I like advertising. It’s what lets magazines like FORBES employ writers like me. Sometimes it’s even enjoyable.
But, lord, when it’s bad, it’s so bad. A crappy movie you’ll only have to sit through once; a crappy commercial you might have to endure ten times in the course of a single football game. or stare at for 20 minutes on your subway commute every day for six months. Because of that forced repetition, an ad that’s merely not good the first time you experience it can quickly come to feel homicide-justifyingly awful.
The ads featured below aren’t, in fact, the year’s worst. You won’t find, for instance, Summer’s Eve’s ethnic talking vaginas, unarguably one of the colossal marketing missteps of 2011. these are just the ads that got into my head, in a bad way, like that apocryphal spider that laid eggs in the brain of that girl who went to your summer camp. I apologize in advance for making you look at them.
“Jack & Jill” Poster
What I hate about it: Adam Sandler‘s face. No actual human being has ever made that facial expression (the one on Jack, not Jill). I’ve spent many long minutes waiting for my train to come, gazing at this poster, trying to puzzle out exactly what mix of emotions Sandler is meant to be conveying here. I think it’s something along the lines of “exasperated with my annoying twin sister, but also laughing a little at how hilarious I just know you’re going to find this movie!”
Toyota Highlander, “Scatter”
What I hate about it: The values. Childhood status anxiety is entirely real, and it’s not cute. It’s sad. The correct parental response to it isn’t to buy into the screwed up underlying pathology by dropping $30,000 on an SUV. It’s to explain to your child, kindly and patiently, that little Joey only has that cool car because Joey’s mommy caught Joey’s daddy having sleepovers with Joey’s babysitter.
(N.B. Technically this ad came out in late 2010, but I didn’t see it until 2011. Also, it’s so odious I’m not going to let it off the hook on a technicality.)
“Horrible Bosses” poster
What I hate about it: The redundancy. I already know these three characters are, respectively, a psycho, a maneater and a tool. how do I know that? Because their pictures tell me so. Advertising is, like filmmaking, a visual medium. The creator of this ad gave me plenty of information visually, then lost his nerve and decided to add captions. When a comedy is already explaining its jokes to me before I’ve even bought a ticket, that’s a bad sign.
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