Take That / Advertising

aka: Commercials

Commercials with their own pages

• Cable/Satellite Mudslinging

Banking and Credit Cards

• An ad for Numerica Credit Union takes a shot at banks, specifically the Bank of America:
  Bear 1: They're looking for a cute and cuddly mascot to help attract new members. "We might just be—"
  Bear 2: You're not cute and cuddly. You're a grizzly bear.
  Bear 1: So?
  Bear 2: So, you're big and scary. You'd make a better spokesperson for a... Bank. (the mascot of Bank of America is a grizzly bear)
• VISA took the rather extreme tactic of making entire commercials for real life vacation resorts and such, then noting at the end that said location doesn't accept American Express, so be sure to bring your VISA card instead.
• American Express:
  • American Express responded the the VISA ads with a series of commercials featuring a traveler going to various exotic locales and being told that they don't take VISA, to which he responded with an indignant shout of: "But this is where I want to be!" Particularly odd given that American Express hardly works anywhere outside of North America while Visa does (though American Express started a push in Europe and it now works in about 25% of stores).
  • American Express also took a potshot at Capital One. In the commercial, a business owner is hosting a dinner with his foreign clients. When he pays the bill with his "custom made" credit card with a comic book character on it, his clients all laugh at him and leave. It's implied that they probably don't do business with him anymore.
  • Another American Express commercial has a man trying to buy a plane ticket. Everything is going well until he pulls out his credit card... And it has a kitten on it. He is then led away by airport security, presumably to be cavity searched.

Computers and related

• Apple Computer has a long history of Take That! ads (but please, no OS warring here for the sake of sanity!):
  • The famous Super Bowl Nineteen Eighty-Four commercial that heralded the first Apple Macintosh, was meant to portray then-dominant IBM as Big Brother.
  • In the mid '90s, there was an ad with a shot zooming out to show two computers side by side: one with the Mac OS starting screen, the other with the Win95 startup screen. "Although watching them run side by side is not terribly special," cue the computer chassis beneath the Win95 screen being pulled away to reveal both monitors hooked to the Mac, "Watching them run from one computer is." promoting the model of Quadra with a PC's core on a daughterboard allowing a single machine to run both platforms at once.
  • The Switch campaign in the early 2000s, targeted at Windows PCs.
  • "I'm a Mac... and I'm a PC" is perhaps the most inflammatory and controversial. Why?
    • The PC character, played by geek comic John Hodgman, turns out to be, for many, The Woobie of the commercials and the more sympathetic character.
    • Similar in Germany where the PC is viewed as a "successful businessman" (suit and tie) and the Mac guy as perpetual student (casual wear) living on student loans.
    • In the UK, they're advertised with David Mitchell and Robert Webb, with Mitchell as the PC and Webb as the Mac. The tendency is for people to view them like the characters they play on Peep Show, with the PC coming across as a bit hopeless, but someone generally loveable who tries their best, while the Mac is viewed as a smug preening tosser.
    • The accuracy of the commercials: "Hotly debated" would be a massive understatement. They are often at odds with the British Advertising Standards Authority (where the laws about truth in advertising are much stricter than, say, the USA) and when they show the U.S. ads in Britain, they are usually modified to comply. One of the more egregious claims is that Macs are immune to crashing, something even actual Mac users know isn't wholly true (particularly, as with all computers, when there are hardware problems). And Mac trojans/rootkits (not viruses or worms) do exist, they're just very, very rare (only one or two in over five years that were even widely reported to exist).
  • Other Apple ads of note. One ad produced around the time of Windows 95's release noted in a humorous manner that the Mac had for years had a Trash feature similar to Windows' new Recycle Bin. They also ran newspaper ads that said, simply, C:\ONGRTLNS.W95. Then came the "Redmond, start your photocopiers" ads when OS X Tiger was released.
  • When Apple switched from Power PC processors to Intel x86, there were ads that asked, "What's an Intel processor doing in a Mac? Far more than it could do in a PC."
  • That coming after years of non-stop toasting (literally) of Pentiums in their commercials is even more Hilarious in Hindsight
  • When Apple's iPhone 4 was found to have a major design flaw in its exposed antenna, Steve Jobs admitted there might be a problem: by imitating the problem in its competitors phones.
• After being named the most environmentally friendly computer manufacturer, Dell ran a series of ads aimed at college students touting this fact with the slogan "Don't let your green get white-washed."
• A Lenovo ad gleefully parodies the MacBook Air ads where the hands stick the latter product in a manila envelope.
• Very rarely has Microsoft ever directly responded to Apple ads (the implication is supposed to be that Apple is beneath their notice) but they have done a couple:
  • Microsoft has fought back against Apple by making "I'm a PC" ads showing satisfied customers. It worked well enough that MS is doing this even in ads not mentioning its competitor.
  • "I'm A PC, and I've been made into a stereotype." They start with a John Hodgman look-alike and move on to several variations on "I'm a PC, look at all I can do and how many people depend on me."
  • "Congratulations, it's a PC": Take an average looking person, have them set goals and a price limit, and send them shopping with the promise that if they find the computer they need, they'll buy it for them. Every time the Macs get panned on their high price.
    • Of course, these ads evoked responses from Apple:
    Mac:"I'm a Mac."
    PC: "And I'm a PC, and the marketing guys have decided to blow all the money on a big expensive ad campaign instead of using it to fix Vista."
    (Computer development does not work that way - that's what the two released service packs were for!)
  • T-Mobile has turned the signature "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" commercial against Apple's iPhone 4 with their T-Mobile My Touch 4G commercials. Only in place of John Hodgeman they have a normal guy for the iPhone 4, and a rather plastic-looking woman for the My Touch 4G.
  • Microsoft must actually love being a second banana to Apple in tablets—there's so much opportunity for payback. They ran an ad with a Surface and an iPad side by side, in which the voice of the iPhone's personal assistant, Siri, was used to disparage the former: "I don't update my apps like that", "I guess I can't multitask" and, finally "But I can play 'Chopsticks'"
  • More so after Apple released the iPad Pro with a keyboard attached. This time it is Cortana on the Surface Tablet reminding Siri that she is still limited by a tablet processor and the portable operating system instead of the desktop version, so she can't run desktop apps like Microsoft Office, and that the iPad also does not have a track pad or external ports to add on devices.
