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Ads. A necessary part of the sporting broadcast, and the sporting experience in an increasingly professionalised world.
But let’s be honest, the bad ones are universally bemoaned by any fan who has ever sat down to watch a broadcast.
There are those ads we, as sports fans, remember fondly and celebrate. They’ve been live through every summer, or every winter, and have seen us through the wins and the losses, the ups and the downs that sport in Australia gives every fan.
Things like the ubiquitous Bunnings Warehouse jingle through the summer, or the VB song that just makes you want to do some hard yakka.
Then there are the other ones… the ones that make summer drag on that little bit longer. Or make you yearn for Holden Half-time. Or those ones that you just never really understood what they were for. Or why they were the way they are.
Some are confusing. Others are downright annoying.
So thanks to Foxtel, which will be showing all the Motorsport, NRL and AFL games this year with no ads during live play, we’ve decided to come up with the absolute worst ads that all sports fans will remember with no fondness whatsoever.
Starting with…
If ever there was audiovisual proof of a child being forced into something that they really weren’t that comfortable with, this is it.
This takes us back to beach holidays, with days spent lounging in front of the cricket, golf and tennis.
But instead of thinking about how well Pete Sampras was playing, it was all about this kid and his mildly humorous pronunciation of the word ‘thirty’.
Oh child. Did they really make you do that?
But it wasn’t the worst jingle we’ve been subjected to watching sport. That award goes to…
Mute button. That’s what you scrambled for every time the advertisement filled with busy mums preparing their homes for various guests.
With Ajax spray seemingly able to shift all the rubbish off the kitchen table, the somewhat redeemable visual work of these ads was completely ruined by the ear-grating jingle that culminates in a homeowner thanking an inanimate cleaning spray.
We can’t pinpoint the precise time or place for this ad, because it’s run for over two decades in various guises.
Won’t someone make it stop?
In other things that confuse the life out of us…
Remember the tongue ad? Yeah, that one.
Only shown late at night, it’s the kind of things that sends sports-lovers to bed with nightmares.
Why is there a tongue crawling around the streets alone? Why is it somehow divorced from its owner’s mouth? Why is it going to haunt my dreams for the rest of the week?
Well, moving right along to this doozy…
You know an ad’s failed when you can’t remember who it’s for.
Everyone remembers the Goggomobil ad, but no one remembers who it’s actually for.
For the record, apparently it was advertising the Yellow Pages for some reason.
But it definitely isn’t the one that sticks out in most of our memories. That honour goes to…
Look, these might not be the most annoying ones we’ve ever seen, but they’re almost certainly the most cringeworthy.
Lowes ads have become a genre all to themselves, to the point where there is a kind of subversiveness to modern Lowes ads, which makes them even more confusing.
Not only do you have questionable acting from old rugby league players, including the relentlessly hard-to-understand Terry Hill, you have to decipher the code of pseudo Olde English they’re pretending to speak.
So yeah, we all remember Lowes ads, probably for the wrong reasons.
Then there’s this one…
We might have been too young for this one, but there’s probably some nostalgia about the things we love.
This content was brought to you by Foxtel
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