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...
Workplace Safety and Insurance Board - There Are no Accidents
If surreal horror doesn't do it for you, how about hyper-realistic gore? That's what everyone likes to see between reruns of Trailer Park Boys, right?
That's apparently what Ontario's WSIB thought when they made this series of workplace safety PSAs. In each installment a worker happily lays out all the negligence that led them to be gruesomely injured or killed. If Final Destination and OSHA had a baby, it would look like these commercials.
Now go buy stuff.
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