4 Ads

Kitchen Roll
It begins with a generic housewife distraught over some kind of spillage. Luckily, she’s suddenly rescued from her despair by a man dressed vaguely like a bullfighter who quickly cleans everything up with just one sheet of kitchen roll. ‘I am Juan Sheet,’ he declares in a crap Spanish accent.

See what they’ve done there? Juan Sheet? In a Spanish accent that sounds like one sheet!

No, it doesn’t.

If you’re playing on a funny foreign accent to get ‘one’ from ‘Juan’ you can’t then completely ignore the same accent for the surname ‘Sheet’ which, if the pronunciation is consistent, becomes ‘shit’. The character’s name is either John Sheet or Juan Shit – you can’t have it both ways.


Ice Cream
The ad where there’s a daring heist that’s almost foiled because the woman who’s supposed to be monitoring the security cameras is distracted by eating a posh choc-ice. I saw this a few times thinking: ‘that bloke looks like Benicio Del Torro’. I never for a second imagined that it would actually turn out to be the real Benicio Del Torro. What on earth is he doing peddling ice-lollies? He can’t need the money, surely?

Bill Hicks said something once about being off the artistic roll-call forever as soon as you make an advert. It’s different for jobbing actors playing an anonymous part of course, but the celebrities who trade on their name or reputation, how can anyone believe a word that comes out of their mouths after they’ve demonstrated that their opinions can be bought?

It’s very easy therefore, to accuse people of ‘selling out’ but the reality is that most people have nothing to sell. That Alexandra woman off Pop Factor for example, it came as no surprise that after the first sniff of any kind of fame, she appeared on an ad for shampoo. You expect that sort of thing from someone like that, nobody has any kind of respect for her anyway, but Benicia Del Torro? I credited him with more integrity. He played Che Guevara for fuck’s sake.


Frozen Fish
One of the most established campaigns on the television, it remained unchanged for decades. Granted, they did briefly try to beef up the main character by turning him into a young, well-built stubbly hero rather than an old man with a white beard but the main thrust of the ads were essentially the same. A sea captain, the only adult on a boat crewed solely by children fed on frozen fish. Admittedly, these days that sounds like a very dodgy concept but it obviously worked and was instantly recognisable as a brand.

It’s quite a radical decision to replace that advertising heritage with a sinister polar bear living in a freezer. Whichever agency came up with that idea and sold it to the client deserves a medal for bravery. I hope they win some kind of award.


Computers
Some updated system thing for an inexplicably popular brand of computer. It’s one of those ads that’s supposed to last just 7 seconds and focuses on one element of this new system that either sounds hellish to work with or that Macs have been doing for years. This particular one boasts about a new secrecy function that enables the user to instantly hide whatever page they’ve been looking at. The example they use is a man who doesn’t want his wife to find out what present he’s planning to get for her.

Yessss. I’m sure that’s exactly what that new feature will be used for – hiding surprise gifts from your loved one.

I wonder how long the creative team were working on this idea before they came up with something that didn’t directly mention porn?