Latest updates to the collection. I'm sure there will be many, many more to come:

Rexona Anti-perspirant Deodorant, Version 2!:
Richard Tahui, All Black: "Peak performance all comes down to the right preparation. That's why I use Rexona Men."

Scotch Brite:
"Don't you hate what cleaning does to your nails? That's why we've invented the Ultra Nail Saver Scrub Sponge."

Cancer Foundation:
Paul Holmes: "Over 600 men a year die from Prostate Cancer. That's why Mitre 10 is facing up to Prostate Cancer."

Rexona Anti-perspirant Deodorant:
Richard Tahui, All Black: "The only white line I want to see on my jersey is the one left by the try line. That's why I use Rexona."

Shoe Clinic:
"I love running, but I hate running injuries. That's why I go to Shoe Clinic."


Stupid ads.

Posted 5/10/09

Here we have a classic case of what we doctors call "Compositional Delusion". This occurs when an advertising Jimmy commits to paper a few words, some of which rhyme, and declares he has written a song.

To my ear this sounds like a Murray Grindlay jingle (correct me if I'm wrong, Bruce). I can only imagine the ghastly disbelief evident on the Master's face when the advertising Jimmy presented him with these lyrics:

"We didn't get the way we were by doing things half-baked"

Half-baked? Errrm, OK, maybe we're all good Kiwi jokers. Maybe this is going to be a version of the "We're Just a Little Country" syndrome (see below).

"We worked really hard and watched the things we ate"

"Really" must really be the laziest adjective. It's really, really lazy. And if we watched the things we ate we can't really be good Kiwi jokers, can we? Not really.

"And what made us grow like a runaway tram"

A runaway tram? Growing like a runaway tram? Wouldn't a runaway tram just kinda careen out of control down the street and then crash in a burning heap, spewing dead bodies onto the pavement? It wouldn't... grow, would it? And what the hell is a tram anyway, in 2009 New Zealand? Or, as Suzanne Lynch sings, a "tray-a-yam"?

"It was New Zealand beef and lamb"

Oh. Rightie-ho. But I still have a vision of animal carcases belting down College Hill in a tram.

"You can slice it you can dice it you can put it in a pay-a-yan"

You can stick it in a bottle you can hold it in your hand.

"It was New Zealand beef and lamb"

Stupid ad.

Posted 11/09/09

I've been meaning to start this collection for years. I'm sure there will be many, many more to come:

Rexona Anti-perspirant Deodorant:
Richard Tahui, All Black: "The only white line I want to see on my jersey is the try line. That's why I use Rexona."

Shoe Clinic:
"I love running, but I hate running injuries. That's why I go to Shoe Clinic."


Stupid ads.

Posted 11/09/09

God forbid that the irksome and - yes - boring Richard Hammond ads for Telecom's XT network should develop into a series, but I fear they will.

The stupidness of the introductory ad was so apparent that even my young daughter noticed, and drew it to my attention. How did this idea ever get past the first brainstorming session?

Mr Hammond is dressed in what looks like a set of overalls such as the worryingly hip Zambezi might design. You know, from the "Air New Zeaand" range: all zap! pow! They look great on the catwalk but are uncomfortable and fall to pieces as soon as you try to do some work in them.

"I've test driven boats," boasts Mr H. "I've test driven planes. I've test driven cars." Now, apparently Mr H is in New Zealand to test drive... errmm... telephones. Sorry, what was that? Did you say TELEPHONES? Yes, telephones, in all their danger.

In the second ad Mr H - good god how many zips does one need in one's overalls? - sets about torture-testing the phone. Stunt-person Zoe Bell throws caution to the wind and risks life and limb by driving through the Mount Victoria Tunnel, all 623 metres of it. Hallelujah! The phone works!

Onto a farm bike out Whitford way. Could it be the phone won't function in that bleak environment of demonic, mutant sheep and evil, genetically processed market gardens? Praise be, it's OK!

Then Zoe - hold on to your hats! - heads over the Auckland Harbour Bridge on the back of a motor bike! And stap me but the phone still works! Phew! Turn your pacemaker down, Grandad! This is just too much!

But this is not enough for the fiendishly demanding Mr H. No, he tells us - or I assume it's us he's telling as he has the disconcerting manner of not looking at the camera but at some distant object, perhaps a cue card - no, he says, this is all "a bit too easy".

Crikey! Ming the Merciless has nothing on this guy!

So poor Zoe is strapped inside a shipping container and dropped from a helicopter "somewhere off the coast of Auckland". I have a suspicion that this is a hundred yards from the Ferry Terminal, but let's not spoil things.

After the big splash we see brave Zoe sitting atop the container phoning a water-taxi company, which is how far away exactly? A hundred yards? And I want to know how she got out of the container. Surely, opening the doors would have caused a great inrush of seawater and the thing would have sunk within seconds.

Of course it's all beautifully shot with that steel-blue filter that filmos love when they want to say "risky, tense, dangerous, dark and murderous", and there's the chugga-chugga synthy Soundtrack of Impending Doom (preset 45B on the ol' Korg).

Apart from the fact that all this supposed excitement just isn't at all exciting, the biggest problem with the ad is that when you've seen it once you never want to see it again . We know the outcome - the heroine wins the day - and the build-up story is so damn lame that it's not even interesting enough to watch for its own sake.

Stupid ads.

Posted 03/06/09

It's always fun when a company decides to re-run a classic ad from the past. It's all fuzzy and familiar. Vaseline-on-the-lens '70s romance; bright, white '80s cutting-edge light. The one I'd love to see is the old "Hugo said you go". Alas, since Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC for health reasons this will never happen.

"Tux keeps him full o' life" was an archetypal Murray Grindlay jingle, all sawing fiddles and oom-pah bass, with Murray's distinctive - if occasionally twee - vocals over the top. It was - and still is - insanely catchy and earworm-inducing.

