Domino's Adverts: Corporate Trolling In Ad Format
Plus Cadbury's Creme Eggs gooing themselves, Super Fresco making it easy and news of a cult potato outlet.
Another Friday, thank Crunchie. I’m looking for help identifying the worst adverts of the Tweenies (2010-2019). You can read the rundown on last week’s newsletter and vote here when you’ve made up your mind, so we can identify an advert of truly appalling badness it could be classed as a non-lethal weapon.
Without further ado, on with the motley…
Domino’s advert
It’s not so long since the airwaves were packed with adverts that were explicitly designed to annoy. That trend seems to have largely disappeared, but there’s always one, eh? Domino’s Pizza – pound-for-pound the most expensive material in the known universe after anti-matter – fulfils the same function in my life as service stations and Wetherspoons toilets: usually something related to my stomach and only when absolutely unavoidable.
This alleged takeaway business, which seems largely in the business of delivering cold food matter incorrectly and several weeks late, certainly has chutzpah. In the latest installations featuring the infuriating Domino’s yodel – a sound even worse than listening to Julia Hartley-Brewer achieve orgasm – the company delivers some steaming hot pizza to three castaway guys at the mere sound of the summoning cry.
To anyone who has waited, fruitlessly, for their very expensive pizzas from this company to turn up only for it arrive colder than the icy heart of Dominic Raab and all squashed against one side of the pizza box like Harry Redknapp’s face, the yodelling adverts where piping hot pizzas show up faster than Tommy Robinson at a terrorist atrocity are like corporate trolling in ad format.
From The Vaults: Cadbury’s Creme Eggs Jizzing All Over The Place
It’s Easter, the time whenJesus rises from the grave, daffodils are in full bloom and, oh, yes, we eat lots of Cabury’s Creme Eggs. I dug this one out as a result – oe of the most extraordinary campaigns ever seen. Almost like it was on a filth frequency so high the Advertising Standards Authority couldn’t see it.
I quite like these adverts for Cadbury’s Creme Eggs that go under the Goo Dares Wins banner. And I quite like Cadbury’s Creme Eggs (I’m always banging on about Cadbury’s adverts – what do I have to do to get some freebies here?).
I think they’re cheeky and funny and different. The adverts that is. Creme Eggs themselves are the most sickly foodstuff imaginable. They’re like little sugar bombs wrapped in chocolate and, I dunno, filth.
But, y’know what, there’s a bit of a problem with them really. Because there’s a bit of a naughty meme at work here. The eggs work themselves up into frenzies of excitement upon seeing things on screen that excite them, such as men having their chests roughly waxed.
And then, and there’s no delicate way of putting this, they ejaculate. All over the place. They jizz absolutely everywhere, like a pornstar after lent. All over themselves, all over each other, all over the camera. They spunk all over the shop. It’s utter, utter filth.
This has been, um, coming for a while. For years Creme Eggs have taken an orgasmic pleasure in splattering themselves all over the screen in suicidal money shots. Go back a few years and Creme Egg advertising was a tad more innocent. There’s still a definite frisson to “How do you eat yours?” but it’s hardly the same as spraying muck everywhere is it?
Back to the current campaign, somehow connected to the London 2012 Olympics, and the Creme Eggs can even be encouraged to perform their climactic self-immolation by your unlikely dares, to which the eggs will duly commit spermy seppuku on their latest advert. The Youtube channel is called… GooTube.
Here’s ad director Michael Patrick Jann explaining – possibly without a straight face – the thinking behind the Goo Dares Wins campaign:
“These Creme Eggs are great comic characters. They’re anarchic, adorable little morsels of yummy goo; chocolaty rascals sporting no self-preservation instincts whatsoever. In my mind, they feed off watching these dares they commission. It borders on mania for them. It fuels them like some weird narcotic, and deep down in their candied yolks they know it will ultimately lead to their destruction. Yet still, they seek it out. They simply can’t help themselves. Theirs is a hilarious adventure of ecstatic pleasure leading to the ultimate act of . . . Gooing themselves “
So there you are. Happy Easter, don’t goo yourself.
Cult Potato Outlet Bounces Back
News reached me that celebrity carrot-chopper and cyclist-botherer James Martin is the man behind an unlikely expansion across Scotland of baked-potato vendors Spud U Like (described in one article as a ‘cult potato outlet’).
When I’d recovered from this revelation I cast my mind back to, ooh, about 1983, which is when I last heard of the heated tuber retailers: the restaurant that only served jacket potatoes. It’s lost in the mists of time, like Wimpy and Happy Eater, in my mind anyway. Maybe I'm just a metropolitan elite.
Spud U Like. What an extraordinary name for a restaurant. What else was on the cards? It got me wondering. Master-tater? Carbella? The Ides Of Starch? Pomme de Fare? Greatie-Tatie? Spudding Lane?
Anyway, following a bit of research I was startled to discover that SpudULike was - at one time owned by the British School of Motoring (what?) and that they later bought out a rival potato company called Fat Jackets.
I am not making this up, though I appreciate it sounds like something from a Partridge book that Alan might recount while detailing his love for Spud U Like.
What Old Ad Jingles Have Lodged In Your Mind?
I found myself singing the jingle from this advert the other day - even down to the little pipe-organ jingle at the end. I was only six when this was out - and it's probably 35 years since I heard the bloody thing.
The main appeal of Super Fresco wallpaper by Graham & Brown seems to be… that it comes off the wall easily...? Anyway, this is based on the song Spinning Wheel by Shirley Bassey and was apparently sung by Joe Fagin, who older AdTurders may remember from the Auf Wiedersehen Pet theme tunes...
Nuggets
🚆 The railway car buffet and trolleys are on their way out. Over on Twitter Pulp Librarian mourned them via some vintage adverts.
🥣 Cheetos, Tetris, Poptarts… Fondness for nostalgic brands is driving a strange new trend in Hollywood
💩 This weird story about Adrian Chiles having a NSFW lookalike is still doing the rounds. It’s a Sunday Sport effort, which is another way of saying it’s completely made up, but the media insists on pretending it’s real for clicks. Here are some of the Sport’s previous efforts, if you’re in any doubt:
Ed Miliband lookalike is Britain's hardest bouncer
Safari horror as Newcastle fan bummed to death by zebra
Dwarf Gordon Ramsay lookalike pornstar found dead in badger den half eaten
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