Sold?: The Highest Five Ever? Halifax Fail…

What with Jools and her (poo?) stained toast and the (mentally ill?) people sporadically high fiving at random intervals, you would be forgiven for believing that the message of this Halifax ad is that if you work for – or are the customer of – Halifax…you are, most probably, a t*at.

Subsequently, this advert is about as annoying as they come. We begin with some chubby ‘Halifax Breakfast News DJ’ getting pissy with Jools (his co-DJ) for saying ‘Hi’ to all the listeners. (Bit of an over the top reaction, surely?) Old know-it-all reckons Jools should say ‘high five’ to them instead. Right… Then old grumps whacks on some Spandau Ballet and we see various lunatics around the country – or are they Halifax customers? – high fiving whilst kneading bread/waiting at the bus stop.

Sure enough, it doesn’t take long for some joker in the Halifax office to call up the Halifax radio station, pretending he’s an excited listener and claiming that he is going to carry out “the highest five ever” in a dodgy (Russian?) accent. Obviously there are a number of questions which need to be raised following this occurrence. Firstly, has this bloke not learnt from the ITV phone scandal? Surely putting a bin over your head and blatantly lying to customers about being a genuine caller (and then broadcasting it) is just gonna piss people off? Secondly, what the hell is the “highest five ever” anyway? Surely all fives are of equal value….that being, um, five?

After these antics, the original bossy boots retrieves the handy, fake arm he keeps by his desk and high fives Jools. Jools, sensibly, decides to use her real hand. After his earlier, narky behaviour, I reckon she should tell him where to stick it.

Sold?: Milking It

Nothing sells a product like a fluffy wuffy poop-machine. Just ask the ad-men who thought up the Andrex puppy. Or the Dulux dog. Or that singing mutt cruising in the Volkswagon Polo.

As a nation of animal lovers we’re much more likely to put our hands in our pockets for something if it’s appeared on the telly with a less-intelligent life-form (though take note Iceland – Kerry Katona doesn’t count).

Dress the poor creature up in human clothes, give it a voice and you’re on to a winner. I’ve watched the entire series of Life but old Attenborough never revealed that horses talk with a posh accent (thanks Weetabix), labradors love loo-roll and sound like Rik Mayall (Andrex) while meerkats originate from Russia (Comparethemarket.com).

Now two new adverts celebrate the wares of a far from cuddly creature – the cow – but we’re still left in the lurch about what they talk like. Which is important to know, should you ever have to sit next to one on the bus.

In a bid to cut labour costs Anchor butter has employed the bovines themselves not only to provide the milk but churn it into butter, quality assess it and package it up for delivery. Bloody cows, coming over here and stealing our jobs. At least they’ve got good taste in music, selecting a dixie-style cover of Guns N Roses’ Paradise City.

Not all cows have it so hard though. Muller says “thankyou” to its cattle by making their fantasies come true. Apparently Mary has always harboured dreams of being a horse. Even Jimmy Saville couldn’t fix that one but Muller do the best thing and stick Mary on a beach and film her walking quickly – bet she’s well chuffed.

Two great ads but we’re still none the wiser about bovine speech. They’re love of stadium rock and black and white attire would suggest a Gene Simmons like drawl but then their dreams of fame and vacant eyes could mean a Susan Boyle-like Scottish twang.

Either way, try and find another seat on the bus, unless the only other free is next to Kerry Katona.

Sold? Cravendale Ads Are Udder Genius

A cow, a cyclist and a pirate walk into a time machine…

Sounds like the start of a joke but actually it’s the premise for the new Cravendale milk advert. Thanks to the past couple of Cravendale adverts we went on a milk buying frenzy and now we’ve got bones like Wolverine. Try and knock us down, just try!

Made with plastic toys and plasticine, we cannot get enough of these ads, and so to celebrate that fact, we thought we’d share the new ad with you.

You’re welcome.

It seems that we’re not the only the only ones are sold on Cravendale from these ads; according to CampaignLive, since the ads were introduced in 2007, the brand has reportedly grown by £40 million.

After this little gems gets popular, we expect the time machine market to make twice that.

Plus, we found that people love the style of animation so much, there’s an entire film that’s been made just like it. A Town Called Panic is available on DVD now. It’s kind of like Robot Chicken but with worse animation which somehow makes it awesome.

