Culture Feature

11 of the Weirdest Commercials of All Time

Most commercials only want your money. These want your sanity.

In the world of advertising, grabbing the viewer's attention is key.

Sure, you could just list off the benefits of whatever you're selling in a straightforward manner, but is that going to leave an impression?

You want your audience to take notice. You want to keep them thinking about your ad for days and weeks afterward — to infect their brains with a little consumerist parasite that reminds them to cough up their money in pursuit of a false sense of fulfillment. So anything you can do to make your ad stand out from the crowd is a good thing, right?

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Culture Feature

15 Classic Commercials to Trigger Your '90s-Kid Nostalgia

Let these distilled doses of 1990s advertising take you back to a simpler time, when pizza came on a bagel and hair came in a can.

Chia Head 1990s

Photo from: Screenshot of Chia Head 1990s commercial/ Youtube.com

The field of advertising is designed to plant its simple ideas deep inside your subconscious.

As a result, your brain is overflowing with jingles, images, and snippets of commercial dialogue that you absorbed like a sponge through the hundreds of hours of TV you watched in your childhood.

While this has probably crowded out useful knowledge and skills like your CPR training, or the name of that cousin you see every few years, it does have the bonus of tapping straight into nostalgia. Short of the smell of your childhood home, there is probably nothing better than an old commercial to transport you back in time, away from the horrors and crises of the present.

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CULTURE

This Haunts Me: The Insane Body Horror of Gushers Commercials

Turning into a banana is pretty terrifying.

Betty Crocker

Children's food advertising in the 1990s ran on pure fumes of lunacy and the genuine belief that kids desired to eat colorful things that would irreversibly mutate their bodies.

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