (while fully naked and with arms outstretched) that she is "NOOOORRRMMMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAALLL!". The intentions may have been admirable, but the scenario is absurd. While the ad has faded into obscurity, it came at a time when the company's fortunes were beginning to decline, and did no favours for their ailing public image.
• A Mexican ad for the Athletes' Foot cream Silka Medic became a minor meme for its ending, where it's narrator declares in a completely serious voice, "Nothing is faster than Silka Medic. Nothing. There aren't any. They don't exist!" They slightly hammed up the last line in later ads.
• The famous American Muzzy commercial from the 1990s is infamous for this. It starts with a young girl pointing to herself and proudly proclaiming "Je suis la jeune fille!" ("I am the young girl!"). Then it gets even funnier when the presenter—who's hanging around the girl's living room for no apparent reason—excitedly points out that "Yes, that's French they're speaking. And no, these children aren't French—they're American!" That last line has become something of a meme among '90s kids, who regularly saw the ad playing on Nickelodeon while growing up.
• 4DX motion-seating theaters have this video before each screening. However, the last shot of all the onscreen audience miming holding a motorcycle's handlebars has gotten laughs out of real audiences for being so absurdly not what moviegoers would do.
• The Florida House Experience is a rehab center to help people fight off addiction. Addiction is a serious condition but the commercial begs to differ. It starts with the mother pouring an alcoholic drink in the glass then it cuts to the scene with her daughter asking for cereal and her response is this: TAKE THE POP-TART AND GO TO YOUR ROOM! The unexpectedness and delivery of this scene altogether makes it hard to take it seriously from that point onwards. You think we would expect something way more serious.
• Admit it: while many CD compilations have some great hits, the fact that the commercials were played ad nauseam, you probably know the whole advertisement by heart. This is especially true if it aired in your childhood while watching Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network. How many times has one seen (or was waken up by) a commercial that came on at full blast singing "And I can't fight this FEELING ANYMOOORRE...", "Ooga-chaga, ooga-ooga, I-I-I, hooked on a feeling..." or possibly the best known example, "Cause I'm your la-DAAAAYY, and you are my MAAAANNN..."?
• A commercial shows a dad talking to his kid through a door, apologizing for missing her game. The kid's upset, but when the dad writes a long apology note on the advertised product, she forgives him. Clearly intended to be sweet...but the advertised product is Angel Soft toilet paper. And he doesn't just use a bit of toilet paper; he uses an entire roll, writing "So..." on every square until he writes "Sorry" on the last square. It's such an amusingly ridiculous use of the product that you can't take the intended sweet message seriously at all.
• This spot for Colonial Penn life insurance should be pretty serious and realistic, with a couple talking about life insurance after a healthy elderly man they knew suddenly died. Unfortunately, the actors' delivery and the As You Know dialogue makes it sound like a strange joke.
  Wife: I just got a text from my sister. You remember Rick, her neighbor?
  Husband: Sure, he's the 76 year old who still runs marathons?
  Wife: Sadly, not anymore!
• The trailer for Butch Hartman's OAXIS streaming service is supposed to sell a family-friendly streaming service by having a family get disgusted at inappropriate content in their television program. The family does this by acting horrified at a television airing the words "HORROR MOVIE COMMERCIAL" and "SEX SCENE" and "MURDER SCENE" and trying to cover the kids' eyes in an exaggerated panic. While Hartman is trying to make a genuine point about inappropriate television content, the lack of any actual threat in context makes it look like a joke.(Hartman's arrival in the trailer does bring deliberate humor, though.)
• Coca-Cola's Real Magic ad takes their usual Glurge-y writing and applies it to the world of streaming and E-sports. Apparently, drinking Coke in real life can bring your character back from the dead, who then becomes self-aware and throws his weapon to the ground, convincing everyone else in the battle do the same. It's all intercut with reactions from streamers and audience members crying Tears of Joy. It's utterly ridiculous and makes no attempt to understand its demographic, which kind of makes it amazing.
• It's almost common knowledge that Bambi is a highly dark movie once one looks past the cuteness. Well, it seems the Disney Company is aware of this. Whenever the movie is promoted, either for theatrical re-releases or on home video, the trailer will go out of its way to make it seem like a safe, fun and cute romp with cuddly animals. This particular trailer takes the cake, with a peppy remix of the ice skating leitmotif and unfitting cartoon sound effects. Anyone who knows what actually happens in the story will find it laughable as well as misleading.
  "Ah, Disney, never stop misadvertising your infamous 'this film ruined me, his mother died out of nowhere' movie as fun and whimsical"

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