But what's happened to it? It's all... out of phase... or something. Like it's about to go into the middle bit of "Itchycoo Park". Sounds like the left and right channels have been shifted slightly out of sync with each other somewhere in the digital transfer process.

Or maybe - heinoius! - it was a mono track that's been made faux stereo by adding digital delays. This was big in the 1970s when RCA records re-released a whole catalogue of mono 1950s rock 'n' roll. To give the records a wide stereo image - and convince punters they were getting their money's worth - they'd add short delays to the left and right channels. It was appalling. Sounded like Elvis was singing in a drain pipe.

But, once again, what vexes me with this ad is that no-one in the production chain - at least one of whom I assume was a qualified and professional audio engineer - no-one noticed that anything was amiss. I know audio is mere plankton in the filmo food chain, but for god's sake open yer bloody ears!

Stupid ad.

Posted 16/02/09

I believe it was Miles Davis who said if you play a wrong note, play it again and it will be right.

Our Steinlager friends have obviously been listening large to the likes of Davis' heinous Doo Bop - surely a collection of the wrongest notes ever committed to vinyl - for the latest Steinlager ad again features a FOP (Famous Overseas Person) wandering a grim place in search of beer.

This time it's Willem Dafoe, ragged-faced, looking like he could do with half a bottle of vodka or a quick ping of morphine to set him right. He's shambling along in a green-grey world past giant aircraft carriers, telling us how admirable it is that little old NZ has said "No" to big old USA's nuclear ships. Why - we even hear a snatch of David Lange's famed "uranium breath" moment. This little sound-bite brings a stirring patriotic joy to any true Kiwi. It's right up there with "We knocked the bugger off", and "That'll be the phone".

Quite what NZ's nuclear policy has to do with Steinlager is not abundantly clear. Whereas the first Steinie ad drew a comparison between the "noes" and the "no additives", in this one the link is much more tenuous: maybe it's assumed we all saw the first one so we know the punchline anyway.

I'm pleased to see Mr Dafoe has the same psychic powers as Mr Keitel: he orders his beer without moving his lips. Whether he likes the stuff is a moot point: he takes a sip, puts the bottle down, and wanders off, no doubt to see if there's a nice bottle of 40 proof rum aboard one of those boats.

Stupid ad.

Posted 10/02/09

Oh wow. Oh jeez. Oh crap. What went wrong with the new Greenpeace ad?

There's the brand new tag line, "Defend the Whales". Can ya dig it! A subtle shift from "Save the Whales", but so much more... righteous.

There's the burbling, urgent ostinato of a music track that was surely written by Sting, Bono, and Mother Teresa. There's the sound effects, designed to sub-frame perfection, principally that old filmo standby (and saviour of many a naff ad), the voice-over-the-radio effect.

And there's Sir Anthony Hopkins, with his sexy how-green-was-my-valley Welsh lilt, thoughtfully telling us how beautiful whales are and --.

At least, I assume that's what he's on about because I CAN'T HEAR A FUCKING WORD HE'S SAYING!!

Come on! That sound mix is appalling! Yes, yes - we know the music is filmo-arousing. We know the SFX have been lovingly created by cutting up the actual radio broadcasts of sperm whales as they use their tracking devices to call for pizza. But for god's sake TURN THE DAMN VOICEOVER UP! You're taking the piss!

Give the bits to me and I'll mix it properly for you for only the cost of the film crew's lunch.

Stupid ad.

Posted 17/01/09

Colenso BBDO have been doing some classy-looking stuff for Vodafone of late, with lots of no-expense-spared visual trickery. This one is puzzling and annoying.

Your man - is it the same fella who folds up his bookcase, his CD collection, and his wife and stuffs them in his pocket? - your man wanders about town and meets up with himself half a dozen times.

I'm not sure I get what Vodafone is advertising here, unless it's advanced cloning technology, which would be pretty impressive on a $39-per-month plan.

And anyway, if it is the bloke who just stuffed his wife in his pocket why is he meeting this other bint? It must be me: perhaps they are two different people but the actors are all from that same, modern, slightly-quirky-but-impossibly-good-looking talent agency.

So, puzzled, I listen to the music, and become annoyed.

It's another of those kooky, female, close-to-the-microphone, I-wrote-this-in-my-bedroom songs. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with writing in your bedroom, other than that the resulting song tends to be overwrought, and tends to begin with either a personal pronoun ("I look at your face in the mirror of the eyes of the sun") or a present participle ("Looking at your face in the mirror of the eyes of the sun").

This one doesn't begin with a personal pronoun, but it's implied nonetheless: we have a casual "Saw you the other day". Or rather, "Saw you the other dye". And it goes on to tell us in the chorus "Oi do loik you, Oi do loik you t'dye".

I've oft wondered where this particular vocal affectation comes from. It's like the Cockney accent Dick Van Dyke slaughtered in Mary Poppins: all "Gor bloimey, Oi daownt believe me aown ois if it eyen't Mary Poppins!"

The earliest exponent of the form in pop music that I can think of is Anthony Newley, with his gloriously overblown vocal mannerisms. His version of the "The Candyman", which he co-wrote with Leslie Bricusse for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, is a delight of vaudevillian Bow Bells over-accentuation: "Who kin tyke a ryne-baaaaaaooowww..."

David Bowie filched Newley's style and has used it on and off ever since. His slightly dodgy mid-period between Mod and Ziggy was more or less Bowie-as-Newley singing nursery rhymes. This Mockney vocal approach continued sporadically on his "proper" albums with songs like "All the Madmen" from The Man Who Sold the World ("Dye after dye/they tyke some bryne awye") and "Be My Wife" from Low ("Sometoyms I git saow laownlee").

Perhaps it was the brothers Finn who carried the torch into the '80s and '90s. Certainly, Split Enz's early music hall stylings were tailor-made for dropped aitches and glottal stops, and the lads kept it up through their later commercial success with the likes of "Nobody tykes me seriously anywye".