Anyway, we’re definitely sold on Cravendale milk and all it took was painstaking stop-motion animation to convince us.

Sold? Low Low Cheese’s Extreme Mouse Trap

Food and mice? Gasp.

Fallon has launched its first campaign for the Kerry Foods-owned cheese brand Low Low. The commercial features a squealing white rodent boldly bypassing a minefield of traps. Like a little furry Indiana Jones, the mouse spirals through the air in matrix fashion, all for the plate of advertised cheese-on-toast.

This is not a live animal we are talking about. Thanks to CGI, the pest is as precious as Mickey Mouse, except that he does not speak or sing and dance. The little guy merely squeaks. And that is all it takes for us to become enraptured by his quest.

As for what he is after–”the ultimate cheese,” we forget the product the moment our dear protagonist leaps into the picture. The voice-over for “cheese made from semi-skinned milk with a third less fat than cheddar” is muted by a sensational rodent. But just because I secretly wanted the little guy to get snapped by a trap in the end does not mean I did not thoroughly enjoy Fallon’s action-packed advert.


Danielle Jacoby

Sold?: Emmerdale – False Advertising On The Farm

In a list of ironic TV names, Charity Dingle would have to rank very close to the top.

This woman has spent more time gold-digging than Heather Mills, and would struggle to tell the difference between a copy of the Big Issue and the Emmerdale Examiner.

She isn’t the most unsuitably named person on television though, that honour has to go to her sister – Chastity.

But that’s quite enough of the Dingle family’s penchant for ridiculous titles. Read More…

Sold?: Incoming Message From The Big Cadbury Head

We like our chocolate to come with a lesson, so we were delighted to see the new Cadbury ad that taught us that chocolate is good, but paying Ghanaian farmers low wages is bad.

If you were paying attention to the ad breaks in last week’s X Factor then you will have seen it and there’s not a gorilla or a wobbly eyebrow in sight and especially no trucks running riot in an airport car park.

Here’s the breakdown: somewhere in Ghana, a giant head with cocoa beans on top floats around getting the locals excited. Incidentally, the head totally reminds us of the Uka Uka mask from the Crash Bandicoot games. Anyone?

One bean from the floating head flies off and explodes into fireworks from which comes Ghanaian singing sensation Tinny with the hit song Zingolo.

Everybody dances around for a bit and then an ultra happy guy smiles at the end.

Yes we know; it’s not as fun or as kooky as Cadbury’s previous ads because this one actually has a point. Cadbury are celebrating their suppliers in Ghana and promoting Fair Trade chocolate. Even if the ad doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense, we give props to Cadbury for giving it a go.

But it’s got some fun moments in there too: dancers wriggling across the floor and doing break dancing 48 seconds in is pretty impressive.

It’s also something that the OTB team were convinced that they could also do after a few too many. Two sprained ankles and several bumped heads later, we realised we better leave it to Ghanaian guys in the ad.

Kudos to Cadbury for supporting their workers. Cadbury, we salute you.

Emily Moulder

Sold?: Mystery Surrounds Lesbian IKEA Yogurt Incident

At OTB we are usually the last people to complain about two hot ladies engaging in some yogurt scoffing with the possibility of future lesbianism, but we felt we had to raise some questions after seeing this advert.

The most pertinent of them being: What the hell does it mean?

My first assumption was that the Nordic decor giant had at last given up making mountains of cash from worthless MDF and switched their resources to the production of soft-porn.

Unfortunately and as per normal, I was mistaken. Maybe the rest of you in viewer-town have worked it out, if so forgive us for being slower than the delivery of a Swedish three piece suite, but we are unaccustomed to adverts that encourage us to think – after all that’s what the History Channel is for.

Does this mean that all women who like IKEA will eventually resort to a life of dairy-fuelled lady love?

Is it designed with the aim of encouraging men to fill their apartments with funky yet affordable furniture in a desperate bid to score a steamy threesome?

Did they see Fight Club? Surely they realise that any male who over-indulges in yin-yang coffee tables will eventually create an alternate personality to blow it all up.

After much deliberation, our best guess was that this teaser is suggesting the blonde woman has decided to completely deck an apartment (which the poor bloke probably mostly paid for) in cut-price IKEA paraphernalia, and will soon be showing him – and his Lara Croft posters – the door.

