What's the worst ad you've ever seen?

Maven (famous)@lemmy.world to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 45 points –

I don't mean like scams or anything like that. I mean what's the ad that has done the worst job as an advertisement? Instead of making you want to buy the product you wanted to avoid it.

76

Idk where to start.

Weirdly, I'm now drawn into seeing how expensive they actually are.

Maybe it's actually marketing genius. 🤔

I’ll start. Ahem. What is she leaning on? What cables are they talking about? Why are they expensive? Is it good that they’re expensive?

I’ll stop there, and see myself out

White font on white shirt?

The confusing messaging certainly takes second place behind that bad typography.

This ad is not for consumers. The line "征求经销商" means "looking for retailers"

Political campaign ads. Not a product so it might be different. I remember watching one that took advantage of homeless people and it made my stomach hurt.

Papa John's always showed some of the most revolting looking pizza in their ads, and I know ads are usually doctored to make the food look better so if that's what it looked like in the ad there was no way in hell I was coming into one of those places to get a pizza.

There was an ad recently on UK TV for some shitty food delivery company,and had a constant loud doorbell sound.

I emailed the TV channel and said myself and everyone I know have stopped watching their channel because the advert was so obnoxiously irritating.

They emailed back a month later and said they'd asked the advertiser to redo the advert due to multiple complaints

We can make a difference if we make an effort!

I think any ad that has the disclaimer guy say about 300 words within 3 minutes at the end has a place in my worst ad bucket. These are mostly drugs. and I don't remember a single specific so it's a sure sign.

also those smiling people eating their salad.

and that one ad with iPhone that people are jumping about with colors splashing and so little detail on the actual product.

The law on drug ads is that if they tell you what the drug does, they also have to tell you all the side effects.

But if they don't tell you what the drug does, they aren't required to say the side effects.

So they used to make two versions of the ad. One that was all about making people feel good about a drug by showing smiling happy people living a good life with lots of wholesome moments then "ask your doctor if zexophlam is right for you." Then they'd have another ad that tells you what zexophlam does and send a few minutes listing the side effects. But lately I haven't seen the second type that lists the side effects. It;s just the first type that doesn't tell you what the drug does.

Last one I saw kind of made a joke about it where someone is about to tell you what the drug is and they keep getting interrupted. Haha, how clever you are in avoiding telling me that a pill can give people diarrhea or whatever.

I feel like any ad you remember isn't the worst.

You got it! Aside from anything seriously offensive, these are ALL better ads than the ones we've completely forgotten about.

The point of ads is to entice you to buy sonething. Theres a higher chance of me buying something I dont remember the ad for than one that I make a point to avoid because of how terrible the ad for it was.

Rama margarine

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zeyoaqnCJdA

Every 90s ad looked (almost) like this. At least in my country. Cringe times.

We might not live far away... this one was the cringiest to be honest, the others ones, not as much. But this... I do eat margarine, but after seing this, I never even thought about buying Rama ever again, though it has crossed my mind before I saw this ad.

It seems weird the whole family is going nuts over margarine. And a whole lot of it too.

It's a cultural thing, it's like butter in the Balkans. Why is butter not as popular? Because it's a lot more expensive 🤷. People have historically been fairly poor around here.

All the anti-smoking ads. I don't support smoking, but the anti-smoking ads are so dramatic I'm surprised they're allowed by the Geneva Convention on psychological warfare.

And the real world affect of those ads were they just reminded smokers they hadn't had a smoke in a while and they'd go light up.

Gillette had an advertisement and it was a bunch of different hot men lined up and a woman fondling their bodies, evaluating what trimming style she found most sexually appealing. They were encouraging you to buy their trimming products.

I just thought, let's flip it around. There's a bunch of busty and tight women in swimsuits, and a man comes and lustfully fondles their bodies, and then they're telling you to buy makeup.

Edit. I should add that this was what made me decide to just stop buying their products. It was just one commercial, and I'm not making a big whoopee about it, but it motivated me to make a change and there's no reason to go back. I pretty much realized through this that I don't need any of their products that I formerly used, and I can shave myself for pennies versus what I used to pay them for disposable blades.

I just thought, let's flip it around.

This is how you best determine the presence of gender bigotry.

Take the genders in contention, and swap them. If the skit or saying or phrase or whatever no longer “reads” exactly the same as it did before, then the “inoffensive” version is nothing more than gender bigotry being aggressively whitewashed.

Example: “kill all men” ↔ “kill all women”. Do both sides read the same? Are both sides taken to be “equally offensive” by most of society? No? Congrats, you have correctly identified the left hand side - frequently lobbed about by a majority of female supremacists as “a joke” - as being a whitewashed example of gender bigotry. And mercy upon the soul of anyone who utters the right-hand version, such is the severity of how offensive society sees it as.

I can shave myself for pennies versus what I used to pay them for disposable blades.

Safety razor, FTW. Blades are cheap, I can shave myself daily for five years for the same price as a 16-pack of replaceable Gillette razor heads that barely last me six months with only thrice-weekly use. And I have a straightedge for dealing with neck hairs during the winter when I let my beard grow out, works wonders in giving me a clean edge to my beardline. If I take care of it well, I could pass that straightedge down to one of my grandnephews in near-mint condition.