But illustrious history is not enough. I imagine this commercial's creative geniuses thought the vocal cute, naive, vulnerable, and believable, but unfortunately the effect is so false and overdone that what should be a charming quirk is merely irritating.

Stupid ad.

Posted 26/11/08

Apologies for StupidAd's hiatus: I could perhaps argue that I was hospitalised by having to view so many stupid ads; let's get back on track with a print ad.

The issue of emaciated fashion models has been hammered flatter than - well, flatter than the chest of the fashion model in the Fayreform ad to our right. Click on it to see a larger version.

Didn't anyone who had anything to do with this ad see anything incongruous about using the tagline "Work your curves" with a photo of a model with a body that looks like mine did when I was a gangly, stick insect of a teenage lad?

Stupid ad.

Posted 16/09/08

I seriously don't get this one. Must be because I'm a boy.

Seven women are asked to test New Dove Roll-on Deodorant for seven days, and are also each given a plain white t-shirt and a plain white sleeveless shirt. "Which one will they be wearing after seven days?"

My boy brain immediately thought: "The t-shirt, to show that Dove doesn't leave that yucky stain, like my Old Spice stick deodorant used to."

But nay! They all - bar one - choose the sleeveless shirt. Why? Something to do with "smooth and silky". I don't understand, and they don't explain.

Stupid ad.

Posted 10/04/08

This is not so much stupid in conception as stupid in execution. The old eyes aren't what they were, and unless one is sitting, childlike, three feet from the screen, one can't see any detail whatsoever.

In fact, don't get me bloody started! How many ads have I seen - or not seen - because some stupid 21 year old art director has chosen a "funky" 5-point type-face - invisible to all but harrier hawks and people who own electron-scanning microscopes - to explain the most pertinent points of the proposition?

Okey-dokey, Freeview allows you to (read this bit quickly) "... enjoy a richer entertainment experience in your home..." by transmitting NZ's free-to-air tv channels via blah blah... satellite dish... blah blah... digital receiver... blah blah... snore snore.

We are presented with a series of vignettes (from the French vigne - "too much wine at lunch time") showing ordinary everyday folk trying to pick up free-to-air tv using the good, old-fashioned aerial of the type that has served humanity adequately for thousands of years. But - dang it all! - reception is terrible!

To make sure they miss not one second of the brilliance that is free-to-air tv programming, our various heroes resort to all manner of Heath Robinson ingenuity to capture the airwaves and deliver them down an antenna cable into their tv: while a bloke watches the cricket his son sits glumly on the roof aligning the aerial for best reception; a fish and chip shop has a deep-fryer basket perched atop the telly; inside a rustic cabin the aerial is balanced in the jaws of a trophy fish.

The sets - err, the film sets, not the tv sets - the sets have been superbly dressed, packed with trivia and trinkets, and herein lies the problem: the aerial is such a small detail amongst the multitude of detail in each scenario that unless one sits - as I've said - three feet from the box wearing jewellers' glasses, one doesn't notice said aerial at all.

Surely the aerial should be the focus of the shot? Surely it should be almost larger than life?

I'm sure it must be difficult to shoot something constructed from a few flimsy metal rods: why make things even harder by filling each shot with all that eye-catching clutter?

Stupid ad.

Posted 31/01/08

Here's another stupid ad that, like L'Oreal below, plays loose with language to keep tight with the legal eagles.

Our good friend the Energizer battery scales a pile of virtual photographs. He claims that, were he inside a digital camera, he would shoot "up to 600" photos, whereas other batteries would shoot only "up to 80".

What a blithering pile (French pun intended) of meaningless nonsense.

Surely, for a start, we need to know what model of camera Mr E. Battery is in.

Then he must also understand that the number "up to 600" also includes the number "0".

And finally, what are these other batteries that shoot "up to 80" photos (which, incidentally, also includes the number "0")?

At school in chemistry (first period after lunch) back in 1971 we made a battery using a lemon, a piece of copper, and a piece of iron. It produced a voltage of about 0.1V. By Energizer's standards this battery too would shoot "up to 80" photos and, therefore, "up to 600". In fact the number of photos it would shoot would extend, like L'Oreal's eyelashes, "towards infinity".

Stupid ad.

Posted 16/11/07

Maintaining a web site devoted purely to stupidity in cosmetics advertising would be a full time job. I ceased long ago to be amazed at the amount and variety of muck that a woman can be persuaded to chuck on her face. Most of it's whale blubber of course, and anti-whaling women might get a shock were the Japanese to cease their harpooning.

L'Oreal and Pene Cruz bring to us "Telescopic Mascara". Being a boy, I thought this would be a secret agent spy glass concealed in a mascara case. How cool! And surely they'd pair it with a powder compact that flipped up to be a radio transmitter.

Alas, no. It's merely black muck that "telescopes" your eye lashes longer. According to the male voice-over, it "telescopes" them quite a distance in fact: "towards infinity".

Which is all very well until you realise that "towards infinity" also includes the distance "zero millimetres".

To compound their stupidity, L'Oreal failed to make it clear that Ms Cruz was also wearing a few fake lashes as well, to the disapproval of the Advertising Standards Authority.

Not that any of this nonsense will stop anyone believing they can buy beauty in a bottle.

More whale blubber, vicar?

Stupid ad.

Posted 16/10/07

Most advertising is built upon suspension of belief: singing chocolate figures, flying cars, hair that shines like a supernova, stuff that cleans toilets with no scrubbing. We secretly know these things to be impossible, yet we play along.

But a commercial that purports to show reality, to show that these things are actually happening, must tread carefully if it is not to appear ridiculous.

The Steinlager Pure ad (see below) is an example. We're expected to believe that Harvey Keitel really is wandering about a deserted funfair, in the middle of the night, in the freezing cold, in an old mackintosh, talking about saying "No!", and ordering beers without moving his lips. I'm sorry but it just won't wash, no matter how close to the front of your showreel it goes.