Regardless, if this man doesn’t do something, quickly his woman will be munching carpet rather than yogurt – and it won’t be one designed by IKEA.


Sean Marland

Sold?: Go Complaints

What happened to adverts being about the actual product they’re trying to sell? Whatever happened to the Ronseal way of thinking? We recently found that movie titles had also gone the same way and we’re sick of it.

Take a look and see how much this advert doesn’t have to do with car insurance.

Two coffee sipping blokes awkwardly lean on a coffee table in one of those coffee shops that are too hip for their own good. You know the ones, you check your reflection in their shiny windows before skulking off to Starbucks.

They try and act like they were just finishing off a conversation about car insurance by saying the barely convincing line of, ‘Car insurance, eh?’

‘What can you do?’ asks the cardigan clad coffee drinker. Indeed, what can you do?

And in place of a cute little Eastern European meerkat to telling us what to do, Go Compare opted for an opera singer who ruins the morning of everyone sitting there. He incites everyone to stop what they’re doing and to sing with him while he twiddles his glued on moustache.

Fatty McDancer struts around the shop while our confused insurance-less men stand around looking like bemused monkeys. We do give the tubby tenor kudos for getting the word spondulicks into the lyrics though.

Then with one final mighty bellow the singer shakes the monkeys’ table prompting them to ponder how much it cost Go Compare to hire the singer.

Probably more than they’re going to make from this advert.

Our clever monkeys conclude that the singer’s only a tenor and they infer that he only cost a tenner. Oh the hilarity. Honestly, our sides…


Emily Moulder

Sold?: Touch Of Grey Is Not The New Black

What should you do when a batch of faulty produce comes off the production line? Flog it anyway – a person may be clever, but everyone knows that people are stupid.

And believe us folks, there can be no stupider group people than those desperately clinging to their youth with all the strength their arthritis-addled fingers can muster. Just look at what happened to Michael Jackson…

When Just For Men realised that someone had cooked up a faulty mix of their secret recipe, they feverishly began thinking of ways to market this mishap.

After offering it to Tim Westwood as make-up, the marketing department decided to move in a far less imaginative direction.

And this is what they came up with. Ironically, it’s almost enough to turn any advertising exec’s hair grey.

For many years Just For Men have mercilessly harvested the grey pound, turning respectable middle-aged blokes into idiots who quite obviously dye their hair, but they may have hit a new low with this advert.

After their profits took a pounding earlier this year when Tom Jones finally accepted his greyness, the JFM bosses could be forgiven for a shot in the dark, but this tactic will surely be unable to fill that chasm-like shortfall.

I just felt sorry for the poor bloke on the left who started the ad with brown hair and ended up looking like he had aged 20 years and been attacked with a felt-tip.


Sean Marland

Check out OTB’s other favourite commercial aberrations..

Sold?: Sex And The City Finally Condemned To The Toilet

As a man who has been forced to sit through more than his fair share of Sex and the City, I was truly astounded when I saw this advert.

Not since Steve McClaren’s tenure as England manager has the nation seen something that was already exceptionally terrible, be so tangibly ruined further.

The creators obviously believed that an idea as mental as this one couldn’t possibly fail. Unfortunately, only the Die Hard universe operates that way, and this piece of s**t just leaves us well and truly jaw-dropped.

Woman A enters and immediately gives a thorough account of her painful visit to the toilet, luckily woman B has got some tablets in her bag which will solve the problem. In a pathetic attempt to add humour to this horrendous conversation, woman C informs us that she has just split up with her boyfriend.

Frankly, I can’t imagine he was that heart-broken.

So then girls, which of these morons do you identify with? The one who constantly chats about poo, the one who likes to give out advice on poo, or the one who can’t maintain a relationship?

For the first time in the history of casting four people were probably fighting over the one non-speaking role, sadly three of them lost and their fledgling careers will be forever soiled.

Of course this dialogue all takes place to the tune of a chronic version of the SATC jingle.

Meanwhile across town, as an advertising manager calls his team in for a very urgent meeting, he silently curses the fact that a revolver can only be fired six times before it needs to be reloaded…


Sean Marland

For more advertising genius dealing with bodily functions, check out our assault on the Glade child who loves Paul’s toilet. Go to our regular Sold? column for a steady stream of advert pokery.

Next Page »