Any ad that runs on youtube. Literally. All of them. You have paid for the privilege of ruining my enjoyment of whatever I was trying to see. Eff you and the product you rode in on.

Crazy frog. Advertising what, a ringtone? I stopped watching television and never really started again.

Every grammarly as that has the English mistake in it.

So, all of them.

A few years ago, Skittles had this ad with a dancing elf looking dude. I used to love Skittles, dentist will back that up, but i just couldn't support that kinda nonsense.

#2 would be those Quiznos ads... I wouldn't eat there anyway, but the deep-fried hamster looking thing isn't going to convince me.

Excuse me, but are you referring to...

BERRIES AND CREAM?!?

Skittles also had that add with skittles pox. That triggered my phobia (not sure how to spell it)

The Quiznos ad was a reference to a popular Flash video from back then. It made sense if you were online a lot, but I can only imagine how off-putting it was without proper context.

The Quiznos ad with the talking chinchillas.

Most people didn’t even know what those things were. I heard them being called weasels and rats and deep-fried hamsters and even beavers.

But, no. Photos of chinchillas, with talking human mouths superimposed. Ended up being the most fingernails-on-a-chalkboard commercial I have ever come across. Sure, there have been worse commercials in terms of raw stinkers or stupidity, but this one was by far the most repellant one I have ever personally experienced.

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Any of the ads that have started autoplaying when I turn on my FireTV Cube. It pisses me of so much I'm actively avoiding the shows and movies they're promoting.

Turn off the auto play video option in your settings. It used to be off by default and got turned on in a recent update.

You are my hero, I looked for something like that but hadn't found it. Thank you!

i disliked an ad in tv before 2000 and decided to not buy the deodorant stick then because of that. like 10 to 15 years later i accidently bought the product- long forgotten that this was the one with that bad ad and actually liked the product and bought it regulary for some time (then remembering how bad that ad was, but okay the product was good actually). that was until they decided to put more plastics into packaging as well as less content into it (same price for package) just to make it more costly for me thus more profitable for them, whilst producing more litter and destroying more resources just for profit. The higher price would not have been too bad, but creating more litter for more profit made me then search a better product. then found a bio product with all natural contents, very few plastic packaging and even less pricy.

That ad made me NOT buy it. So that was the worst ad i've ever seen in two ways: it reduced my willingness to buy their product to far below zero lasting for a decade and i did not even want to try the product that i later found to be actually good, so worst case for the vendor AND the customer.

However that product later also had the "best" Price raise (by less content) for me ever as that made me search and find the then newly existing even better and more natural, less pricy product of their competitor.

Maybe good CEOs are rare.

Literally any ad. I hate advertising in all forms and it does nothing but piss me off. If your ad is intrusive enough, I'll remember it well enough to never buy your product.

An ad for Descovy, an HIV prophylactic, that they kept playing in Portland in 2020. You gotta step up… PReP UP!! It featured this super creepy dude who I guess was supposed to be gay and kept making eye contact with the camera. I felt like I was being stalked.

Mobile game ads involving...

dirty feet

edit: i think this description is an understatement. it's absolutely disgusting.

there was an old ad with a kid sitting on a dock fishing, eating a bologna sandwich and singing "my bologna has a first name, its o-s-c-a-r. my bologna has a second name its m-a-y-e-r"...

nothing wrong with the commercial except it turned out to be an ear worm that would live in my head FOREVER. my brain trots it out at least once a month for no good reason. usually more.

ive never bought bologna and i'm low key mad at Oscar Mayer so maybe this counts?

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Every single billboard for Paramount+ is just six shows that don't interest me at all.

Like how can your streaming service be worth it when you don't even have enough content to fill a poster.

That Wendy's ad with the meme guy that I wanna strangle. Haven't eaten at Wendy's in like 8 years because of that ad

I've never seen a good ad tbh but car ads are the most fun bad to me.

There was one sonic ad that looked absolutely disgusting to me, I swear that food was made of plastic

I don't think I've ever seen a Word ad. I don't know how much Microsoft advertises its Office software.

Excel had a TV ad, IIRC. Man makes a spreadsheet while in the elevator going to his big presentation. Actually kinda funny.

Or maybe it was an ad for a portable PC...

The Folger's "coming home" (incest heavily implied) ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhfcWTZeP1k

ok, not an ad. it's a sketch. the incest is the joke, not implied.

This is the actual ad, the video the person above linked cuts periodically between the actual ad and drop-in skit scenes carrying the joke well beyond the point of being funny (imo)

https://youtu.be/uMwFWDIFVCU?si=TP0jPKxxj1-n1A0g

Still some weird undertones there tho

*sketch, as in sketch comedy. not a skit. I'm sorry, I don't want to be pedantic but it drives my neuro-divergent brain crazy. but yeah, that's a gross commercial. have a beautiful day fellow human.

I can't remember. Seeing an ad must be a century ago.