  • Microsoft has also been going after Google online and off with "Don't get Scroogled", pointing to Google's privacy issues.
• Motorola Xoom tablet commercials have an announcer saying "our tablets are less expensive than the iPad2, also there's one other difference" then part of Queen's Flash Gordon plays "our tablet runs" FLASH AAHHH AHHHH
• Samsung responded to the release of the iPhone 5 with an ad for the Galaxy S-III headed "It doesn't take a genius".^note In case you don't get the joke, the tech-savvy employees at Apple Stores are called "Geniuses."
• One of Samsung's ads for the Galaxy S5 took a jab at iPhones' smaller batteries by showing S5 users who can get by with swapping their batteries out or using ultra-power saving mode, while iPhone users are left huddling around the electric outlets recharging their phones.
• This fall 2017 ad for the Samsung Galaxy S8 and Note 8 was timed to coincide with the release of the iPhone X. It is Samsung's way of boasting that they're many steps ahead of Apple in the smartphone technology race.^note In part because the iPhone X was the first iPhone without a physical home button, but it didn't come out until well after Samsung had already done away with the physical home buttons for the S8 and Note 8 in favor of onscreen keys A guy gets the original iPhone, and at one point tries to take a picture of his car only to be told he doesn't have enough storage space^note Samsung's Galaxy Note and S lines with the exception of the S6 / Note 5 have always had a tray to install a micro SD card to expand on-board storage; Apple locks you in at whatever internal storage option you settle for at purchase. In 2013, he then meets a girl who owns a Galaxy Note 5. In 2016, they both slip and fall off a pier and get their phones wet. The girl's Galaxy S7 Edge is fine, but the boyfriend has to put his iPhone 6 into a petri dish of rice^note except for the S6 / Note 5, almost all Galaxy S and Note phones since at least 2013 have had IP67 or IP68 certification for dust and water resistance. It wouldn't be until 2016 and the iPhone 7 that Apple released a water resistant iPhone. The boyfriend upgrades to the iPhone 7, but because there's no headphone jack, he must use a special dongle to listen to music and charge his phone simultaneously^note Apple gained a lot of controversy in 2016 for removing the headphone jack beginning with the iPhone 7, forcing everyone to connect their headphones through the Lightning port via an adapter, which also means unless you have the iPhone 8 or X that support wireless charging, you'll need to use a special dongle to charge your phone and listen to music simultaneously on an iPhone. By contrast, Galaxy phones still use conventional headphone jacks, compared to the girlfriend, who's just charging her Galaxy S8 on a convertible wireless charging stand^note wireless charging has become a mainstream feature of Samsung Galaxy phones beginning with the S6 and Note 5 in 2015, and in fact had been around since the S4 in 2013 with a special inductive back panel. Apple didn't bring wireless charging to the iPhone line until September 2017 with the rollout of the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, then the iPhone X two months later. So the boyfriend decides not to wait in line for the iPhone X and instead settles for purchasing a Galaxy Note 8. As he walks past an Apple Store, he briefly glances at one man in line who has a haircut imitating the "notch" on the iPhone X^note from the front-facing camera that is used for Face ID.
• Whoever designed the Windows Phone advertisement (which shows patrons at a wedding capturing the proceedings on iPhones and Galaxies) must've been fed up with the in-fighting between Apple and Samsung and wanted to expose their silly ideas for competing (including their ongoing lawsuits) as an advertising allegory that portrays such corporate warmongering as a physical brawl in which Apple and Samsung fanboys and fangirls make complete arses of themselves in front of a waiter and a waitress who are capturing the whole thing with their Nokia Lumias. Or they could have just been advertising the high resolution of the Lumia's camera...
• Microsoft Surface Tablet PC
  • One ad shows that it has a docking keyboard, plus USB, display port and has a touchscreen. The guy with the Apple Macintosh laptop shown side-by-side with it is shocked to discover the Surface "runs full Adobe Photoshop," has the same quad-core processor as the Mac, plus has a kickstand so you can have it standing up even if a keyboard isn't attached. So the guy with the Apple says, "So you're saying it's more powerful than my Mac?" and the guy with the Surface says, "Well, technically you said it." Note that since the original statement is a question, Microsoft never really claims the Surface is more powerful than the Mac.
  • Another ad shows how the Surface has a keyboard (which the other guy's laptop has, but isn't detachable), has a touchscreen (which the other guy has to use a tablet), and you can write notes on it with a pen (probably a stylus) and the other guy says he can do the same thing with a pad of paper and a pen, thus showing the guy with the Surface has one thing to carry while the other guy has five, so the guy with the Surface says, "You are more powerful than you think."
• A Google Photos ad features people trying to capture pictures of increasingly significant things (such as skydiving, tornadoes, and Bigfoot), but an Apple pop-up comes up (with the accompanying sound) saying storage is full. This is to promote how Google allows the ability to free up space in the moment.
• Thought it was over? In 2017 a new series of ads for the iPad Pro prove that it is a better solution to replace a PC than the Microsoft Surface because it can run on LTE cell service (data caps apply), has a touchscreen (which the Surface has), and does not get viruses (after all, there is no such thing as antivirus software).
• A Firefox ad◊ on Tumblr displays a webcam with the Google Chrome colors around it, subtitled "BIG BROWSER IS WATCHING"- referencing the infamous fears of Google storing and selling user data to third parties without permission.
• Back in The '80s, when commercial UNIX was in its infancy, a vendor called "MT XINU" (which is "UNIX™" spelled backwards), published this poster◊ depicting a 4.2 BSD-powered X-Wing speeding away from an AT&T logo writhed in flames, with the Tagline "4.2 > V." ^{longer explanation}AT&T had just lost their long-running antitrust lawsuit regarding the Bell System and were being forced to divest it; however, as a Consolation Prize, they were being allowed to sell computers (and thus UNIX) at retail, which led to UNIX System V's first release in 1983. However, System V was slow, expensive, and had many gratuitous changes to it that many UNIX hackers, who cut their teeth on the older and faster UNIX Version 7, found unappealing compared to the not quite as slick but more featureful releases from the University of California at Berkeley (the B in BSD). MT XINU was one of the first companies to port and package BSD, and System V made AT&T an easy target, especially considering their new logo at the time—which they still use a variant of in The New '20s—strongly resembled the Death Star... As for the Trade Snark, it comes from an example of Our Lawyers Advised This Trope that dates back to the mid-1970s and eventually became a meme; AT&T insisted that all mentions of UNIX in ads and documentation be qualified with a "UNIX™ is a trademark of Bell Labs" disclaimer.