Here's another: There was tremendous shock in this sport-stricken country when it was revealed that Irene van Dyk, New Zealand's via-South Africa star netballer, had high cholesterol. "How can this be?" wailed the women's mags. "She is that most holy of persons, a New Zealand sporting hero!"

Living by that worthwhile maxim "Make every post a winner", Unilever seized on this grim news and invited Ms van Dyk to front a series of commercials promoting Flora pro-activ, their allegedly cholesterol-lowering bread spread.

Lets leave aside the issues of whether the stuff does what its makers claim, and the growing controversy about consuming high levels of plant sterols. What's annoying to StupidAd is the way the commercial plays out: Ms van Dyk is seen coaching some school-age netballers, but her voice-over tells us that, rather than concentrating on teaching the finer points of the bounce pass, the only thing she's worried about is that today she gets her cholesterol results!

In fact so worried is she by their imminent arrival that she's brought husband Christie along just to look after her mobile phone! Soon enough, anxious hubby gets to fulfil his purpose. The phone rings and he dashes onto court.

"Irene! Telephone!"

My dear old mum used to say if you can't say anything nice about someone, don't say anything at all, but there can be something deeply unattractive about the South African accent. Sounds like a dog that's swallowed a dalek. I'm sure Christie van Dyk is as charming a fellow as you could ever hope to meet at a braai with a glass of Meerlust Rubicon in hand, but his sole speaking line is so idiosyncratic that I'm afraid as soon as the phone rings in our house the guttural shout goes up: "Irene! Telephone!"

Ms van Dyk breathlessly receives the news: The cholestrol's down! Whew! Now she can concentrate on shooting technique, defence strategies and winning space.

Stupid ad.

Posted 21/09/07

Another one where they forgot to get the audio right.

The original Molenberg ad must be getting on for 20 years old now. Remember it? A troop of soldiers wheezes along the road, sounding off, and our young heroine breezes past chanting "I want my Molenberg/Keeps me fit haven't you heard". It was written - if memory serves - by the much misunderstood Chris Howden, and was kinda dumb? Yes! Stupid? No!

Now we have a new version featuring a bunch of senior citizens, inter alia, strutting about the place, chests out, elbows flapping, fortified by Molenberg, sounding off in their own, special OAP way.

Only thing is: I can't understand a word they're saying. I don't think this is because all our aged actors have new teeth, or are losing control of their physical faculties. I think it's because no-one coached them on how to perform the script, and the resulting bumbling jumble was badly recorded to boot.

Stupid ad.

*Thanks to Rob Crawford for bringing this one to StupidAd's attention.

Posted 19/09/07

This has bugged StupidAd forever, for a couple of reasons.

It's not a bad ad overall: a couple o' Kiwis drive around the world extolling, in Dagg-esque tones, the virtues of Kiwibank via a Tannoy speaker on top of their Smart Car.

The first series of ads went overboard with the echoey loudspeaker effect. Couldn't hear a word being said. Thankfully that's improved.

The big problem is the national anthem. I'm sure some of us dimly remember when "God Save the Queen" was played at the pictures and whenever NZ won a medal at the Olympics. But surely "God Defend New Zealand" has been our national anthem for long enough now for everyone to know - if not the words of verse four - at least the BLOODY TUNE!

This is a whistled version, and very chirpy, chipper and cheery it is too. Starts off nicely - you know the tune: "God of nations at thy feet, in the bonds of love we meet..."

All good so far, though Mum often warned me about meeting people in the bonds of love.

Carry on: "Hear our voices we entreat. God defend our free land..." Sets up some nice rhyming with "Zealand" later on.

Now we get into the mystical meat of the middle bit: "Guard Pacific's triple star, from the shafts of strife and war..." Even Max Cryer, who produced a six part radio series on the song, could not discover what the Pacific's triple star really is.

And listen! - here comes the clanger! Instead of the tune for "Make her praises heard afar..." (doh-sol-la-ti-doh-re-sol), a glorious upward sweep that reaches the highest note in the tune, our merry whistler re-whistles the opening line (doh-ti-doh-sol-me-me-re-doh)! Calamity!

What I can't understand is how the error got past so many people. Kiwibank is a government department for ford's sake: the ads must have been reviewed by thousands of people on hundreds of committees and sub-comittees. Have none of them been to a rugby match?

Stupid ad.

Posted 07/08/07

Telecom NZ sold off their Yellow Pages business for a couple of billion in a bid to bolster their share price after the bashing it took over the leaked deregulation document. The new owners, a private equity consortium, rebranded the product "Yellow" and now - naturally - the price of an ad in the Yellow Pages will shoot up to pay for stupid ads like this one.

It's the sort of idea that seems so bleedin' obvious that you wonder why it's never been done before. Until you see the result. The idea is - yes! - let the Yellow Pages Fingers Do the Walking!!

Brilliant!

Unfortunately the effect is an arachnophobic's chirophobic nightmare. Black hands scuttle about the landscape "finding" things for people, swarming menacingly towards the camera as though they're about to leap out of the telly and afix themselves to your face and implant demon spawn in your gut.

It's creepy to the entymological max, as freaky as a cave teeming with giant wetas or a waterhole full of mutant flesh-eating psycho-crabs. Stephen King could not have written a more terrifying tale.

And - en passant - a recent immigrant from South Africa, in a letter to the NZ Herald, pondered the racial overtones of the black hands doing all the hard work.

The one saving grace is the soundtrack, the weird and wiggy "Bathtime in Clerkenwell" by the Real Tuesday Weld.

But all in all, a stupid ad.

Posted 05/08/07

Wha - ? Whe - ? Who - ? What year is this? For a minute there (60 seconds exactly) I thought I was back in 1988.

Why?

It's Famous Overseas Person time! Let's get a FOP to voice our ad, or appear in our ad, or - hell - even write our ad. Back in '88 it was stalwart male Brits like Joss Ackland, Geoffrey Palmer, Gordon Jackson and Richard Briers. Today, with our new-found Hollywood connections (a New Zealander made a successful movie therefore all New Zealanders are brilliant) we're allowed to have stalwart male Yanks.

