STREAMING has killed live TV, and it’s taken all the good adverts with it. If you’re one of the holdouts with a Freeview box, here are the rubbish ads you’ll be forced to watch.
Betting
Don’t let the bleak Gamble Aware warning fool you, betting is fun, sociable and a great source of income, whether it’s sparkly bingo, sexy poker, or plain old blokey sports. Ads like Foxy Bingo sometimes have a crap animated character encouraging you to fritter your life savings on games of chance. If that’s your benchmark for good advice you deserve everything you get, frankly.
Cars and perfume
These are in the same category as they are the only two products that reach the pinnacle of ad wankery: trying to be cinematic. Where’s the honesty? It should be: ‘Pretty reliable, looks okay, doesn’t show dents’, or ‘Smells faintly of kitchen spray but cheaper than the Gucci stuff.’
European food
The most inelegant dubbing you’ve ever heard, over partially animated jokes that clearly got lost in translation. Are you convinced by this Bavarian Euro-chef pretending the chocolate comes from his kitchen, not a factory on the outskirts of Munich? No. But you’ll still buy one of their cheapo Easter Eggs. These ads invariably include horrifically unnatural dialogue that makes the actors sound like androids: ‘Mmm! It’s the taste we all like from Rostini!’
Sofa
Whether they’re working-class black leather or middle-class green velvet, the sofas are all equally extortionate in price, but Big Sofa wants your cash. Watch as too-good-looking families flop onto cushions of all shapes and sizes, and resolve to buy a new one in five to ten years. Keep putting it off until your existing sofa looks as if it’s already at the tip.
Chemicals
You may not be aware that your house is so filthy you are moments away from death. Or you are according to a pretty blonde lady in a white shirt. She’ll say it in a sweet voice, but the clear message is that if you don’t buy her bleach, your children will die. After seeing this advert with the blanket of germs on every surface helpfully shown as computer graphics, it’s nothing short of a miracle that you all survived this long. You should start going to church.