Food and Drink

• Arby's has a spot with a guy sitting on a bench, eating a traditional burger, fries, and soft drink lunch. He's about to bite into it when grease squirts all over his shirt and hands. Just then, a bombshell woman walks up to him to the tune of Warrant's "Cherry Pie" and hands him her number. He tries to open it, and the grease on his hands smudges the number. He tries to get her to stop, but she just makes the "call me" gesture and drives off. The ad, specifically, is for the Arby's Roast Burger. Apparently, anyone who buys hamburgers from other places is too stupid/uncultured to think to get napkins. It's unclear whether this particular Take That! is aimed at the competitors or the customers, and the ad has some rather vexing Fridge Logic when one considers the extreme unlikelihood of a model-hot woman giving her phone number to a random cheeseburger-eating stranger ever happening in real life, much like an insurance company using serious threats of killer meteorites or a Zombie Apocalypse to sell personal injury policies. This began in response to a series of ads from Carl's Jr that featured sexy men and women biting messily into its burgers while dripping sauce everywhere.
• An Arby's commercial complain has them taking a dig at Subway. It began with someone outside of a Subway and then head to some kind of factory that's far away. To make a long story short — Arby claims that Subway's food isn't as "fresh" as their turkey sandwich.
• An third Arby's commercial takes a dig at Chick-Fil-A in advertising their new chicken sandwiches. In it, the announcer claim that Arby's has put great care into the new sandwiches, then reassures everyone that they still have other meats. The guy goes on to laugh at the notion of a store that sells nothing but chicken sandwiches.
• The Aviation American Gin commercial "The Gift That Doesn't Give Back" is one towards the "The Gift That Gives Back" Peloton commercial and the grief it brought to its main actress Monica Ruiz, who appears in the ad.
• The advertising for Billabong Ice-Creams Lime Spider flavour contained the slogan "A lime spider is better than a lame lion", a very mean "take that" aimed at Paddlepop ice-creams, whose mascot is a lion.
• Commercials for Budweiser were quick to mock how long it took for NFL officials to review plays once video replays became commonplace: the Budweiser horses, who were shown playing football (don't ask how horses can play football) in other commercials, spend one standing around waiting as a zebra peers into an on-field replay system.
• The Burger King commercials with Ronald McDonald, in a trench coat, ordering his food.
  • This goes all the way back to the 1970s-vintage commercial featuring a 4-year-old Sarah Michelle Gellar claiming that Burger King's burgers were bigger than McDonald's burgers, and that she never ate anywhere but Burger King. Which, given her slim figure when she grew up, was clearly a complete lie.
    • Another BK commercial from the '70s was a musical in which a man has "tried it here, tried it there, and tried it where they make 'em square", obviously referring to Wendy's.
    • They've also expanded their target range, with a set of commercials featuring Whopper, Jr. and Crispy Chicken going to Wendy's and Subway, and generally acting like assholes.
    • There's also the Whopper Virgins campaign, with Burger King giving taste tests to those who had never eaten a burger before, such as Thai Hmong tribesmen, Romanian farmers, and Greenland Inuit people. The test was to see if they would pick the Whopper over the Big Mac. Sure enough, they chose the Whopper.
    • A Burger King ad shows The King sneaking into McDonald's headquarters to steal the McMuffin blueprints, then escaping on a scooter. The narrator then admits that their McMuffinalike sandwich is "not original, but still good".
    • An ad at a bus stop in Australia had one where it give directions to the nearest Burger King (about 500m up the road), which happens to be "past the other mob". It has been removed.
    • One poster found in some Burger King establishments featured a picture of a Whopper on top of a box, unable to fit inside. The caption reads, "Silly Whopper. That's a Big Mac box."
    • Wendy's and Burger King have gotten into dueling commercials that make it clear that you, the customer, just can't win. You can either go to Burger King and get a burger that "starts with a frozen patty, cold as ice", or you can go to Wendy's for their real burger: "Real small, and real fried".
    • In 2016, Wendy's introduced its 4 for $4 meal including a sandwich, nuggets, fries, and a drink. After a few weeks, Burger King introduced its 5 for $4 meal which included all of that plus a cookie. Their slogan? "5 is better than 4!" Wendy's response? "Edible food".
    • Enter Carl's Jr. and Hardee's version of the 4 for $4 Meal which includes both a burger and a chicken sandwich, and advertises that Wendy's only gives you nuggets. Wendy's response is to include the option for a crispy chicken sandwich instead of a burger.
    • Now Checkers & Rally's Drive Ins enter with their own spin which includes a burger, chicken, fries, apple pie, and a drink and only for just $3.00! They point at Wendy's, Hardee's, and Burger King by saying "We give you more food for $1.00 less then everybody else!"
    • In September 2018 when Rally's and Checkers ran a $1.00 drink campaign, their ads went to show that they offer a bigger size beverage in any size than McDonald's.
  • In May 2019, Burger King launched a promotion called #FeelYourWay with different Whopper meals based on various (mostly negative) moods to promote mental health awareness. The tagline "No one is happy all the time," as well as the design of the boxes being somewhat similar to those of Happy Meals, is a pretty clear dig at McDonald's.
  • Long predating these commercials, Arby's used to run a series that portrayed a trench coated Ronald caught on amateur film or photography ordering at an Arby's, with the caption "everyone gets burger boredom."
    • Arby's ran a commercial in the mid-2000s featuring a man going to a Wendy's board meeting and proposing a line of healthy roast beef sandwiches, which promptly gets him laughed out of the room. The ad stopped running in 2008, when Arby's parent company Triarc purchased Wendy's. Ironically, Triarc ended up selling off Arby's just three years later.
• Carl's Junior (Or Hardee's, depending on your area) once did a commercial that advertised their "large" five-dollar burgers, which, literally, was a line of take-out paper bags belonging to rival fast food chains dropping, while someone intoned, "(insert fast food place here) doesn't have it." They've done another one, which was now a take that at Burger King.
• The rivalry between Coca-Cola and Pepsi Co. is well known for anybody, but the place where this rivalry is most present is in their advertisements filled with Take That against the other company. Some of them are:
  • Many new Pepsi Max adverts showed a sliding scale of fun, starting from "Zero" going up to "Max", in reference to the new Coca-Cola Zero.
  • Diner 2pointZero. For added irony, the Pepsi driver is portrayed by the Trickster. This is itself a reference to this older spot.
  • Speaking of Pepsi, there was also a series of commercials featuring a little girl who asks for a Pepsi, but ends up with Coca-Cola instead. And this drives her to get even, with the voice of Marlon Brando.
  • Pepsi had an ad set in the future, with an archaeology class picking through an abandoned present-day family home. The students keep finding everyday items which their professor (wrongly) identifies, until one comes up with a certain wasp-waisted glass bottle, and the professor admits that he has no idea what it is.
  • Some others can be seen here.
  • Worth mentioning when Pepsi is using two of Coca-Cola's known mascots, Santa Claus and the polar bear in switching to Pepsi for the summer blowout.
  • At least two Pepsi ads state how when you buy Pepsi, you could win free concert tickets. But with Coke, you get the polar bear (a guy in a costume) or a name on the bottle (but not necessarily your name).
  • Like Microsoft, Coke usually pretends Pepsi doesn't exist. The ads with Max Headroom promoting New Coke were a rare exception (actually justified in that New Coke was meant to better compete with Pepsi). The "sweating" Pepsi can was probably the best.
  • Somewhat similar to Windows Phone example above, RC Cola portraited both Coke and Pepsi as two teams in fishing competition, who later put their "captured" customers hanging on display as trophies. The message? You don't have to swallow that [the lies about only two great tasing colas on the market].
• Ironically, a few years before that Busch had gone after Coors hard, pointing out that the Coors distributed in the Eastern US didn't use that fine Colorado Rocky Mountain spring water they bragged about since they were brewed in Virginia. Some were almost as quick and dirty as political campaign ads. Coors responded with ads where their president walked around with the Virginia mountains in the background and asserted that water was just as pure and didn't make a difference to the overall quality of their beer.
• For many a year the market leader in Ireland for pizza delivery had been Four Star Pizza. Then Domino's moved in on the island with the slogan "The five star pizza."
• The ads for Domino's subs are a huge Take That! against Subway. The first series had employees from Submart secretly trying to get hold of Domino's subs. A later series has several employees looking at all the great ingredients on Domino's subs, while the guy behind the counter complains that all they have is lettuce. (Which isn't even close to true.)
• A Jack in the Box commercial has Jack mocking Burger King's "Have it your way" slogan by mentioning the fact that you can't order breakfast after 11:00 A.M., unlike at his restaurant where you can order anything on the menu 24/7. He ends the commercial by standing in front of a Burger King and uttering these words, "And hey, if I'm saying something that's not true... *rips the sleeves off his suit* Do something about it."
• A KFC advert in the UK shows two coworkers comparing their fast food lunches. One of them has a £5 KFC meal which he sings the praises of, emphasising his two side dishes. His coworker has a £5 footlong sandwich (the price of a Subway footlong and drink in the UK). The first guy asks if he got crisps, and the second guy replies it would have cost extra.
• It keeps going, too. Krystal (kind of a Deep South version of White Castle) has a string of commercials featuring the famous mascots of other restaurants getting busted ordering from there. One has a drive-thru attendant ask a person in the back of a limo, "Back again your highness?" (It becomes obvious that it's the Burger King a few seconds later.) Another shows an unseen person with large red pigtails (and the famous blue dress of the Wendy's mascot) getting chastised when someone finds the boxes Krystals are sold in hidden in her desk.
• Mike's Hard Lemonade has a series of spots taking shots at their competitors, with the innovations said competitors advertise being brought to the bosses by a well-meaning employee. Take Miller's Cold Activated (and for that matter Coor's Light's similar mechanic) can, which displays a logo when the beer is cold enough. The Mike's employees pointed out that you could do the same thing simply by picking up the can. Subverted in another ad, with the employee bringing in a sommelier, who described their product in beautiful, flowery terms. The bosses stand agape, then ask the employee if he wrote it down. He had just been doodling on his notepad.
  • Or how about all their commercials remarking in general about how unmanly every other drink in the market is, saying "in a world that's gone soft, someone has to be hard"? Let me reiterate: a company that sells spiked fruit punch is attempting to make a Take That! against other alcoholic beverages by accusing them of being unmanly.
