Ooh, beer commercials. They think they’re so clever. They sell beer and make men go ‘I like beer. Let’s drink a beer because we’re men who like birds’.
Oh bollocks. What’s the point? I really can’t do it. This ad is just too good. It’s an ad that, whilst it may not make you go forth and act like a tit in pubs, it does highlight that sometimes to be genuinely memorable, you have to be a teensy bit clever. Are you listening Oven Pride and webuyanycar.com?
To take a break from my usual vitirol smeared over low income earning ad execs, let us just take a seat and enjoy a minute and a half of actual television gold. It’s not clever in the truest sense, but it will make you laugh.
Enjoy. I’m off to balance the universe for this article and shave a cat.
The internet is a dangerous thing. Just asked Pete Townshend. However, what makes it more dangerous is having the misguided idea that because your child knows how to use the internet, then she should be allowed to use the internet.
Jessi Slaughter is an 11 year old child who has learnt the hard way that using the internet to broadcast how awesome you are is about as socially gratifying as making friends with Gary Glitter. Jessi AKA Kerligirl13, like many other users of youtube, had her own channel where she broadcasted all the stimulating, stored up knowledge that was coming out of her brain like a monkey punching through a wet paper bag. Mummy and Daddy meanwhile didn’t seem to care.
Jessi also published pictures of herself on the internet which were a tad, lets say, dodgy. Mummy and Daddy probably rolled their eyes and uttered ‘what is to be done with this child of ours?’
The photos started doing the rounds and a number of people on a certain forum put John Gabriel’s Internet Dickwad Theory to the test and began to send her comments on her youtube channel and, in one case, even go her telephone number. Mummy and Daddy must have been trying to catch up on the last series of 24 at the time. Obviously, if they hadn’t been they would have put an internet amnesty on the household.
Jessi responded to the ‘byatches’ that had been ‘dissing’ her by talking like a valley girl and releasing a video answering her critics.
Mummy and Daddy were completely ignorant to her ‘Put a glock in your mouth and make a brain slushee’ and ‘get AIDS and die’ comments. Had they seen the video I’m sure they would have put their foot firmly down. They may have even sat her down and explained that you don’t need to grow up so quickly nor act like Katy Perry in drama school. Maybe they would have said ‘Here’s a Barbie, go play!’.
A war of words began between 11 year old Jessi and, basically, the entire internet. Finally… FINALLY Mummy and Daddy noticed that their precious little ankle biter was upset and, during a video that would make Chris Crocker blush, Daddy let his feelings be known.
Yep, the internet is the real problem. They dun goofed up. It’s got nothing to do with parents failing to do their duty and protect their child. No, the real bad guy is broadband. Now, I’m not justifying a bunch of anons ganging up on a kid, but the fact it had to get this far for their parents to do anything is staggering. Does Daddy know about the photos of his daughter which will be doing the round sin some unsavoury circles? Probably not and if he did, it’ll probabaly be the fault of Kodak.
So, there we have it. Child pretends to be an adult, gets dissed and returns to being a child. Story over.
Except…
Except, a few hours later Jessi was back on Twitter encouraging people to come chat with her online.
My name is John Noonan. I had an accident, and I woke up in 2009. Am I mad, in a coma, or back in time? Whatever’s happened, it’s like I’ve landed on a different planet. A planet where cheap nasty marketing is classed as ‘ironic’. Now, maybe if I can work out the reason, I can get home.
Okay, that’s at least how I felt a few hours ago. I’ve just seen the Oven Pride advert for the nth time this week. Aside from the irritable nature of it and the women’s laughter at the end, which sometimes haunts me in my sleep and I often wake soaked in sweat feeling that She is going to burst into my room at any minute and beat me around the head with an oven tray, the main thing bugging me about this advert is that I’ve seen it all before. Literally.
And a quick search on Google proved to me I had. More or less a year ago, the advert was hauled before the ASA with claims of sexism and double standards. The whole debacle even made it to the Marketing magazine where their Nicola Clark dismissed it as just a bunch of men ‘moaning’ in an example of fair and balanced journalism. ASA dismissed the claims of sexism and Oven Pride cried that it was a victory for common sense, in much the same way a taxi driver claims when he’s heard that ‘the loony left are finally losing their grip on the polls. ‘Bout time. Bleeding liberals. I blame the immigrants’.
So, obviously the re-emergence of this 30 seconds of sensory torture has been some sort of deliberately planned celebration like VE day. VTV day if you will. With this sudden non-lubricated penetration back in to the public conscious, the same arguments are coming back. It’s cheap, it’s annoying, it’s sexist. The problem is that it comes across as all of these things so it makes it hard to single out the worse feature. Let’s try though shall we?
Cheap
There’s no denying there’s next to no budget on this. Part of me wonders if all those involved weren’t just students at a communication studies class putting together their next class project. There’s the underlying though that maybe the idea was filmed by the two protagonists themselves. Maybe they just dumped the camera on their breakfast table and just went for it out of some perverse desire.
‘To hell with the hot sex, let’s film ourselves cleaning an oven, Steve!’.
