Monday, March 15, 2010

Ads on my TV

Nescafe Ad
A bootleg Indiana Jones seeks out what appears to be the distilled spiritual essence of coffee, in the heart of a generic South American jungle. Securing it within his sacred Nescafe jar, he proceeds to a vast cavern full of identical such jars, adding it to the collection. Unfortunately from a distance, the jars look more than a little like they're filled to bursting with luminous yellow weewee. My theory: This man is actually a tramp in the final stages of a fatal alcoholic delirium, fancying himself an intrepid adventurer when all he's doing is wandering out into the local woods, filling discarded coffee jars with his own foetid urine, then hoarding his noisome treasure in the damp cave he calls his home. Here he will surely expire in the near future, to be found in some months' time like a Celtic king entombed with all his worldly posessions. But y'know, with piss.


Lynx Ad
Lynx adverts are infantile and retarded at the best of times, and they need to be; their target demographic consists of priapismic 14 year olds with unrealistic ideas about women. But this latest campaign is just face-palmingly awful.
"Women bore easily", sez the slogan, a very laddish proclamation that doesn't really jive with the hero of the piece's appearance. He's a hipster blowjob in skinny jeans and faux spectacles, and sporting the kind of physique that makes David Bowie look like Conan the Barbarian. Yeah he's a real MAN alright, which is why has hidden robot helpers to frantically change his hairstyle and clothing in order to completely emascualate himself by desperately pandering to the rapidly shifting tastes of his supernaturally fickle date. All this in downright psychopathic and single-minded pursuit of eleven seconds of frantic thrusting followed by two hours of meek apology.

Clearly they're angling for a bit of manufactured controversy here as well, and with such an excruciatingly insulting tag line, they'll probably get it, as they reason that any publicity is good publicity, even if it's people decrying it as offensive. Hell, I'm writing about it and I'm a hugely popular Internet journalist with a circulation of well over two people including my mum and the ghost of my deceased cat. So I guess their clever plan worked, but I'll say this; Lynx smells of failure, and no amount of magic robot arms will distract your prospective bedmate from the fact that you could only afford £2.99 to deaden her nose to the odour of your armpits and ballsack.

Thrush Cream Ad
I didn't catch the product name for this one. It's always fun to watch advertisers try to dance around the gory reality of the female menstrual cycle (which was invented by Tom Savini), and indeed any similar product that in the course of its duties comes into contact with our various manky crevices, be they tampons, french letters or good old bog paper.
This particular advert is a self-consciously low-fi cartoon, euphemistic to a fault, and of course great pains are taken to avoid directly mentioning the fact that it's a cream you daub on your lady-junk, because that would be an admission of the existence of the whole unsavoury process. This would never do, because it seems we're still very prudish about some things.

I for one think this is a sorry state of affairs, the human body is a beautiful thing, and should be richly celebrated. I wait for the day when our dinnertime TV ad breaks are awash with horrifyingly detailed depictions of blood-spluttering minge and fist-sized chunks of beige-brown effluence being wiped out of diahorreah-addled hairy arse cracks, like an obscene harvest reaped by a power shovel from the tortured bowels of lower Hell. All in HD.

Actually on second thoughts...