• The link also discusses the Miller/Bud dustup around the same time: Miller ran ads (in a U.S. presidential election year) mocking Bud's "King of Beers" slogan by saying, hey, in America, we have presidents, not kings, and calling Miller the "President of Beers". Not mentioned in the link: One of the ads showed the spokesperson "debating" one of the Budweiser Clydesdales, and that apparently was seen as over the line by the Busch family, so Bud hit back with no-more-Mr.-Nice-guy radio and TV spots mocking Miller for saying this when it was foreign-owned ... and, just coincidentally for a beer very popular in the African-American community, the foreign owner was based in ... South Africa! (So what if apartheid was long gone by this point?) That, in turn, became Hilarious in Hindsight when Busch was itself bought by a Belgian company, InBev, four years later.
• Ovaltine's chocolate milk commercials were infamous for featuring kids trash talking Nestle's chocolate milk. Not much anymore however: Nestle now owns the rights to Ovaltine in some regions.
• Pillsbury has been steadily bashing Kellogg's when it comes to their Toaster Strudels against Kellogg's Pop Tarts. In the ads, there are usually two kids, one has the Toaster Strudel and the other has a Pop Tart. The kid with the Pop Tart is disappointed as he/she sees the Pop Tarts is hard as a rock and snaps like a cracker while the other kid gets their Toaster Strudel from the toaster and happily enjoys it, showing how soft and warm it is compared to Pop Tarts.
  • One shows a kid keeps the Pop Tarts in his locker, rather than eat them.
  • Some commercials proclaim the inferiority of Pop Tart's strawberry flavor, as opposed to their other 26.
  • This ignores two major selling points for Pop Tarts — one, they're infinitely easier to prepare and carry with you (unless you forego the Toaster Strudel icing altogether) and two, Pop Tarts are prebaked before being packaged and shipped while Toaster Strudels are fried, so Pop Tarts are healthier.
    • Also, it's commonplace to pop the Pop Tart in the toaster oven, something that the kids in the commercial don't seem to even think about.
• In a Pizza Hut advertisement promoting Back to the Future, two Hill Valley teens from 1989 travel to the year 2015 in the DeLorean and soon start craving for pizza. One of them suggests, "What about that place that delivers?" They approach a building with a sign on the window saying "We Deliver". The camera tilts up, and what is the name of the building they've come to? Domino's Hardware. This revelation causes them to wonder, "What happened to them?"
• Pizza Hut ran ads asking people on the street to choose between their P'zone and a cold turkey sub. They choose the P'zone. Even though sandwich places can heat up any sandwiches or serve warm ones in the first place.
• The Quizno's commercials about the people who eat at "Wrongway" are the latest in a long series of anti-Subway commercials.
  • Commercials have them applying a Take That to Subway's "Five-Dollar-Footlong" commercials, with people eating five dollar bills or rolls of coins. Then in the same commercial they mock the amount of meat in their sandwiches. One has to wonder, what exactly did Subway do to Quizno's?
    • Not so much so any more, since Quizno's has five-dollar value-subs as well (although they're mostly just advertising their $4 Toasty Torpedoes, which are also a foot long—though they're extremely skinny, which the commercials don't mention.) KFC snipes at the both of them by having someone ask how much the chips and the drink cost, as you can now get an entire box of food for 5 bucks at KFC.
    • Subway for a long time based a large bulk of its advertising on bashing McDonald's (and indeed, burger joints in general), so it's only right that someone hit them back. Heck, they still take shots at fast food. If you're to believe them, eating one meal at Burger King Stand-In will ruin your life.
      "I love how they've managed to make a meatball sub into health food."
  • There's at least one case where this backfired. One Quizno's potshot against Subway involved two men sitting on a bench, one with a Quizno's sub, and one with a sub that was clearly Subway's. The man with the Quizno's sub says "Untoasted^note  At the time the commercial in question aired, Subway did not offer toasted sandwiches.? What, were you raised by wolves?" Cue the second guy having a flashback of himself, still adult and in a three-piece suit, nursing from a mother wolf with her pups. He then responds back in the present "Why yes. Yes, I was." Enough people were put off by this ad that it was taken off the air, then put back on with the nursing scene cut out.
    • In New England (unless it was in one of the gas station franchises) Subway has always offered toasted sandwiches. They only started offering toasted in their gas station franchises since 1990...
    • Subway ended up getting the last laugh during the Great Recession - Quizno's had to close about a thousand stores, with Subway buying out a fair chunk of them.
• Relentless energy drink tastes pretty much identical to the more popular, well-established and expensive Red Bull, apart from having a bit more sugar in it. The big difference is that Relentless comes in 500ml cans and Red Bull comes in 250ml cans. Relentless' slogan, which is printed all over said cans, is "NO HALF MEASURES". But... 500ml is half a litre.
• Sonic drive-up restaurants are showed ads blasting Wendy's for having Frostys made with "a vanilla mix that freezes," whereas Sonic has real ice cream! Except that their "real" ice cream, as shown in the commercial, is just soft-serve, which is ALSO shipped as a liquid mix that freezes. The idea that there's someone inside each Sonic lovingly churning out made-from-scratch ice cream is nonsense, so there's no reason for Sonic to be so smug about it.
• Subway's ads in The New '10s are trying to be Take Thats against fast food, but look more like Take Thats against anyone who eats it, implying that even one fast food meal "comes with" long lasting life ruining side effects. There's a specific campaign in which people start breaking chairs, popping buttons off their shirt and so on the second they sink their teeth into a burger. (One of these ads ends with someone taking a bag into their car from the drive-thru, and the tires immediately blow out.)
  • This commercial represents the apparent monotony of eating burgers all the time with a heart monitor, except the beeps are replaced with the word "burger" and the line is replaced with a series of familiar yellow arches, until it flatlines.
• In The '90s, Taco Bell once had a marketing campaign with Rocky and Bullwinkle characters. Boris Badenov sold "Boring McBoris Burgers", which were so dull the people of Frostbite Falls found watching grass grow to be entertaining (The grass later revealing to be Astro Turf). One ad had Natasha note "What we want is what we get!", poking fun at a then-current McDonald's slogan. June Foray reprised her role of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and Natasha for the commercials.
• British supermarkets got into a rather vicious commercial war, where each supermarket brought up just how many products it had cheaper than the others. Particularly bad with Asda and Tesco, where Asda started with 'Asda have this many products cheaper than Tesco', who then responded with 'Tesco have this many real baskets cheaper than Asda', and so on.
  • Budget supermarket LIDL had recently been trying to rebrand itself and take some of the middle class customers from Sainsburys and Waitrose. Their advertising consists of giving members of the public blind taste tests of their products and their competitors', stating that "You can't even taste the difference", which is Sainsburys' slogan and the name of their "premium" line of foods.
• Indian advertisements are governed by very strict rules that don't allow direct Take Thats in an ad, so they resort to Bland-Name Product or a Brand X that is a Suspiciously Similar Substitute. For instance, a Pepsi ad taking a potshot at Coke will feature either a red paper cup with a white rim, or a crimson label with 'Cola Cola' in white. Alternatively, the competing brand is censored, or they will take a dig at the tag line or key feature of the competing brand. This has, however, been rather lax lately, in the milk powder war, with Complan taking a full-frontal dig at Horlicks.
• Taco Bell has been trying to establish a breakfast presence, with menu items like the "waffle taco". This included running ads where people named Ronald McDonald endorse their breakfast items. Now McDonald's is running ads that say "Have breakfast for breakfast". Coincidence?
  • Taco Bell is still shooting, running ads about a sort of wrap with a hash brown inside, and saying it's what's inside that counts, so McDonald's must not think hash browns matter.
  • Taco Bell ads have gone as far as to paint McDonald's as a communist state, including a Playland-esque slide and clown guards. Those who eat Taco Bell are rebellious "Breakfast Defectors" who choose something new instead of sticking to the same old routine: biscuit tacos.
  • They're not done painting McDonald's as some all-powerful enemy; in their advertisement for nacho fries, the "burger people" are established as a monopolistic establishment who won't let anyone else sell fries, once again casting Taco Bell as the rebels.
• A Russian ad for Burger King showed one of their burgers falling on a poppy flower. Russian for "poppy" is 'mak'.
• An Arby's ad from September 2016 introduced Arby's new chicken filet sandwiches, but reassured that none of the other meats were going away because the idea of a restaurant that sells only chicken filet sandwiches (you know, kind of like Chick Fil-A) is absurd.
• When it's not about quality of food, it's about giving you more for your money. Than, say, a sandwich of all things. Just ask these fine folks:
  • Taco Bell: "You've got sandwich money, but your stomach wants a full meal." (The 5 Buck Box)
  • Quizno's: "If you're gonna eat $5, shouldn't you get more meat?"
  • KFC: "5 dollars for a sandwich!?" ($5 Fill-Up)
  • Cici's Pizza: "$5 foot-long...Or $5 25-foot-long?"
• Florida's Natural orange juice often highlights in its ads that its juice is made from oranges grown entirely in the U.S. as a cooperative effort among Florida farmers, while its competitors use a mix of domestic and imported oranges. One ad shows the juice next to its competitors, then asks something along the lines of, "Who knows orange juice better? The corporate heads of Pepsi and Coca-Cola, or real orange farmers?" The competing juices (Tropicana and Simply Orange, which are owned by PepsiCo and Coca-Cola respectively) dissolve into some generic CEO guys. Another ad portrays the competing juices as floating lifelessly in the water as the narrator describes how they ship their orange juice from overseas.
• Cicis Pizza's ad for their unlimited buffet had a subtle one at Little Caesar's Pizza, making fun of their motto. "You can have 'Pizza, pizza'" (showing a bored family with one box of pizza) "...or you could have pizza, pizza, pizza, pizza..." (showing the various pizzas available in the Cicis buffet).
• The Bear Paws crackers commercials throw more than a few jabs at Pepperidge Farms' Goldfish line of crackers.
• Ads for DiGiorno frozen pizza often have the Tag Line "It's not delivery; it's DiGiorno!", suggesting that the quality of their pizzas is on par with or even better than that of delivery pizza chains.
• An ad campaign from KFC took aim at fried chicken shops that imitate their branding with a TV ad showing the Colonel driving around a high street with fried chicken shops with names like "Texan Fried Chicken", "Memphis Fried Chicken" and so on which the narrator describes as "home of the imitators" and a print ad◊ with a collage of photos of similary named fried chicken shops in alphabetical order (AFC, BFC, CFC, etc all except for K)
  "Because when you're on top, everybody wants a piece of you."