This time, FOP Harvey Keitel (My god! Doesn't he look old!) performs perfectly a convoluted script about how saying "No" is the secret of life. Obviously the writers have never read "Fuck, Yes!" by Reverend Wing F. Fing MD, Ph D, DDS, LLD, DVD and much, much more.

It's a dodgy proposition, this "no" business. "No" to nuclear weapons: fair enough. "No" to not giving the vote to women: well, I suppose so, but it's an odd way of putting it.

It's damned confusing. "When they said Everest couldn't be climbed, you said 'No!'"

What? Surely we said "Yes! It can!"

And once again, it's the "Just a Little Country" thing (see "New World" below), this time featuring, obliquely, Ernest Rutherford and Kate Shepherd along with Sir Ed's "no" to climbing Everest - errr, or is that "no" to not climbing Everest.

I'm surprised they didn't add Team New Zealand's "no" to not winning back that bloody stupid cup that no-one else in the entire universe can give a flying pig's f*ck about. Oops! I forgot! They didn't not not win it. Or what about no to not not smacking our kids?

Anyway FOP wanders around - where? Coney Island? By some miracle of telepathy he orders a Steinlager Pure without moving his lips. Judging by the bleak look of the ad and his warm coat I'd say telepathically ordering an armagnac would have been a much better idea.

The purpose of the ad? To tell us there are lots of unadditives in Steinlager. No, unright!

This is the sort of ad that filmos love. I can see then viewing the rushes, rolling Drum cigarettes and murmuring how "well-crafted" it is. The soundtrack is also the kind that filmos love: an aimless, maundering organ tune that shrieks of Wellington cool hipness.

To go along with the general air of negativity the ad itself is executed without an ounce of humour. No, Mr K is certainly not playing this one for laughs, much as he didn't play it for laughs in that film he didn't unappear in that wasn't not shot here in New Zealand. You know, Mills and Boon in the mud: The Piano. I unenjoyed it:

Not unstupid ad.

Posted 03/07/07

My family and friends will bear testament to my gentle nature, my tolerance and love of peace. The last time I was in a fight was in 1972, at school, when John Pain spat at me, so I threw stones at him from my bike, so he threw a punch at me, so I threw one back.*

However, when I see the fey fellow fronting the Ferrit ads, I WANNA SMACK HIM IN THE FACE!! He's so thoroughly, campily dislikable he almost makes me worry that I might be homophobic, which I'm sure can't be true: I just adore the big musicals. "O-o-o-o-o-o-oh - klahoma where the wind comes sweepin' down the plain!"

Ferrit is Telecom's foray into on-line selling, an eMall of a couple of hundred retailers where shoppers can buy what - to my jaded eye - appear to be seriously over-priced goods, from CDs and books to electrical appliances and auto accessories.

Just why we need the umbrella of Ferrit I'm not too sure, given that - were I to be contemplating the on-line purchase of, say, a Canon PowerShot A450 - a quick Google search would deliver far more choices than Ferrit offers. Didn't Apple's eWorld, AOL, and others discover early on that the bricks-and-mortar metaphor stinks?

You'd assume that an advertising campaign aimed at people who might frequent an eMall would appeal to, well, people who might frequent an eMall, rather than the minuscule fraction of the population who have "Young Fogey" magazine air-freighted out from the UK.

I have no idea who these ads are aimed at. Certainly can't be me, or my children, or any of my friends, colleagues, acquaintances, relatives, football team members, or any of their children, or their pets. I have yet to find anyone who finds these ads - and Mr Stupid Pants and Tank-top - anything other than awfully, cloyingly annoying.

Stupid ad.

[* We both missed, and we both ended up on detention. By the by, I met John again while on tour with Th' Dudes in the late 1970s. He was chef at the Hillsborough Hotel in Christchurch. A nicer chap you could not hope to meet.]

Posted 15/06/07

"Ig!" they cry, "why so negative? Ig!" they cry, "you're just part of the great kiwi clobbering machine, a manifestation of the tall poppy syndrome, another of the Passionless People!"

In my defense, m'lud, I present the lickspittling back-slappery of the NZ Creative Circle Blog. One visit to that dark place and I realised: someone has to be a force for good in the world. I accept my burden with humility.

Still, let's have a look at something that's not stupid, shall we, just to show how easy it can be to make a simple, intelligent and entertaining commercial moment. This Coke ad is gorgeous, and shot for the price of the gum on a 5c stamp.

Boy sits next to girl, hums Nokia tune, looks puzzled, pats pockets, retrieves Coke bottle, twists lid, holds bottle to ear, says "Hello?", passes bottle to girl: "It's for you."

Delightful.

Not a stupid ad.

Posted 14/06/07

Sky Television's UKTV has been re-broadcasting Creature Comforts - a wonderful treat for fans of Nick Park's effortless animation talents - and suddenly New Zealand's commercial airwaves are awash with anthropomorphism.

At my count there are at least five campaigns featuring talking things:

Maggi Flavour Mixes:   Potatoes, mushrooms, and brussels sprouts devotedly discuss their delicious dinnertime destiny.

KiwiSaver:   Purses, wallets and stationery items worry about Mr - oops, I mean Dr - Cullen's financial brainchild. Lord help us - I'd rather not have the country's financial future sold to me by a paper clip.

Telecom "Clever Toys":   Puppets sell phones! I know! Impossible not to like. (Not sure about Gus's exploding drink though - it's a bit Carry On, isn't it?)

Number One Shoe Warehouse:   Cheap and nasty talking shoes. I should make a joke here about shoes having tongues, but this ad makes me feel too tired, too uninspired.

Panasonic Batteries:   The closest to Park's original, featuring a poultry couple, complete with hubby making carefully rehearsed ad-lib cup of tea noises, and a surely-they-won't-yes-they-did joke about battery hens.

Some good, some stupid ads.