Look at his face when he’s shaking the tray. He was clearly voting for the former idea rather than the latter.
Annoying
Oh, I refuse to believe that there is one person out there who doesn’t think this is annoying. Those who say it isn’t are the same people who consider Heat the be all and end all of literature.
I admit, there’s a very good chance that this ad was designed to be annoying. Like the webuyanycar.com advert, it’s designed to squat in your brain and give something for Keith in finance to re-enact at the Christmas do. However, my question is, why? Why go out of your way to do this? When humankind can achieve so much, and HAS achieved so much, must we resign ourselves to only being able to sell products by punching you in the face with this tat.
‘Ah, John, but you’re writing about it!’ I hear Keith say, ‘It’s done it’s job. It’s stuck in your head’.
Keith is the same person who told me that whatever I said about Katie Price, Peter Andre and Alex Reid ‘they’ll always have made more money than you’. Yeah, one for showing her tits and the other two for being them.
The thing is Keith, Hitler’s final solution is stuck in my head. It doesn’t make what happened any less horrific and vulgar. There is a time and place for annoyance and, frankly, ads are not that place.
Sexist
Tough one this. I have been guilty of crying out ‘if the roles were reversed then this would be pulled’. Upon closer inspection, I realised that the advert manages to pen both sexes into their miserable 1950’s counterparts.
Ha ha! Look at the man! He’s stupid! He can’t clean an oven. Trust a man to be so fucking inept, eh girls? Look at the floundering bassoon. God, why doesn’t he just stop existing! They weren’t kidding when they said a women needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. Stupid men. If only they were like you women, eh? You know how to clean an oven. Course you do, you’re women. That’s what women do. You clean.
Okay, I appreciate the argument that Yorkie do a similar ‘sexist’ campaign by proclaiming that their bars are not for girls, but this is a kneejerk reaction to an ad campaign that is deliberately mocking it’s own overtly masculine campaign of the 80s.
The only way that Oven Pride could do the same is if they admitted they were mocking the overtly tackiness of the Bargain Booze campaign.
Yeah, you remember that, don’t pretend you don’t!
There is part of me that says ‘Hey! You’re missing the point. They’re just trying to stand out from the undistinguishable mass of overly glossy ads that pander to a society that requires quality at a high price’ and maybe that part of me is right. However, I think that the other factor to take into account is that my association of the product with the ad is now too tight and I refuse to buy it now under that basis that I don’t want to part with my hard earned cash on a product that seems to be sneering at me and suggesting that I champion the glass ceiling that’s holding them back.
The last time I saw a battle of the sexes in a kitchen played out through an advert that was even close to this one, was the Old El Paso ‘Arooomatic Spices’ drivel. An advert so immensely annoying that not even the internet has a copy of it. Seriously, type it into Google and see if you find it.
Remember the woman in it? ‘Did you get that? Aromatic Spices!’ I don’t think there’s even anyone on the other end of the phone. I think she’s just acting out her frustrations at a loveless marriage to an imaginary friend in the hopes that hubby will pick up on these frustrations and actually make love to her that night. Either that, or he’s become so emasculated by her constant whining that he’s actually calmly cooking her chicken in aromatic spices such as coriander, paprika and arsenic. In fact, now I come to think about, digging up this advert reminds me that there could be balance in the universe. For as long as there is Oven Pride males, there will always be Ol El Paso females.
So, on the day that Michael Jackon’s death certificate has been redone to include that little bit of news his death had something to do with a homicide, a spokeswoman for RTL has commented on their bizarre ‘Jackson is Alive’ video they released last month.
“We wanted to show how easily users can be manipulated on the internet with hoax videos. Therefore, we created this video of Michael Jackson being alive, even though everybody knows by now that he is dead – and the response was breathtaking.”
The thing is we didn’t need a tv station wasting money on a 30 second video to tell us something we already know. Setting people up with fake videos on the internet is like shooting John Belushi in a barrel. The way she talks, you’d think that the entire world had been duped. Oh how they must have chortled when they leaked the film on the net. HO HO HO! Look how everyone is falling for our scam. Except, I don’t think we did. I don’t believe anyone was taken in by this video. For a start, it was about as believable as this one:
Yes, we tuned into various websites and the news to see what this was all about but we did it because when you hear a bold claim that a dead singer is alive, you’ll tune in. If someone told you the Queen was having sex with Jude Law on Channel 4 right now, you wouldn’t believe it but a little part would be going ‘go on, let’s wathc and find out’. As soon as you got on the net or sky news to witness the ressurection of the King of Popped Clogs, they treated it with the same disdain they did when faced with a fancy dress costume in a block of ice.
In this blogger’s humble opinion, the only successful thing RTL managed to do was possibly hurt the family of Michale Jackson who watched their son’s/father’s/brother’s death used to prove a stupid, already proven point.
Well, I’m quite excited. I’m presently making my way through the fantastic Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and have been pondeirng where else they could go with it. Looks like I need ponder no longer. For here we have Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters!
Books due in September and if nothing else, this trailer has proven there is definatley a need for a P&P&Z movie. Peter Jackson get on board.
