Orangina and Samsung lose at advertising

Thursday 7th of August, 2008

Okay, talking about bad TV advertising isn't exactly original — but seriously, the current batch is just too terrible for words.

Firstly, there's the insanely badly judged Orangina advert. Is this what we're doing now — freaky octopus women and anthropomorphic mice juicing citrus fruits on their breasts? It's obviously a strange conundrum — while I've never been prudish, I do loathe obvious misogyny, and if this video was made with real actors I'd be pretty shocked. So is it supposed to be better that it's been turned into some kind of CGI Furry soft porn?

So Orangina is both weird and disturbing. My real scorn, however, is reserved for this train wreck from Samsung. Fine, it's the run-up to a major sporting event, so we should be expecting a whole bunch of terrible Olympic-related crap from the sponsors. But this might just be the most appalling promotional line I have ever heard in my life:

“ When your Samsung Tocco touchscreen mobile connects you to your Olympic spirit, imagination lives ”

Was this just a bad translation from the original Dickish? Between the vileness of this meaningless marketing-speak, and the blandness of the actual idea itself (oh, DJ Eurostar is playing an exclusive live set using only his Samsungs and his elite team of Nathan Barleys), I find myself dying a little every time it comes on.

Whenever I see an awful advert, I always take a moment to imagine how that advert came to be in front of me. Invariably, I see a meeting room in London with a vast glass table, a lot of adman stereotypes, and a whiteboard on an easel. And I think about how many people must have thought this was a good idea for it to have made it onto my TV. A lot of the time — with the confused.coms and easy credit solutions — I know that it's not really their fault. There's no budget, and the last thing they want is to challenge their audience.

But this advert has broken that little routine. Because I cannot, however much I try, imagine the people who are so disconnected from real, actual culture that they thought this would connect with people.

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