Posted 9/06/07

Ooh, it annoys me! Just a little more care, please!

I have long been resigned to audio being far, far down the queue when it comes to doling out the dosh. Crayfish for the film crew's lunch? No problem! $100 to do a proper audio mix? Sorry, nothing in the budget for that!

Money isn't the problem with these ads though. They just needed someone with a pair of ears to point out the bleedin' obvious during post-production.

BNZ:  These piggy bank ads are cute, and the remake of "Let's Stick Together" is excellent. However, there's a new 10 second spot that begins with a bad, hard edit halfway through the sax melody. It's a nasty note, yet could have been fixed in ten seconds by a) shifting the audio so we hear the start of the sax note, or b) doing a quick fade-up. Any audio engineer worth their salt would have done it without a second thought.

Brand Power:  Same problem. The three-second trumpet fanfare - the only audio branding that Brand Power has - cuts in halfway through the first note. Very jarring. If they don't care about their ads, why should we?

Classic Hits Radio:  Another dodgy start. We have a montage of classic hits beginning with Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow". Only problem is it's faded up a little too late, so all we hear is "Stop thinking about tomorrow". Minor, maybe, but it bugs me no end. Because the song is so well known, it's the sort of slip that makes us feel ill at ease without us perhaps knowing exactly why.

New Zealand Ballet "Swan Lake":  I am shocked - shocked I tell you! - at the gruesome beginning of this ad for the ballet company's nationwide tour. A dirty great distorted, cutting-in-and-out mess, as though someone dropped the needle onto the vinyl halfway through the record. Hey! - maybe they did! Inexcusable.

Brothers and sisters in the audio industry: use your ears!

Not stupid ads, just careless.

Posted 29/05/07

An incredible indelible blankness can overcome a creative's mind when he's handed the keys to a large car account. What is it with car advertising that makes it so feast-or-famine? On one hand we have Mazda's durable "Zoom Zoom Zoom" campaign, Toyota's always brilliant NZ spots, and VW's whimsical Taureg ads. On the other hand we have... Mitsubishi and Chrysler.

In keeping with the "let's have a rock song" theme (see Nissan below), Mistsubishi have chosen to rework Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall" with the tag-line "Get Hard". So far so average. Snigger all you like at the slogan: the ad is going to stand or fall on the quality of the soundtrack.

While the Zim may have written the song, perhaps the best known recording was by perennial coat hanger Bryan Ferry back when Roxy Music was still cool and the bland "Avalon" and "Dance Away" not even chalk marks on the worsted of his creativity.

Trouble is, whoever sings this commercial can't decide who to be: Bobby or Bryan - or maybe even Leon Russell, who also recorded a version of the song, or Freddy Mercury, who didn't.

The result is an appalling mish mash of vocal stylings, a jigsaw puzzle of a performance that laughably warbles, swoops and guffaws all over the shop as our singer slips from Bryan to Bob to Leon and back again, and then to Freddy for the tight-trousered finish.

Chrysler, too, decided "let's have a rock song", though theirs sounds like it was written while scraping the bottom of a very deep barrel.

"You're different - that's what I like about you" sounds so much like a press ad set to music I have to wash the ink off my hands after listening to it. Everything about it, from the lyrics to the melody to the guitar sound to the vocal performance, is so shudderingly awful that I can only assume the creatives must have abdicated responsibility and handed over all control to the client. It's like a high school pastiche of Rock Star Supernova.

The latest ad has a voice-over that assaults us with quite ridiculous extremes of automobile techno-babble. We start with the usual "power and economy" and "improved fuel economy" lines, and then move swiftly into "5.7 litre hemi", "filtering systems", "street edition accessory pack", and - my favourite - the never-explained "MDES technology". Ah well, at least it drowns out the singer.

Music is wonderful at conveying emotion. If the emotion you want to convey is "I am a stupid ad", then count these as brilliant successes.

Stupid ads.

Posted 23/05/07

This is just plain badly recorded. Our talent, that infuriatingly obiquitous Bonus Bonds guy, does vox pops while dishing out bacon samples. Didn't anyone in post-prod point out that you can't understand a word he's saying?

"Blahm-mumble-umble-bacon. Mumble-arumble-crumble-dumble-bacon-blumble. Jumble-bumble-bacon-grumble-pumble."

Too fast, too slurred, too much background noise.

Stupid ad.

Update 18/05/07: Do you know, I think they may have re-recorded this! Either that or it's another in a series, shot - this time - with money in the budget for a soundman.

Posted 08/05/07

StupidAd isn't trying to pick on Cadbury, but they're setting themselves up for it: the latest in their "Wouldn't It Be Nice" series is a right shocker.

Originally the soundtrack was a fairly good remake of the Beach Boys' hit. The Aussie jinglers had gone out of their way to find a singer who sounded like Brian Wilson, and the backing track was well-produced. I bet they had a lot of fun doing it: I always find it fascinating to remake those classics, retracing the steps of the pioneers.

As the series progressed the lyrics became more ridiculous, and the instrumentation less authentic: a Beatle-esque "Penny Lane" trumpet featured in the last couple.

This latest ad throws all pretence at authenticity out the window. The soundtrack has been completely rerecorded. The backing sounds like it came out of my Grandad's 1983 CasioTone organ. The vocalist sounds like the butcher up at the Taradale shops, i.e. it's no small wonder he's a butcher and not a singer.

The overall theme is some kind of world trip - not sure if it's a competition or what - so we have the obligatory stereotypical "snake charmer oboe" over shots of the Sphinx, and the obligatory stereotypical "romantic mandolin" over shots of Pisa's leaning tower, all played on the afore-mentioned CasioTone.

Extraordinarily disappointing all round, and a prime example of how an initially focused idea can be diluted over time until barely a molecule of the original survives.

Stupid ad.

Posted 06/05/07

There are a couple of these ads on at the moment - for different products - featuring people whose reading glasses have been styled to death.

