Top 10 Most Insane Adverts

Wouldn’t life be so simple if adverts just told you what you should buy and why? Say you were considering buying a bar of chocolate and an advert told you that Hershey’s chocolate is really good because it’s popular. You’d think “Ah – a popular brand that many people enjoy. I might enjoy that too”. If adverts were straightforward and honest, it would make consumer decisions so much easier.
But where would be the fun? In a desperate attempt to capture our attention in a world saturated with commercials, the ad men have had to work harder than ever to get us buying their product en masse. And that’s where eye-catching, mind-boggling advertising comes in. For your enjoyment, here are our pick of the Top 10 Most Insane Adverts.

10. Skittles

Let’s start one which provoked outrage as well as selling candy. The advert involved a girl making out with a walrus and being caught by another girl who thought the walrus was her own whiskery lover. It’s just Skittles’ usual surreal stuff, but it prompted a furious reaction from OneMillionMoms.com, who defend their innocent children from the sex and violence so frequently shown on our screens. You;d think they’d have enough to work through with “True Blood” alone, but no, they still have time to get incensed about a Skittles ad. They said “not only is it disgusting, it is taking lightly the act of bestiality.” Maybe in some parts of the country bestiality is a real problem and something children should be shielded from. Here, though, kids just think it’s funny. Someone kissing a walrus? What’s offensive about that?

9. Evian

Maybe the kids aren’t offended because they’re too busy rollerskating and things. After all, they start them young nowadays – just have a look at these babies! Freaking people out since 2009, these rollerskating babies are part of Evian’s  UK “Live Young” campaign, which is supposed to mean that if you drink Evian, you can adult-like things while sporting the physique of a baby. Or something like that.
The main thing is that there are babies dancing to hip-hop. On rollerskates. It’s one of those adverts which just leaves you thinking “What just happened?!” But it was an instant hit, with 4 million views on youtube in a week. And it probably sold some bottles of water too.

8. Little Baby’s Ice Cream

While we’re on the subject of babies, this ad for Little Baby’s Ice Cream was also an internet hit, with 1.5million hits in 3 days. But it was also deeply, deeply creepy, featuring a man entirely man of ice cream eating himself. Cause, yknow, their ice cream tastes so damn good that it would eat it even if it meant self-cannibalism. There were a pair of ads, the other one being an ice cream man licking a smaller ice cream man in a cone, who was also licking an even smaller ice cream man….and it pulled out to reveal that the first man was also being licked by a bigger ice cream man…and so on.
The creator of the ad describes it as “the right kind of creepy” and says “It’s pretty twisted but they are actually lobotomizing themselves as the ad proceeds”. So, if even the man who came up with the idea thinks it’s creepy and twisted, what are the rest of us meant to think? It takes a lot to put me off eating ice cream, but this might just have done it.

7. Lifebuoy

And while we’re on the “unbelievably creepy” spectrum, here’s a cute little offering from Unilever Indonesia. If you’re wondering what they’re selling, it’s hand gel. But you could be forgiven for thinking it’s some strange new Asian cuisine that you’d be expected to try if you ever visited Indonesia. After all, it’s acceptable to eat guinea pigs in South America, so maybe hamster muffins are commonplace in Asia?
Thankfully, it’s not. But the point the ad is making is that without hand gel, the germs from whatever you touched last transfer onto what you eat, hence the tagline “you eat what you touch”. But what a supremely sinister way of getting that message across…!

6. Zazoo

Time to move onto to something different, and here’s an example of the beautiful simplicity an ad can have. In this Belgian ad, a father walks through a grocery store with his child, when the child spies a bag of candy and starts throwing an almighty tantrum, screaming “I want the candy!” The father meanwhile looks on with a look of despair and resignation.
The tagline? “Use condoms”. Yes, it’s an advert for how hideous parenting is. Whoever came up with this concept obviously ignored the fact that a large proportion of people watching would be parents and might not see the funny side. But really, it is pretty funny. Remember, this could be your life. Use a condom.

5. BonoGrão

OK, so this one takes some lateral thinking, so let me walk you through it. The product is Brazilian coffee brand BonoGrão and the concept is that you want to keep lecherous, rich, old men away from gold-digging young women. Do you get the link yet? It took me a while, but look at the base of the artwork. It’s an eyeball. Which makes the old men and the young women eyelashes. And what happens when you don’t have enough caffeine? That’s right – your eyes close. And so, eyelashes come together. Which – remember  – you don’t want.
It’s a bit of a logical leap isn’t it? But apparently it made sense to someone, because there were also two other variations – one with luchadores facing off against each other, and the other one with Princesses and Prince Charmings. You don’t need to be squeamish about eyes to be freaked out by this, but it helps.

4. Panda Toaster

This one, however, takes no explaining. There is a toaster. It has pandas on it. If you make toast in it, it’ll have an imprint of a panda on it. And this is something to get very, very excited about. In typical Japanese fashion, there is a girl using the toaster as if she’s never done such a thing before, and it unleashes an army of animated dancing pandas (above). It may confuse and frighten the average Western consumer, but I can testify that babies are fascinated by it.
The advert concludes with the over-excited girl taking a delicious-looking bite out of her entirely dry toast and making the “OK” symbol. Makes you want one, doesn’t it?

3. Sprite

This was another series of interlinked ads, all building to a campaign that aimed to…sell you a soft drink. After dropping hints and mysterious passwords on a “Lost” fansite, the campaign culminated in the site sublymonal.com, which is now in German and something to do with kissing.
Along the way, there was a seriously mind-bending commercial where competing lemon and lime forces stealthily entered a house with guns and launched an attack on….a giant tongue (above). And along the way, there were some midgets in nipple-shape green and yellow hats, dive-bombing into a pool. I’m not quite sure what the point of it all, but that’s how subliminal advertising works, isn’t it?

2. McDonalds

More Japanese insanity now, for that well-known Asian brand McDonalds, specifically the SpongeBob Happy Meals. All Japanese commercials are hyper, but it seems like Japanese kids are even more excitable than their grown-up counterparts. I challenge you to watch this commercial all the way through, but it is almost entirely screaming. Sometimes it’s the boy screaming, sometimes the girl, but there is a lot of screaming. It’s only 30 seconds long, but it will feel like the longest half-minute of your life. What is it they put in that orange juice?!

1. Tango

Maybe it’s just oranges. Maybe they make people crazy. You would be forgiven for thinking that the humble, vitamin-C-packed fruit had something sinister in it after watching this British campaign from the early 90s. The idea was simple – a man drinks from a can of Tango and pauses for a second, realizing that something unusual has just happened. A rewind shows a man dressed and painted entirely in orange running up to him and slapping him about the ears, with the tagline “You know when you’ve been tango’d”
It was instantly popular (although in the days before youtube, it’s not so easy to measure) and its popularity was to lead to a ban, as schoolchildren around Britain starting punching their friends in the ears and yelling “You know when you’ve been tango’d”. Eventually, the ad was reshot and the orange man kissed the Tango drinker instead but the phrase had well and truly passed into the popular consciousness by then and it took more than a reshoot to stop those children “Tango”ing each other. For inciting a nation of children to violence, as well as the original crazy ad it is a deserving winner of the title of “Most Insane Advert Ever”