Gaming

• About a week or so before Activision's "Wacky Racing with real cars" racing game Blur hit store shelves, they started to air an ad that shamelessly mocks the Trope Codifier Mario Kart, with a cutesy Toad Expy named Brock Lee wanting to use the real-life cars in Blur, and decking another cutesy creature for saying that "racing's not about winning, it's about making friends", even though the game in question has strong online features and in fact is brutally competitive even against the computer. The tagline for the ad is Blur: Race Like A Big Boy. Ironically, Blur is rated E10+ and is developed by Bizarre Studios, who had previously developed Disney games.
• "Playing in the Street can be dangerous."◊ Seeing whatcha done there, Clayfighter.
• Ads for Crash Bandicoot (1996) on the original PlayStation had a guy dressed as Crash show up at Nintendo headquarters with a megaphone, to taunt "Plumber-Boy". "You're hurting my elbow!" When Crash started appearing on Nintendo consoles, Nintendo Power had a faux-interview with Crash in which this trope was lampshaded with Crash saying something to the effect that his antics in the commercial were "Nothing personal, it was all business related."
• A print ad for the third edition of Dungeons & Dragons took a relatively tame jab at MMORPGs, while simultaneously poking fun at itself: "If you're going to sit in your basement pretending to be an elf, you should at least have some friends over to help."
  • A similar one said "At least this way you'll know the hot elf chick is a dude."
  • Interestingly, a banner ad for D&D Online takes a much more pointed jab at other free MMORPGs, specifically MapleStory. "Broccoli or the Beholder" indeed.
• Eternal Champions :
  • Ads for the Sega Genesis fighter Eternal Champions were not very discreet about its competing with the likes of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat (1992), which were also on the system. One, for example, had the game stalking these two around a house until they were whimpering in a corner.
  • Then there's this print ad◊ saying Street Fighter is "training wheels" for Eternal Champions.
• One web advertisement for the MMORPG Fiesta poked fun at the advertisements for Evony, which attempted to lure in clickers with a woman with oversized breasts in a revealing outfit, complete with bad grammar ('Play discreetly on your browser FREE' and so on). In any case, the Fiesta banner said something to the effect of, "More than just breasts! Play Fiesta MMORPG - for free! My Lord".
  • A few other games have taken other shots at these ads. AdventureQuest Worlds had one, and PopCap made an absurdly funny one for Plants vs. Zombies where the "girl" in question is a zombie.
  • The online card game "Alteil" also gets in on the fun, showing one of the card illustrations captioned with "She's actually in our game, my Lord."—the various breast women used to advertise Evony aren't in Evony at all.
• A commercial for Glover had an enemy from said game attack obvious Expies of Duke Nukem, Lara Croft, and Cloud Strife.
• Similarly, print ads◊ for James Pond 2: Codename RoboCod, featured the title fish in what appeared to be an ice cream parlor talking up his new Do-Anything Robot abilities, and Sonic dashing out of frame because he couldn't compete.
• The American commercial for Metal Gear Solid: Peace Walker has Marcus (the spokesperson for the PSP during its later years, in a spinoff from the Kevin Butler ads) saying about the game "This isn't some kiddie game that cousins play!" It's quite obvious he was making a stab at the DS, because a great majority of the DS's games are kid-friendly.
• A certain infamous Rift trailer proclaimed: "We're not in Azeroth anymore!"
• The Tiger Game.com launch ad is probably the harshest and most insulting of them all. It has a guy in a jumpsuit yelling to the audience about how the Game.com is so amazing, and that it "has more games than you idiots have brain cells!!!" And there were only 23 games released for the console. So, basically, Tiger was outright calling their customers idiots with less than 23 brain cells...
• Print ads and commercials for Ty the Tasmanian Tiger shown the eponymous Ty dropping in on three hospitalized and highly bandaged characters who bear obvious resemblances to Sonic the Hedgehog, Crash Bandicoot, and Spyro the Dragon, all of whom have Ty's signature boomerangs embedded in them somewhere. They all flatline thereafter. All three characters are still more popular than Ty ever was, though.
• Way back in the early 1980s, Mattel ran print and TV ads with George Plimpton comparing their cool-looking Intellivision sports games with Atari's primitive (even by the standards of the time) counterparts (a way of deflecting attention from the fact that most people wanted Atari 2600s so they could play Space Invaders or Asteroids, which were only available in home versions for that platform). Atari ran counter ads promoting exactly those games with a little blond boy in a suit and tie, whereupon Mattel shot back with an ad in which a similar kid starts off promoting Atari only for Plimpton to come in and set him straight. It all became Hilarious in Hindsight when Mattel started marketing ports of the same games for Atari as "M Network" once it discontinued Intellivision in 1983.
  • Actually, the M Network ads got in a final dig: "Games so good you won't believe you're playing an Atari." Yep, they blasted the very console their games were on. Imagine if ads for modern Sonic games on Nintendo consoles still took shots at Mario and Nintendo.
• PS2 commercials from the 2002-2003 timeframe used the slogan "The only place to play".
• Sega did this a lot during the 1990s: "Genesis does what Nintendon't" and all that. Let's also not forget how a burly black guy mocked us from our television sets about waiting for Nintendo to make a CD gaming system instead of going out and buying the Sega CD.
  • Sega even tried it with the PlayStation when the ill-fated Sega Saturn was released. Ads for the system and for one of its killer apps, NiGHTS into Dreams…, referred to the PlayStation as "Plaything" and included such imagery as a baby with a grown man's head and someone dropping a PlayStation console off a building. Sega were really damn bitter.
    • One of the best examples was this 1993 ad for the Game Gear, comparing playing the Game Boy to hillbillies watching bugs being zapped and eating pickled pork lips. Nice.
    • There was another one, seen in an article in the Italian edition of the Nintendo Official Magazine, discussing - you guessed it - the Console Wars themselves. It was a printed ad, showing a dog between the Game Gear and the Game Boy, with the sentence: "If you were colorblind and had an IQ of less than twelve, then you wouldn't care which portable you had. Of course, you wouldn't care if you drank from the toilet, either." Here's the TV version. Most notably, in retrospective, the writer of the article said "so basically, in other words, their message was, if you prefer the Game Boy over the Game Gear, then you're a dog. The world replied with a simple "woof."
  • Sega was also on the receiving end of a Take That!, courtesy of Turbo Technologies, Inc., who ran a series of multi-page advertising comics featuring a superhero called Johnny Turbo taking on the evil goons of faceless corporate monster FEKA. Of course, the comics were so ridiculous and filled with Ho Yay that many speculate that the real Take That! was directed towards TTI employee John Brandstetter, who served as the model for Johnny Turbo.
  • Surprisingly enough, Nintendo did strike back at Sega with the Donkey Kong Country TV ad, announcing it as the "first fully rendered video game EVER" which, obviously, was not to be found "on Sega", "on 32X adaptors" or "on CD-ROM".
    • Furthermore, one of the Donkey Kong Country games had a results screen that included a garbage can labeled "No Hopers". Some of the items lying around the bucket included Earthworm Jim's laser and, of course, Sonic the Hedgehog's shoes.
    • Nintendo Power also released a subscribers-only special promotion video for Star Fox 64. In the video, a weaselly man in a Sony shirt and his incompetent sidekick in a Sega shirt try to coerce a Nintendo employee into releasing the secrets of the Rumble Pak.
    • This SNES Star Fox commercial featured a Take That against Sega's early 90s slogan, "Welcome to the Next Level".
    • One of the earliest take thats Nintendo issued at Sega was this Australian commercial for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1989), which featured a take that to the Sega Master System.
  • Though Sega did some more take-thats of their own in 2001 — while Sony was having problems with not having enough PlayStation 2's on the shelves, during that year's E3 conference in Los Angeles, Sega drove a truck around the parking lot with a large message printed on the side: "Our condolences to Sony regarding their console shortage problems." This was accompanied by an even bigger picture of a young boy sticking his tongue out.
    • And speaking of Sony's problems, Microsoft's Xbox 360 campaigning during PS3's launch was pure Take That glory. Highlights were crashing Sony's live broadcast launch party held on a ship by parking another ship in the background with a large Xbox 360 poster on the side, and Microsoft employees offering chairs for people queuing up for game stores on launch day, each chair decorated with an advert for a website where you could read Microsoft's sympathies for people having to wait in rain when they could have just played a 360 ages before.
  • It gets better. A PlayStation 3 ad featuring Kevin Butler, VP of Everything, Lord of the Anti-Subtle, hyping up the PS Move controller takes a few potshots at Microsoft's Kinect motion gaming tech, saying that the Move has buttons, and that's pretty important for shooters like SOCOM. In the runup to the Move launch, Sony put up a website called yaybuttons.com. They're not even bothering to be subtle against Kinect. Then a commercial aired on TV that had him saying "Dear PlayStation: People think motion control is for little kids!"
  • Sony has also taken a potshot against Nintendo for relying on the Mario franchise, basically telling people "Oh, look. Just another Mario game. Come with us for better games."
  • Ads for the PlayStation 4 made numerous shots at the Xbox One, which had an unveiling that did not go over well.
    • Particularly noteworthy was an ad about sharing games with friends. The Xbox One required players pay a fee to share a game. The PlayStation 4 ad had two PlayStation executives show how you share games on their system: handing the game to your friend.
• There were a series of magazine ads for sports cards from Topps, Upper Deck, and Wizards of the Coast that took rather blatant shots at the trading card games for Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!. Nintendo and Konami were not amused, with Konami breaking off ties with Upper Deck in response.
• A Panasonic 3DO Interactive Multiplayer commercial from 1994 (?) depicted a Sega Genesis and SNES being dropped into a toybox, with the narration "If you're not playing with a Panasonic 3DO system, then what are you playing with?" The commercial then cuts to footage from various 3DO games, then it cuts back to the toybox with the narration saying something along the lines of "Say goodbye to your old toys", and then it abruptly cuts to a static picture of the 3DO logo as we hear a gunshot.
• Print ads for the Atari Jaguar had a cartoon Jaguar about to attack Mario, Yoshi, and Sonic the Hedgehog.

Online services

• Insert-city-here-jobshop.ca frequently has characters excuse their not using a job website by saying they went to one that was "monstrously complicated".
  • An ad for helpwantednewmexico.com criticizes a "monstrously monstrous" job website for being useless when looking for local employees.
  • An ad for ajcjobs.com actually works the metaphor to the point where people in their radio ads are having one-sided conversations with a monster that sounds [and apparently behaves] like Taz.
• An ad campaign for the NYC car service app Gett is pretty much just 'We're better than Uber'.