I know these narrow spectacle frames are considered, by some, to be fashionable, but didn't the stylist notice how unsuited the frames are to this man's face? Can't they see his big round eyes, and the way these stupid narrow frames make him look as if he's squinting like a mole in the midday sun?

I don't even know what this ad is for - I'm too distracted by this big man wearing those little glasses.

Stupid ad.

Posted 17/04/07

I know what this is - this is the "Just a Little Country" brief writ emo.

The "Just a Little Country" brief is given when the advertising agency, even more bereft of ideas than usual, resorts to the last refuge of the scoundrel: patriotism. Tell NZ how great NZ is, and - with luck - some of the pride will rub off on the product.

And for the music, let's have an anthem! Back in the day the thing would start with "We're just a little country, but we've come a long, long way", followed pretty smartly by "From North Cape to the Bluff...".

Well I'll tell you who's come a bloody long, long way, cos in these piccies a young lad is riding his bike from North Cape to the Bluff. Is he a delivery boy, and does New World have delivery boys, and why doesn't my New World have one? Oh no - I see. He's cycling from North Cape to the Bluff to get some milk and bread.

Meanwhile regular folk stride around like animated Letraset people, do what they do in their town, wave at the boy on the bike, and visit New World supermarkets. We've seen variations on this a zillion times before.

(And may I make an interjection here? You know that shot - how they've made Taihape the gumboot capital of the world? You know - the gumboot throwing competition and the giant gumboot made from corrugated iron? Well, they don't wear gumboots in Taihape. It's sheep-farming country. Gumboots are for dairy farmers.)

Anyway the New World music - thankfully - mentions neither North Cape, the Bluff, nor the apparent smallness of the country. Instead we have a pseudo song with a female vocalist trying to reassure us that "I'm looking out for you". Fine sentiment.

But dear god it's wet. Not as wet, perhaps, as the awful, super-wet BP jingle ("Make the world a little better") but stalagtitian in it's drippiness.

The vocal delivery is so disinterested, dull, dead and dispassionate that I would be mightily worried if I really did need the singer - or New World - to look out for me.

I hear they're tearing down my local New World. I'm not too worried.

Stupid ad.

Posted 15/04/07

Not a stupid ad per se, but still a celebration of stupidity.

The Axis Awards are the New Zealand advertising industry's premier awards ceremony, if you care about that sort of thing.

Back in 1996 word came down from on high - i.e. Howard Greive, convener of judges - that plagiarism in music was a serious concern and would not be tolerated. Only truly original soundtracks would be considered for entry. As legendary jingle-writer Murray Grindlay said to me: "Your track can't win an award unless you've got a Mongolian Throat Flute on it."

Just to emphasise the point, that year the judges stuck their collective noses in the air and decreed that their poor, sensitive ears could hear plagiarism in everything, and that no soundtrack was weirdly, throat-flutily original enough to be worthy of so hallowed a prize as a Gold Axis - in fact from memory I think there were only a couple of lowly Bronzes awarded for soundtracks.

And so the 1996 Axis Awards Show progressed: Best Grip, Best Best Boy, Best Third Assistant Camera Tripod First Leg Adjuster, all the usual stuff.

The most prestigious award of the evening comes at the very end, for Cinematography. This award is for outstanding excellence in film-making and goes to the director who makes the most brilliantest, most breathtakingest, most droolingly delishesest ad of all: bewitchingly lit, beautifully shot, stunning special effects, formidably acted.

The winner of the 1996 Gold Axis was Silverscreen's Geoff Dixon for a Toyota commercial featuring giant women tromping through a city-scape, stepping over bridges, peering into skyscrapers.

Hang on! Haven't I seen this before somewhere? Indeed: it's an award for the excellence with which Mr D.has created a 30-second rip-off of the video for the Rolling Stones song "Love Is Strong".

And not a throat flute in sight.

Stupid ad.

Posted 10/04/07

Evermore - "Light Surrounding You" (TV One promo and various ads)

It's every composer's right to have an advertiser give them a huge wad of banknotes, but come on guys - at least have the decency to wait until your song has dropped off the charts before you start flogging off its cold, dead carcass.


Chris Knox - "Not Given Lightly" (Vogel's bread)

The Mayor of Grey Lynn selling his soul to advertising? Not very Flying Nun, is it? Still, I suppose it was easy to say you'd never sell out when no-one was buying.


Stupid ads.

Posted 09/04/07

Geez I hate these ads. The very first in the series just about scraped by: a good re-make of the Beach Boys' "Wouldn't It Be Nice" and some choc-mation pictures of happy Cadbury World people.

But now we have convoluted lyrics with impossibly trite rhymes, and ridiculous scenes of blinking chocolate people eating chocolate gear sticks, or going to the chocolate movies ("A Chocolatey Tale" - how long did it take to think of that name?) and taking bites out of other chocolate people's big chocolate hair who sit in front of them at the movies.

Just be done with it and bite off her whole fucking head! And then we can have chocolate blood squirting up out of her torso!

I trust they paid Brian Wilson a sandpit full of money.

Stupid ad.

Posted 09/04/07

Come on! Do they still employ people to dream up these phrases?

We have a standard, seen-it-before, verging-on-stupid analgesic ad (the pain killer travels along a map "seeking out" pain) with an obvious 10-second tack-on at the end: "Now with Advanced Liquid Technology".

Oh, you mean it's liquid instead of solid? Like the difference between water and ice, that kind of advanced technology?

This reminds me of the time back in the 1980s when Saatchi and Saatchi Wellington were buying up almost every song ever written for Telecom's "animals" ads. (And incidentally, with such profligate splashing of cash, making it prohibitively expensive for anyone else to buy the rights to whatever was left, now that the overseas publishing giants had cottoned on to the fact that NZ, with a population of a medium-sized US city, was willing to pay laughably huge amounts.)

But I digress.

