We should start a thread about the most annoying TV pitchmen. How about that weird UPS white board guy?
Casting a vote for those ridiculous *vikings* in the Capitol One credit card ads -- they don't really want to know what's in my wallet.
Branching out from individual pitch men, the most annoying ads are:
Got Milk? For years, I could not figure out how this ad campaign made money for milk producers, since it advertised one of the more annoying aspects of milk. Then I found out it was a government sponsored ad campaign, meaning it didn't have to actually respond to market forces.
Anything from the Ad Council. Whether it's the ad where the woman makes her daughter climb a tree full of bees or the one where the kid has asthma "I don't want to feel like a fish out of water" or the frankly offensive one where some guy does all the racial stereotype phone calls trying to rent an apartment. If it's from the Ad Council, it's trying to make you feel guilty or convince you that anything that happens to you is because someone else is prejudiced.
Generally, the one's that REALLY make me mad are the radio ads where they play the sound of a car wreck or a siren. I'm driving along, minding my own business and hear a "CRASH!" I jerk around looking for the wreck and then hear some bozo trying to sell something. I make a mental note never to do business with those guys.
One of the ones that has always been funny to me is the ads that Time used to do to sell subscriptions. They'd send the most misleading ads in the world, guaranteeing that you'd already won some great prize. Whenever I saw these ads, I always thought, "Why the H#LL would I get a subscription to a "news" magazine when their sales pitch includes blatant lies?"
With the Big 12 breaking up, I went to the Sports Illustrated site to check out the latest (usually don't go there) and there are the ads for an Apple iPad for $23 if you sign up for some ad infested marketing campaign. Nice to know Time Inc. hasn't changed.
On Hulu, I recently saw a new type of deceptive ad. It was for a goofy comedian (I won't give his name, but he apparently had some kind of HBO show as one point in time.) Anyway, the commercial, which was supposedly selling a comedy DVD, was just a commercial for Obamacare. His jokes were things like "The Republicans think Obama is evil because he wants you to have health care! The Republicans really just want you to die!" Not kidding. That was really the commercial. Anyway, seemed pretty clever to me, as it was a political ad, but was posing as something else. This allows the agency to make claims like "The other side wants you to die!" without having to face the political flak if they did it in a political ad.