With the public going batty for healthy comestibles, now is a bad time to work in the snack food industry. Vilified on television, snack foods are shown as the reason for poor, twenty-four-stone Janine from Slough being barely able to lift her bottom off the sofa, and also why the nation’s children are wobbling balls of fat in Jamie Oliver’s School Dinners. Give it ten weeks and your humble packet of salt and vinegar crisps will be held responsible for the recession, knife crime and the breakdown in relations between the UK and Russia.
So, you’d imagine it would be quite hard working in the marketing department at Cadbury’s. I remember chocolate adverts from my youth, usually featuring a cartoon frog in a baseball cap screaming its lungs off, designed to get us kids worked up into a pestering frenzy. The money-shot would always feature an enlarged shot of the chocolate bar, with all the different layers of chocolate, sugar and marshmallow labelled. Like porn for chocaholics.
To do that now would not only be impractical with all the anti junk-food advertising laws around, it would also make your ad’s guilty claims of being ‘more chocolatey then ever’ seem unappealing, almost perverse when displayed next to promotions for organic celery sticks and drum-wheat cracker bars.
So, the new trick is to resort to novelty promotions that do everything to distract the public from what they’re promoting. Poor old Walkers had to drum up some novelty flavours, from Chilli & Chocolate to Menstruating Goat ‘n’ Cress.
Cadburys have taken a different route, and the result is 30 seconds of very surreal television that makes about as much sense to me as the time I hit my head and tried to listen to BBC Cymru.
The advert stars two kids, both abducted from a special needs school in the 80s, who wiggle their eyebrows in time to some funky electro pop. The boy on the left is common or garden funny-looking, but the girl on the right is something else; a cross between those spooky little girls you get in Japanese horror films and the child of Frau Farbissina from Austin Powers.
By the time she starts to squeak a balloon in time to the music, you’re not only left confused as to what’s been advertised, you’ve also forgotten who you are. Your jaw hangs open as you stare agog at this new watershed in pointless advertising. It might work to the extent that it has distracted you from the unhealthy nature of the food whilst subtly reminding you that chocolate is fun, but it’s messed me up so much that I can’t decide if I hate it in all it’s fake internet meme glory or not.
I spent half an hour last night watching it on Youtube, oscillating between abject hatred and childlike affection, while jamming milk chocolate bars into my face at a rate of six a minute. At least it’s temporarily stopped me from thinking about eating healthily.
That might have been the point in the first place, come to think of it.
73 Comments
Being Scotch. I do not know much about healthy eating, or advertising for that matter. But it seems to me that adverts must be anything other than forgettable. Therefore advertisers are perfectly happy to bamboozle or irritate the fuck out of you in equal measure as long as their product sticks in your bonce. Remember the Jewson adverts? I’m still trying to hunt down the perpetrator of that one like a Mossad assassin. Or those adverts with that fat bolshevik Ricky Tomlinson in. Throwing his militant lefty views to the wind for filthy capitalist lucre.
I’m happy to say I can’t remember what he was advertising.
FAIL
I only eat dark chocolate now.
This ad gives me the creeps.
Tom – Knowing that rat Tomlinson, it’ll be some left-wing guff he was advertising. Probably lesbians or that Greenham Common shower. Bring back Thatcher, that’s what I say.
Wasn’t he also a member of the nationala front or somesuch ?
Dickinson’s real Deal got a bit frosty just then… was on the edge of my seat.
Nick – He can’t have been in the National Front, surely? He was all right-on and left wing. They don’t usually let that sort into the National Front. Or do they?
Shit SH, I’m missong it!
Peter Rabbit?
I’ve never watched Dickinson’s Real Deal. Is it any good?
Yes nap, it’s class
Is it? Is it as good as either Last of the Summer Wine or XXX Road Trip III? These are the benchmarks by which all televison is weighed and measured in my house.
It’s a cross between “Going For A Song” and “Lovejoy”
Nah! Tomlinson was in Militant. He was one of the soap dodging work shy who went around assaulting and threatening decent hard working miners who wanted to day a days work.
‘Lovejoy’ is all I need, Nick. If something’s even remotely like Lovejoy, I’m in.
Ahem……http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/2361313.stm
Tom – One o’ those, was he? That bloody miner’s strike got on my nerves. There I was, trying to read my copy of The Beezer with the bloody lights going off every five minutes. Who do those miner’s think they were in the ’80s, eh? Bring back Thatcher, that’s my advice.
Wasn’t as bad as the 2002 mime’s strike.
Or the 2000 BC Midas strike. Couldn’t get something turned into gold for love nor money …
I did post a link to the BBC website but wordpress has stopped it.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/true_spies/2361313.stm
They should lock that Tomlinson character in the Tower for being a traitor.
Well they did lock him in a room with Caroline Aherne for what seemed like years. Filmed it to.
A scouser as well. That seals it. TWAT!
Rough old coiple on Kyle…ouch!