These songs that S&S bought had to be chopped into 30 and 60 second lengths. Normally this would be the sort of task I'd cheerfully undertake with an editing block and sharp razor blade. Now, in super-switched-on 1988, I had a Fairlight CMI, capable of sampling two minutes of audio. With this phantasmagorical machine I could make the edits smoother, speed things up and slow things down, even pitch change if necessary. More fun than the blade too: I could always amuse myself by playing the fart samples.

The most creative part, however, was writing the invoice. Instead of "Edit song to 30 seconds, $50", the invoice would read "Digital Audio Reconstruction, $750".

"Advanced Liquid Technology" indeed.

Stupid ad.

Posted 05/04/07

I admit straight away that I'm super-sensitive to audio, but these two always make me cringe.

KFC run a good series of fun ads. Only problem to my ear is the sung tag: "Can't beat that teeest".

Maybe I'm being overly picky, but I'd've made the bloke sing it again, properly.

Dove comes, I guess, from the USA, and features little vox-pops of women telling us how Dove deodorant doesn't leave white marks on their clothes. It's fine, if a little cutesie - probably written by a man.

Unfortunately it has appallingly re-dubbed NZ/Aussie voices. I know it's hard to get dubbing right, but this ad is so reliant on the women's personalities that the falseness of the voices makes us wonder if everything else is false too.

Stupid ads.

Posted 04/04/07

Soundtracks for car commercials tend to go through a follow-the-leader cycle. About a decade ago we had the "Classical Music" phase: even the cruddiest shopping basket cruised smoothly down leafy lanes to the strains of Brahms or lovely Ludwig van in a pathetic attempt at convincing us there was sophistication and class in this heap of crap that in three years' time would be held together by the rust in the anti-sway bars.

Right now we're in the "Rock Song" phase, started a couple of years ago by Mitsubishi playing the New Radicals' "You Get What You Give" over pictures of louche, be-fringed outcasts from Pavement magazine having a groovy drive-time. ("Wake up kids/We've got the dreamers' disease.") Worked bloody well too.

The latest example is Nissan using "Time of the Season", the spookily atmospheric 1960s Zombies hit. Initially, the 30 second ad featured the first verse, no voice-over, and your standard well-shot, car-driving scenes. It was a nice spot, if a little unadventurous.

A couple of weeks later though, it was broadcast with an added voice-over. You could almost hear the knees of the NZ Nissan agent knocking together: "But... but... we don't say anything about the car!"

So now we have the good-looking ad with the great soundtrack and a very po-faced voice-over: "Designed for driving!".

"Designed for driving"? Stap me! You mean, the car wasn't designed for beating eggs, or removing a client's tiny brain? Not only does the ad still say nothing about the car, it sinks any claim it may have had to style, elegance and wit.

I've recorded some bloody stupid car voice-overs in my time (how about "colour-coded bumpers"?), but this one takes the cake.

Stupid ad.

Posted 02/04/07

I don't know about you, but by crikey this one bugs me. It's just stupid. A young lad sees a rope on a wild and rugged beach, gives it a few tugs, and finds he's towed in the cities of Sydney, New York and Beijing, or someplace.

Yes, I know we often have to suspend disbelief in an ad, I know it's well shot - oops - I mean well-crafted, I know little NZ is metaphorically in touch with the big world. But it's so damned earnest.

Made in Wellington I'll bet.

Stupid ad.

Posted 27/03/07

This ad for Huggies nappies wasn't born stupid; what makes it so is the female voice-over.

I'm convinced it's an Australian putting on a New Zealand accent. Huggies is not the only culprit: there are a number of ads which play in both Australia and New Zealand: I'm sure some have been voiced - in Australia - especially for the New Zealand market. Thus we have ridiculous pronunciations like "skun", "trum mulk" and "poo-a-fict".

It just doesn't ring true.

Stupid ad.

Posted 26/03/07

Boy, this is a real stinker, inspired - I hazard to guess - by the success of "Chicago", the musical. We have a theatrical stage set, dancers wearing a curious cross-section of tat, and a male lead dressed like Cagney, prancing like Nijinsky and extolling, to the approximate tune of Cole Porter's "Anything Goes", the delights to be found inside a box of Cadbury Favourites.

The basic premise isn't bad, but I suspect it's been shafted by a case of Copywriter's Time Expansion. CTE occurs when a copywriter creates a Shakespeare-rivalling script that fits comfortably into 30 seconds when he runs it through in his head while seated at a glass desk overlooking the Waitemata Harbour. Once in the recording studio however, he quickly discovers that his 30 second script, when read with due care and gravity by a voice-over artist, actually takes 47 seconds.

CTE is compounded if the script is the lyric of a jingle, for the laws of music take over: a bar is a bar is a bar, and there are usually four beats to a bar, and we have to wait for all four of those beats to pass before we can start the next bar. All that wasted air time!

There are two ways around musical CTE: speed the jingle up or cut out some beats. Speeding it up makes it garbled and hysterical; cutting out beats makes it sound like a three-legged donkey staggering about trying to avoid standing in its own shit. Unfortunately this ad does both, and for good - or bad - measure features excruciating shoe-horned rhymes like "A Picnic for Rick, a Flake for Jake". Good God it's a mess. Add to this the suspicion that the whole damn thing is too nut-clenchingly high for the male vocalist and you have it:

Stupid ad.

Posted 25/03/07

In general, the list of stupid ads would never include this kind of cheap and cheerful cleaning product spot. No, as with retail ads, we're too comfortable with the formula and their honest-to-goodness, down-home dumbness to classify them worthy of the tag "stupid".

What sets this one apart from the bunch is the ridiculous game show format ("The Vanish Stain Show"), a sweaty and blindingly pink presenter/host, and onlookers oohing and aahing every sudsy moment as though a million bucks were riding on the outcome.

The part that really gets my gonads is the half-second shot - no doubt added at the insistence of the client - of the amazed crowd nodding approvingly once the Napisan has been shown not to make a pile of clothes look like it was run over by a Hummer driven by Robert Mugabe.

Stupid ad.

Posted 21/03/07