Telecommunications

• Alltel:
  • A series of Alltel commercials portraying Chad, the Alltel guy, as a cool dude, and the other four big wireless companies as D&D-playing geeks.
  • The original versions of the ads featured Chad trying to befriend the other cell phone companies' mascots, such as the Verizon guy and that weird orange stick figure from Cingular. The companies hated this; in response they did an ad of a mock court scene with the mascots' faces blurred, before switching to Chad vs. the employees.
  • "Chad joins the adventuring party!" With the acquisition of Alltel by Verizon, the campaign is put to an honorable end with the real Verizon guy meeting Chad in apparent accomplishment of what these two metaphors can do together. (The imitator characters were nowhere to be seen.)
• Cellular advertising wars in Indonesia in late 2000s and early 2010s were notoriously vicious:
  • Axis, a newer operator established in 2008, had an ad where a representative of Axis, XL, and Indosat's IM3 are in court. The XL woman and IM3 (fat) man (referring to both operator's spokespeople, Luna Maya and Saykoji respectively) tried to say that their representatives are the best, but they failed. Then when Axis man tried, he succeeded. This ended up being ironic in hindsight when XL Axiata purchased Axis in 2013.
  • Esia was notorious for not only picking fights against other CDMA operators (such as in this ad mocking Telkom's Flexi color scheme and "Bukan Telepon Biasa" (Not Just A Phone) slogan)◊, but also against GSM-based operators by actually offering a service that allows one to try discounted, simulated rates of GSM providers.^note This was controversial because the name Esia chose for the service turned out to be a prostitution-related slang. In return, the GSM-based XL not only copied the latter, but also offered rates marketed as being comparable to CDMA providers.
  • Telkomsel once placed an advertisement next to XL's billboard mocking their purportedly complicated tariffs and poor coverage.◊ In return, StarTech, an early dual-SIM phone manufacturer, placed an billboard◊ for them to stop fighting and take advantage of their dual-SIM functionality.
• NetZero's nearly perfect parody of an AOL commercial.
  • Speaking of NetZero, many of its commercials try to get you to switch by having you compare their per-monthly fees with whatever you're paying with your broadband connection, then saying that whatever it is, it's not going to be the "just $19.99 a month" (or what have you) that NetZero is. Completely disregarding that if you're paying for broadband you're paying for the technology that will allow you to connect to the Internet via DSL or fiber optic cable, while NetZero is a glorified dial-up internet service that could not be in any way even remotely as fast or reliable as DSL or fiber optic cable. They Fail Technology Forever, anyone?
  • Their commercials worked well when dial-up was the dominant service available, but trying to bash broadband because it's more expensive is like a horse salesman doing the same thing to cars; it's ballsy, but pretty stupid.
• Verizon and AT&T spent a good portion of the second half of 2009 taking shots at each other.
  • Verizon showed their greater 3G coverage area with the phrase "There's a map for that", a parody of the "app for that" phrase from the iPhone, of which AT&T was the only authorized carrier at the time. In response, AT&T sued them, then later dropped the suit. They rolled out a series of ads with Luke Wilson, citing their greater 3G speed and better overall coverage, as well as other features.
  • The Verizon Christmas ad placed the iPhone on the "Island of Misfit Toys" because of its limited 3G coverage. Their Valentine's Day ad worked along the same principle, as a parody of the jewelry commercials with the shadows. The guy gives his girl an AT&T phone (not specified as the iPhone this time) and she rejects it upon seeing the limited 3G coverage. With Verizon coming to iPhone, this is now Hilarious in Hindsight.
  • It's AT&T's network more than the iPhone itself that determines 3G coverage. While they don't blast the iPhone specifically, as of 2012 Verizon is again touting how much more 4G coverage it has than its competitors. Sprint's "why would you limit your iPhone?" ads (hyping their unlimited data plans) show that you can take iPhone-related shots at your competitors even when you all have the iPhone, even if the iPhone is the only brand directly mentioned in the ad other than your own.
  • Another Verizon commercial also pokes fun at The Twilight Saga with the Edward Cullen Captain Ersatz dumping the Bella Swan stand in because her phone (clearly an AT&T phone) has poor 3G coverage and running off only to find a bunch of girls with Verizon phones...and then a werewolf hits on "Bella".
• Virgin Mobile has released a series of ads featuring a very clear parody of the cheerful young woman from the T-Mobile commercials. She is mocked by the Virgin mascots and perpetually sports an unnatural smile.
• There's a Verizon commercial called A Better Network as Explained by Colorful Balls in which there are more red balls (Verizon) than any other balls. In response, Sprint and T-Mobile (both represented in the ad) released two ads attacking Verizon for being inaccurate. The T-Mobile ad (which ran during the Super Bowl) even had Steve Harvey making fun of his Miss Universe mistake.
• Indian mobile service provider Airtel has a series of ads featuring one young girl who brags about the very fast and very powerful 4G network, and often challenges random people to a test of network speed and connectivity. This ad's frequency across media, its overly bold claims and also frequent network connectivity issues with Airtel have annoyed so many Indians that the '4G girl', as she is called, has ended up becoming mocked and a subject of Take Thats time and again. Eventually, a new ad was released, where she is holidaying with her friends in the Northeastern part of India, where there may not be 4G coverage, while her friends keep mocking her for talking non-stop and how the public gets a break from her.

Toiletries and related

• Around 1990, Blistik ran print ads for its lip balm (lip salve to UK readers) that suggested you should use the smoother Blistik instead of a "Waxy Stick", which it suggested was as stiff and skin-unfriendly as a candle, down to showing one of them with a lit wick. Just coincidentally, the "Waxy Sticks" tube had graphics very similar to ChapStick, the leading lip balm.
• "To all who use our competitors' products: Happy Father's Day."◊ In a print ad for Durex condoms.
• Kotex mocks their competition.
  • This doubles as a Self-Deprecation in that all the clips in the first ad come from old Kotex ads.
    • And U By Kotex are direct replies to Kotex, and vice versa.
    • And Tampax got into it with print ads showing a cheerleader in mid-air flip with the caption "At a time like this, you don't want to be thinking about the fact that your tampon came from a little black box." Clearly, they didn't consider the fact that some women who wear tampons aren't athletes.
  • Back in the late 1960s, Meds, a competing tampon brand to Tampax that was on its last legs at the time, ran an ad promoting the benefits of their product being made of rayon and asking "Why are some tampons just chunks of cotton?"
• A commercial for a Nivea hair product ends with an Average Guy with good hair saying that it doesn't need to do anything fancy. What makes this a Take That is the earlier cuts in the ad, including a stereotypical geek whining about how the Nivea product won't increase their mating potential, like AXE and LYNX advertise in a decidedly tongue-in-cheek fashion.
• Speaking of AXE, they had their own Take That against The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, boasting that AXE is for men who would "rather be with a woman than on a horse."
• In a far cry from Indian TV advertising Take That norms that use a Bland-Name Product as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute for the competing product, this Pepsodent commercial slams Colgate's competing product head-on.
• Playtex has (ahem) always played Pepsi to Tampax's Coke.
  • This 15-second early '90s TV ad for Playtex—"They're not your mother's tampons!"—doesn't have to identify what brand those are. It's especially, um, ballsy in that it's for Playtex Ultimates, which used cardboard applicators, just like Tampax always had.
• Scotties has a bus stop ad series featuring a crying face captioned with two different hypothetical tragedies (for example, "Broken heart"/"Broken phone"). One particular ad that came out around the 2016 election had the double-barreled potshot "Hillary wins"/"Donald wins".

TV and related

• Cable and satellite TV companies launch so many Take Thats at each other that they get their own page.
• An ad for National Geographic's Border Wars had an obvious take that at A&E Network's Storage Wars. The ad begins with two men showing off in front of two storages with the narrator saying:
  Storage.. That's not a war. The border, now that's a real war.
• A 1998 Cartoon Network commercial has a take that at Nickelodeon's Rugrats. When the titular duo of Cow and Chicken talk to an executive about their show, he brings up the idea of a show called Carpet Bunnies. Chicken calls it a stupid idea.
• A spot for Dexter's Laboratory had a Cartoon Network-logo amoeba eating an orange blob that bore more than a passing resemblance to the Nickelodeon logo.
• After a pay dispute got AMC kicked off of Dish Network, AMC's promos for shows like Mad Men and Breaking Bad all now end in a voiceover reading some passive-aggressive onscreen text: "[Show] can be seen on cable or satellite. NOT Dish Network." AMC later went beyond passive aggressiveness and into straight up mudslinging, airing minute-long commercials that claim that Dish subscribers are "suffering" and should be pitied, all because AMC is not on the Dish lineup. One wonders who they're trying to convince, since Dish subscribers aren't seeing the ads, and everyone else is probably tired of hearing about it during every ad break.
• In the early days of Nicktoons, back when they were confined to a block on Sunday mornings, Nickelodeon ran promos that took aim at their main competition at the time, USA's Cartoon Express. One example included stock footage of a literal trainwreck.
• The commercial for the first Nonstop Nicktoons Weekend in 1993 took a shot at the then-new Cartoon Network. Granted, Cartoon Network's programming at the time was mainly old Hanna-Barbera, MGM and Warner Bros. cartoons.
• In the New York area, the local PBS affiliate has been running outdoor ads in which half appears to a promo for an upcoming Reality Show on a fake network, with titles like Knitting Wars, Bad Bad Bagboys or Married to a Mime, and even creating fake Twitter accounts for the "stars" of those "shows". The other half of the ad says "the fact that you thought this show was real tells you all you need to know about the current reality of television."
• Time Warner Cable's stab at Verizon's FiOS ads. A guy at home is greeted by a Verizon employee and makes lots of flashy special effects similar to Verizon's ads while the potential buyer keeps putting down the guy, explaining how cable is so much better. When the Verizon character tries to explain about fiber optics, the potential buyer shoots back by saying "I think I'm taking care of that department" and shows off his fiber based cereal.
  • Time Warner Cable has unleashed more ads bashing Verizon FiOS by proudly claiming they carry NY 1, which is a 24/7 news channel exclusive to New York residents, and that Verizon doesn't carry it. It is doubtful though that many people will quickly switch to cable just for that one channel. Later ads show a group of people in a post office asking an employee to send all their Verizon equipment back to Verizon, and then talking amongst themselves on why Verizon sucks and how cable is so much better.
    • Verizon has been steadily bashing Time Warner, by having Verizon being represented by a young and handsome looking man who is installing FiOS for people while he runs into an older, slightly heavier, and unshaven man trying to get people to switch to cable or trying to convince the Verizon guy that he is doing just fine with cable, but is not.
    • After a long time, Time Warner has resumed bashing Verizon. This time, they bring back the guy that mocks Verizon's FiOS guy and have the guy's mother tag along in order to get him to tell the truth about stuff like cancellation fees.
• The television station UPN created an anti-olympics chant for their promos aired during the 1998 Nagano Olympics. It was simply "No, No, Nagano!"
• The only instance of Toonami ever calling a competitor out by name is seen here: "Ever wonder who would win in a battle between Jake Long and Naruto? I'm betting Naruto, hands down." TOM also calls out "pretenders" (keep in mind this was while Avatar: The Last Airbender was starting to get popular).
• When DirecTV's contract with Viacom expired in 2012, they dropped 26 Viacom-owned channels. When they dropped those channels, Viacom decided to make a commercial warning their fans of the dropped channels. When they made that commercial, they made it a parody of DirecTV's "When You..." ads. When they parody those ads, this is the result.
  • When DirecTV dropped The Weather Channel in 2014, they made a parody of DirecTV's "When You..." commercials as well. "Aren't you glad you don't have DirecTV?"
• Shortly after coverage of the first game in the 2016 World Series, the local FOX affiliate in Cleveland aired a brief message stating "We’d like to take a moment to thank the Cleveland Indians for their historic run. We’re also thankful the TBS announcers aren’t calling the World Series.”^note  Indians fans felt that the announcers for TBS (who carried their games for the earlier rounds of the MLB postseason) were severely biased against their team, whose last World Series appearance before this came 19 years prior.