I can’t see how him being a scouser confirms anything.
Sitting around watching daytime tv while us good honest decent folk are pretending to work… tsk.
I’m watching a half decent horror film at the moment, called Splinter. It’s about zombie type people who got killed by trees and have got all splinters up their faces.
Ugeine – if my cunning plan fails, I’ll be back at work as soon as I can convince some moron to employ me, don’t you worry about that.
Which plan would this be? One so cunning you could stick a tail on it and call it a weasel?
I’m doing bugger all too. The most productive thing I’ve done all day is eat some cheese.
I’m selling this site to a Russian ogliarch (or something) for a pound. When I’m a poundionaire, you lot can get fucked. I’ll be too focused on spending my pound to talk drivel in here any more.
Cheese, eh? I ate some crisps earlier.
Have you seen Punisher: War Zone, Napoleon? It’s a right laugh. Lots of guns.
i’ve got the “lighthouse watcher’s” pass today. all lonely in a smelly danish office building. gives a lot of oppurtunities.
sh: speaking of russian ogliarchs where’s toothed varmint?
Lots of guns? Well that’s just rocketed to the top of my ‘To Watch’ list. Thanks, Swineshead.
I hope it doesn’t shit me up like that last one you recommended. That shit me right up.
Indy – deported, I’d imagine.
Napoleon – It’s not scary in the slightest. rec gave me a good shitting up, I have to admit, but P:WZ is straightahead rocket launchers and machine guns. The best bit is when one of them urban street jumpers does a somersault from building to building and gets blown up mid-air by a grenade launcher.
KABOOM!
Have you plans for another WWM podcast?
That sounds like the best film ever made. I haven’t been this excited since the second Smokey & The Bandit film.
Nick – We did, but then Piqued had a bad family thing happen, so it’s been put on hold until he’s back to his old self.
Anybody watched Cyborg Cop? Absolute Tour De Force.
Cyborg Cop? You don’t mean Maniac Cop, do you? I fucking love Maniac Cop.
any film where parquerers (sic) (street jumpers/tw*ts) are blown up makes it to my “to watch list”
I’ve just looked Cyborg Cop up. It looks ace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyborg_Cop
NP: It is cyborg cop, starring the magetic John Rhys-Davies as a mad scientist.
The tag line is ‘Human, robot or cyborg killer?’
Forgetting that a cyborg is a robot, unfortunately…
Indy, my sweet princess, I think you’d quite enjoy District B13 then, wouldn’t you? We could watch it together one night if you want.
“deported, I’d imagine.”
Can you get deported from the internet?
Thank God for that – Dave’s back. Finished signing on, Dave? You flabby leech.
Not only did I sign on but I also purchased a six pack of Pepsi Max and a scratch card as well. I missed you too.
myopinionstuff: tihihi. oh stop it!
Did you get the depressingly patronising ‘121’ interview where they show you how to use the search engine on the job centre website?
I won £2 on a scratchcard the other day. Even though I’d doubled my stake, I was still miffed. It was £100,000 I was after, like.
Good, I thought it sounded like a more abusive version of The Word one.
Get it on the iTunes next time eh what?
Ugiene – No. If I was the kind of moron that needed a leaflet instructing me on how to use a simple search tool, they’d better give me a second leaflet showing me how to operate the first leaflet as well, and so on.
£86 million on the euro this week…..
I must have one of those faces then, Dave.
£86 million? Fuck me. Imagine what you could do with that kind of money, eh?
It’s pissing it down up here though so I wondered into a strange room within the village’s town hall (where they make you sign on) with my vision obscured by my glasses, shouting ‘Job Seekers Allowance, Job Seekers Allowance’ at the top of my voice to three disturbed Scotch women.
Something soap-based?
I reckon one could buy Iceland Nap
How much do nuclear missiles cost?
I’ll make you a dirty bomb for a fiver out of the little metal things you get in smoke detecters and an egg timer.
I also know how to make a small Victorian petting zoo by simply mixing a range of household cleaning products with baking soda.
i’ll make you a dirty bomb out of a handgrenade and a poo
BMTV’s sexist (but true) thought of the day:
Women don’t need advertising for chocolate.
I want to buy this http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=260368670624&fromMakeTrack=true
A cyborg isn’t a robot.
Isn’t it? I thought a cyborg had wires and cogs and what-have-you? Like wot a robot has?
You learn something new everyday.
You do, don’t you? Where I’m going to use this new piece of information, Gawd only knows. Still, it’s nice to know.
1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
4. Don’t mention the Fight Club.
robots makes lousy dominatrixes.
heh.
i think the point you make about spending hours watching it on youtube is exactly the point of it. novelty works, people talk about it… it’s a very viral ad.
what the hell it has to do with chocolate is another matter.
looking for suggestions on crap adverts for a top 10 post. anyone? check out my this crappiest advert post
http://watchwithmothers.net/2008/01/16/glade-touch-n-fresh/
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