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?
Well, maybe not anything... Sometimes commercials try so hard to achieve that memorable or viral effect that they veer into strange and disturbing territory. They stop being little tributes to capitalism and become vivid flashes of madness.
These 11 ads took that attention-grabbing ethos to strange and upsetting new heights. Maybe they were hoping for the kind of quirky virality that Old Spice has made iconic. What they got instead was...
Alinamin V - Arnold Schwarzenegger Japanese Commercials
In addition to general weirdness, another highlight of Japanese commercials is the use of western celebrities reciting phonetic Japanese in incomprehensible scenarios. In this series of Alinamin V energy drink ads, Arnold Schwarzenegger lends his genie alter-ego to a variety of bizarre situations.
Highlights include a bottle of energy drink transforming into a scantily clad woman before the Arnold-genie bursts from her head, laughing maniacally. In another ad, Arnold is accused of groping a woman on a crowded train, but then he drinks his energy drink, transforms into the genie, and destroys the train while, again, laughing maniacally. So...problem solved?
Now go buy stuff.
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