Vehicles

• Audi ran a commercial series in spring 09 about "Identity Theft". Specifically, people being unable to distinguish their car from dozens of identical mook cars, so to speak, compared to the "unmistakable" Audi. Which, by the way, would look like any other vehicle on the road if you were to pry off the logo.
  • They did it again with various people reciting what "they've been told" while looking at the "generic" cars. Two young executives were told that hollow status symbols (A pair of identical Mercedes) were the goal. A young boy was told to desire a red Italian sportscar. A soccer mom with a minivan was told beige and predictable fits her lifestyle. An older golfer was told that this was the way to retire (Lexus). A middle aged man with a red BMW and a trophy wife was told it captures his essence. Then they all look on in amazement as Audis whiz by. The trophy wife actually leaves her husband on the spot.
• Audi and BMW play The Santa Monica Gambit.◊
• Shortly after Lexus ran a series of ads for their "self-parking" system, Audi ran this ad with a driver displaying Improbable Parking Skills, with the tagline "The luxury car for people who can park themselves."
• An Indian example: This ad for Bajaj Discover shows two children pretending to ride their bikes. It's a screaming shot at the Hero Honda Splendor, for long a massively successful commuter bike, shown inferior to the Discover on multiple counts. And without the branding.
• One example that went horribly wrong is this ad for the Chevy Silverado pickup truck, where Howie Long mocks the competing Ford F-150 for having a "man step". Ford's truck marketing manager, Doug Scott, responds with a Take That! of his own:
  "I hope they keep running the spot because they're doing a great job advertising that feature for us. Thirty-two percent of the 2009 F-150s we've sold have that tailgate step. We're doing really well with it, and we're really happy they're running that ad because it's proven to be a popular feature."
  • Not helping matters is this ad for the Silverado where Mr. Long mocks the Dodge Ram for having a heated steering wheel. The Silverado's upscale badge-engineered cousin, the GMC Sierra Denali, can be ordered with- you guessed it- a heated steering wheel. GM's ad agency did no research at all.
  • They didn't even spare the Toyota Tundra. This commercial is a neat Take That at Toyota Tundra's advertisements, which have a deep, manly voice-over. It takes one simple question from Howie Long to raise the pitch of that voice.
    • This F-150 ad (pretty clearly in response to Chevy's) pretty much says it all about the "man step". It's not for wusses and dorks, it's for people who routinely and repeatedly use the bed in their truck. Y'know, the whole reason to own a pickup.
• After PETA complained about Dodge's Evel Knievel chimpanzee TV commercial, Dodge remade it with...an invisible monkey.
• When Ford unveiled their all electric pick up truck, Ford F-150 Lightning, they said that it was "designed to look like a truck". A clear gab at Tesla’s Cybertruck, which many have decried as not looking like a truck.
• This commercial for the Hyundai Genesis luxury sedan is one giant Take That! directed at Lexus and various German automakers. The ad aired during the Super Bowl, a month or so after the Genesis became the first Korean car to win the prestigious North American Car of the Year award. The ad is also a subtle Take That! at Detroit as no American managers are shown at all, thereby implying Cadillac and Lincoln- the American luxury brands from GM and Ford, respectively- are not competitive with the Genesis. At the time, they really weren't (and arguably still so).
• When the Mahindra Scorpio was launched in India, it was positioned as an alternative to regular cars, stating its height as an advantage, so that the occupants don't have to bend down to enter the car. An early ad said that "cars will now suffer from low self esteem", mocking both the low-slung cars sold in India, as also India's most popular sedan, the Maruti Esteem- which also has a low roof.
• One campaign of Mazda commercials had four men in white lab scientist jackets with the names of other car companies on the back contemplating to themselves why Mazda is so much better than them. One interjects that, perhaps, it's because of that "Zoom, zoom, zoom" thing.
• This ad for the Nissan Leaf electric vehicle shows what the world would be like if everything ran on gas. The Take That! comes at the end, with a gas/electric plug-in hybrid Chevrolet Volt clearly visible in the gas station.
  • Needless to say, General Motors was not amused at the potshot at the Volt. Here's the official response from GM's PR guy.
  "A carmaker poking gentle fun at our product ignores tow trucks they need and rental cars they recommend as backup to their product."
  • VW's response to GM's comeback.
    • And now the ad's in Insult Backfire territory, thanks to this.
• One of the more infamous Take Thats in the car-ad field was run by New York-city area Pontiac dealers in 1990. To visuals of a Pontiac going down a road, a gruff male voice said: "Imagine. It's a few years from now, and you're taking the whole family down to see the big Christmas tree at Hirohito Center. Go ahead; keep buying Japanese cars." It was a clear reference to Mitsubishi Estate's recent purchase of Rockefeller Center. After a couple of weeks of opprobrium from Japanese American groups and other commentators, it was withdrawn.
• Subaru. Snuggies. A crowbar. Brilliant.
  • Poor, poor Lap 'n' Snack. It got the axe.
• In 2011, Subaru ran a fake ad campaign showcasing the "Mediocrity", a So Okay, It's Average sedan that was a shot at the mid-size sedan market in general.
• VW once released three ads that mocked the Pimp My Ride stereotype, named Vee Dub, or alternatively "Unpimp ze auto". They feature Swedish actor Peter Stormare as a German Engineer, who 'unpimps' heavily customised cars- a Ford Focus, a Honda Civic and a Mitsubishi Eclipse- by obliterating them totally and replacing them with stock VW Golf cars. The commercials can be viewed here.
• The launch slogan for the Peugeot 407 was "Playtime is over". At the same time, the Renault Laguna, one of the 407's competitors, had "Serious Playtime" as its slogan.
• Ford mocked the Cadillac ELR Poolside ad by featuring a woman who promoted urban farming and extolled the virtues of working hard for progress, not material gain. Cadillac's ad was criticized for being elitist.
• A supposedly "Chinese" motorcycle maker, Beijing Motorcycle, made this ad which shows a kung-fu practitioner doing some martial art moves, complete with an announcer pitching the motorcycle advertised. At the end, the kung-fu fighter had a fight with a ninja and won, a jab at Japanese motorcycle manufacturers.

