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...
Confused.com - Chain Reaction
Confused.com is a website designed to help confused britons navigate their options when it comes to car insurance.
Back in the early 2010s, they made a series of ads featuring their frazzled cartoon mascot Cara Confused singing along to classic tunes. It doesn't have much to do with car insurance, but the music is catchy enough, and the animation style would actually be pretty cute...if not for all the gratuitously-bouncing cartoon breasts.
In addition to Cara, the ads also feature a buxom Black woman named Bertha— who is somehow able to pull ice cream from her cleavage. But Bertha is just the most blatant example of this series' breast obsession.
More or less all the cartoon women in the Confused.com commercials have absurdly bouncy busts. Why? Either to hypnotize you into buying car insurance, or because these commercials were animated by and for 14-year-old boys...who are also in the market for car insurance.
Now go buy stuff.
- "Peloton Husband" Is Using His Girlfriend for Self-Promotion - Popdust ›
- The Dystopian Hellscape of the Charmin Bears Commercials ... ›