Miscellaneous

• An ad for Park mocks adverts that have little to do with their subject matter - Cadbury's drumming gorilla, for instance. A bunch of CGI advertising executives suggest an advert in which "a giant reindeer plays the drums!" only for Park's mascot (a fairy) to zip the speaker's mouth shut while some woman explains that people join Park for a cheaper Christmas, not gimmicks. All very well, but when the zip-mouthed guy tries to respond, the fairy makes his mouth fall right off his face. The other executives smile and cheer nervously for the camera...
  • They showed a similar advert, but with a few changes. The execs' proposals have changed (makes sense, it's no longer Christmas), but also Mr. Zip-mouth no longer gets his mouth zipped, and in fact is the most vocal in supporting Mrs. Some Woman's explanation.
• Aspen and Vail have a longtime, generally friendly rivalry as the Coke and Pepsi of Colorado ski resorts. Usually their ads don't take digs at each other, but sometimes they do. In the early 1980s, in response to one Vail campaign under the slogan "There's No Comparison," which might or might not have been meant as a shot down to the Roaring Fork Valley, Aspen responded with "There's Only One", a clearer jab at Vail.
• Blockbuster got in on the "Netflix bashing" trend by bragging about how you can use their online rentals to get movies 30 days before Netflix and Redbox. And about how you can return your rentals to one of their stores and pick up another, this is during the time they were closing hundreds of stores by the way.
• The original Energizer Bunny commercial started as a take that to the Duracell Bunny commercials after Duracell failed to renew its U.S. trademark. In this commercial, it is implied that Duracell always compared itself to carbon-zinc batteries and not similar alkaline batteries like Energizer, indicated by the Energizer Bunny showing up as an uninvited guest.
  • In Energizer commercials, the "Supervolt" battery is seen as their Brand X parody of Duracell, including being black (and in the "Chess" commercial, red, like the Duracell Quantum battery).
  • In Duracell's "Puttermans" commercials, the "other" battery was usually depicted as being silver with black stripes, like Energizer.
  • In a Canadian Duracell commercial parodying The Tortoise and the Hare, after outlasting the other Tortoises, the Duracell Tortoise passed by a sleeping familiar-looking pink hare.
  • Energizer loved to take the piss out of Duracell even beyond the Supervolt commercials, with a couple of TV ads calling them out on some of their claims using a battery featuing the trademark Black and Copper pattern.
  • One of the old Jacko commercials opens with him knocking over giant batteries with the designs of both Duracell and Kodak's batteries. An alternate version aired in Australia just has Duracells (and are even labeled as such).
  • Their foreign mascot, Mr. NRG would also get into the swing of things by beating Duracell's bunny in a race.
  • A trio of ads released in the late 90s would also include Rayovac and Panasonic in their competitor bashing.
• On Duracell's end of things, potshots were usually avoided. But ignoring the above attempts, they would take some direct hits toward both Kodak and Energizer at different points in time.
• Gibson's old slogan, once upon a time, was "Only the Best." Epiphone responded with the slogan, "When the Best isn't enough."
• On a similar tack, there was an Esurance commercial narrated by John Krasinski that stated that Esurance didn't need a mascot to sell insurance. Definitely a Take That! to rivals Geico (the gecko), Progressive (Flo), and Aflac (the duck); but also one for themselves — up until a few years ago, they had a popular mascot of their own named Erin Esurance that they're hoping you'll forget.
  • Another campaign notes the ridiculous of customers getting a quote within 15 minutes from a certain unnamed competitor when they could get one within just 7 1/2 minutes from Esurance.
• "I'm Mayhem, and if you've got 15-minute auto insurance^*Geico/you're naming your price on car insurance^*Progressive's "Name Your Price" plan, you could be paying for this yourself - So get Allstate."
• A commercial for Huggies Little Movers diapers features a take that to Pampers' Swaddlers line of diapers. The commercial depicts a baby lying on its back, wrapped in a blanket like a cocoon, while the other babies are out crawling and having fun as the announcer says, "Some diapers are designed to swaddle your baby, while others are designed to give your baby all the freedom to move."
• A TV spot for "The Jungle," a children's playlace in San Jose, California, asked a rhetorical question: "Where would you rather play? At home, or at the Jungle?" The "at home" scene depicted a monochrome shot of a couple kids playing on a Nintendo 64, looking bored, with the caption "Bo-o-ring!" in the upper left corner.
  • There has been quite a few "public service announcement" that take jabs at iPods, Video Games, computers, and T.V in general, showing the kids using said brands are bored and dull, but then step outside with colorful cartoon characters and famous athletes and look like they're having the time of their lives.
• An advertisement for a "Love Checker" app for cell phones often changes the names of the two fake people, but they always have "3%" chance of success. One of the name pairs for that commercial? "Selena" and "Justin".
• A Mr. Muscle commercial has the slogan of being "cheaper than a plumber". However, this seems to be an unbelievably dumb attempt, as a bottle of kitchen cleaner is bound to be cheaper than a guy who comes to your house and rearranges your piping (as if we didn't know).
• No Nonsense once promoted their hosiery with the slogan "Great pantyhose are made, not hatched," a clear Take That to competitor L'eggs.
• Rayovac were vicious in their battery commercials. Some of their commercials featured scary-looking electronic devices literally eating Duracells and Energizers, until they were stopped by Michael Jordan. Other commercials featured them electrocuting people for saying Duracell gives you better value for your money.
• Though not pointed at any specific competitor, handgun manufacturer STI had a Take That! in one print ad: "We've upped our standards, now up yours."
• There was a Universal Studios ad where a girl says "If I have to hug another princess, I think I'm gonna hurl."
• The British climate change group "10:10" has a very violent Take That directed against global warming skeptics. Viewer discretion advised.
• Due to the general decline of the medium, newspaper ad wars in the U.S. are nowhere near this vicious anymore. Nevertheless, in the New York area, where three daily papers survive, there have been some in the past:
  • The New York Post once ran a radio ad promising prospective readers they'd be "ahead of the times and on top of the news", phrases not coincidentally incorporating the names of their two competitors.
  • In a mid-80s TV ad, one of the two tabloids (can't remember which) ran a TV ad in which voices singing "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" were complemented by the words on screen and a bouncing football on whatever one they were singing. Only by the second line the voices were starting to lose their rhythm and go off-key, leaving the bouncing football unsure of where to go. The (ahem) kicker? The words were in the same Old English font that The New York Times uses for the name of the paper. It was a clear Take That to the Times' sports coverage, which up to that time was notoriously the weakest section of the paper (since then it's been greatly improved).
• Newspaper wars in India are quite vicious, with brands calling out the competitors aggressively.
  • An ad for the recently-launched Pune edition of Times of India, which sold one million copies- "Thank you Pune. There's nothing left to EXPRESS"- attacking the long-running daily Indian Express. Not taking it lightly, Indian Express shot back with an ad depicting a bathroom roll of paper with the Times of India masthead, and that part torn, saying "Not everyone of the one million buy the Times of India to read it".
  • Lately, a very aggressive war between the Times of India and the Hindu has started, since the Times of India launched its Chennai edition. The Times of India ad showed Chennai as a very sleepy place, with sleepy people, including one with a copy of the Hindu in his pocket, in a "Wake Up Chennai" ad. The Hindu shot back with a whole lot of young people, college-goers and professionals, with poor general knowledge, who know everything about celebrities' personal lives- and read the Times of India. They even ran a print ad saying "Because Government malfunctions matter more than wardrobe malfunctions", still poking fun at TOI's tabloid style of reporting and editing. Funnily enough, that was a full-page front-page ad on the Times of India itself, but they still kept poking, congratulating the competitor for waking up to the competition.
• A sign above an auto insurance company that read, "No lizards. No cavemen. Just great service."
• Somewhere, a small-town gym chain ran a radio ad bragging about its unpretentiousness. It ended with the narrator saying "So, if you think you're made of gold or from another planet, you may not like it here." Hmm ... who could they be thinking about?
• When the Planet Fitness gym chain was promoting itself as a safe space for people who were not much into body-building, professional weight lifter, Steve Pulcinella, made this ad in response to promote his owned Iron Sport Gym; in which Steve gives a tour of the facilities to a skinny guy, who gets progressively scared by the extreme strength workouts and ends up being thrown out by Steve.
  Guy: What planet am I on?
  Steve: The wrong one!
• During the 2012-13 NHL lockout, Canadian sports channel TSN aired sports-related movies to fill schedule holes created by the lack of hockey. As a subtle Take That, the ads for said movies used a modified version of the graphics normally used by TSN's NHL coverage—which mainly consists of a stylized hockey arena—but with the lights dimmed.
• Two airlines in India had a billboard war in 2007. Jet Airways first put up a billboard advertising their new branding, saying "We've changed". Kingfisher Airlines replied by putting a banner right above Jet's, saying "We've made them change". Jet Airways responded by changing their banner below, saying "Take off to New York daily", advertising their newly-announced flights to New York. In response, Kingfisher said "They've flown from here to New York" in their banner. Hilarious in Hindsight when you find that most of Kingfisher Airlines' business model was full of Take Thats at the competition and ultimately went deep into debt and ceased operations.
• Even The Transformers took part in ripping into their competitors (mainly The GoBots) by devoting an entire commercial to it. With Megatron, Optimus Prime and the announcer outright proclaiming that only they deserve the right to be called Transformers.
• A commercial for the Mike Slocumb Law Firm features a woman from "Depressive Insurance" named "Slo." Gee, I wonder who they are referring?
• When an infamous incident at a Chicago airport about a passenger being forcibly taken out in a United Airlines plane occurred, and when Oscar Munoz, United CEO, commented that "those [Gulf] airlines aren't airlines", Emirates, one of the flag carriers of the United Arab Emirates, made this ad in response and even quoted the CEO's own exact words and proclaiming they are a "real airline".
• Car donation charity 1-800-Charity Cars led off one ad with a sound-alike of the infamous jingle by rival charity Kars-4-Kids, before everyone in the ad expresses disgust at having to hear another jingle like that and they go on to promote their own charity. Unfortunately, several ads refused to air the commercial in favor of the original Kars-4-Kids ad, though the company stands by their right to air the ad.
• This poster for Child's Play (2019) implies that Chucky has killed Woody, a reference to how Child's Play shares a release date with Toy Story 4. A few variations on this concept featured Chucky murdering Slinky, Buzz Lightyear, Mr. Potato Head, Rex, and Hamm. They'd also take a swing (literally) at Annabelle when Annabelle Comes Home was released.
• The teaser trailer for Birds of Prey (2020) has a bunch of red balloons (as seen in It (2017)) fill the screen, before Harley smashes them with her mallet, declaring, "I'm so fuckin' over clowns." This teaser came out during the hype for not just the sequel to the aforementioned It (and was released to play before screenings of said sequel), but for Joker (2019), which was made by the same studio about the character Harley is clearly referencing.
• Canadian advertising agency Zulu Alpha Kilo has a tendency to make fun of the advertising industry as whole. "Awards Gone Wild" and "Left-Handed Mango Chutney", in particular, satirize how obsessed the industry is with winning awards (to the point of grossly exaggerating how impactful a product was or outright making things up) and how agencies should focus more on winning over customers instead of impressing awards judges.
• The late Billy Mays made an updated commercial for the Zorbeez absorbant towel where, at one point, he brags about the Zorbeez's washability, then taunts, "Did ya get that, camera guy?" — a jab at Vince Offer's ShamWow commercial where he famously interjects "You followin' me, camera guy?" Mays saw Offer as The Rival and also disliked him, claiming that Offer ripped off some of his pitches.

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