Worst Recent Car Advert – Motherhood & Fatherhood

After a brief absence (I will never write a 4-part post ever again) there are some new adverts to talk about. The most memorable are two for the Fiat 500L entitled ‘Fatherhood’ and ‘Motherhood’. You may have seen them already without even realising, but that only means their influence has been insidious.

After the click we’ll get depressed about parenting because apparently that sells cars.

 

Enterprise Car Rental - UK vs USA

Pull up your pants and pay attention. I meant underwear, not trousers, because I know exactly what you’re doing and it’s not required for this blog post. See the tricky language barrier that I just played with, between US English and International English? It’s a cliché that whenever the British and Americans talk, the subject will come up. And why not? It can be a good ice-breaker and dialogue improves international relations, as evidenced by the interactions between Brad and Dave in the adverts for Enterprise UK Car Hire (aka Enterprise Car Rental).

No? Well, come on then:

See? Comedy gold! It’s taken the advertising world a surprisingly long time to make use of this unique dynamic – or at least for it to register on my limited radar. After the click we can find out more about this hilarious comedy-duo character-act.

Vehicles with Faces - Budgie the Little Helicopter

I’ve written before about vehicles with faces, namely Thomas the Tank Engine vs Tugs. Tugs won although it never enjoyed the same success. But the work of Clearwater Studios is not the only time people have put faces on inanimate vehicles. One of my favourite Tex Avery cartoons (and there are a few) is Little Johnny Jet which is only five minutes long:

Ain’t it weird? Mr and Mrs Plane are shagging like rabbits! After the click let’s find out more about living planes, trains and cars – and also about the world’s most annoying helicopter.

Gay Adverts - The Strange Cold War

For the past year or so the advertising industry (in the US especially) has been wading into the fight for gay rights vs the sanctity of marriage or something. Adverts and brands are now banners beneath which armies gather.

Before I talk about homosexual issues I feel like I should qualify my feelings on the subject. Sexuality is like the sea: mysterious, ever-changing, nearly impossible to properly measure, quite polluted and full of sharks.

But if you’re careful you can jump those sharks

If people want to connect themselves to one another in the eyes of some mythical overlord, or in the eyes of the law (also a kind of mythical overlord) then I’m fine with it as long as they put on a good buffet and a free bar. Regardless of whether they’re bride/bride, groom/groom or groom/bride (which isn’t always a reflection of gender anyway) my only question is whether I’m invited. The answer is usually no; everyone is afraid of what I might do when exposed to limitless alcohol. Their lack of faith disturbs me.

There’s no practical reason to deny homosexual couples the same legal rights that heterosexual couples ‘enjoy’, there’s only ideological hyperbole*.

*In a decent thesaurus those two words are synonyms for ‘insane ranting’

With that seriousness out of the way, let’s get to business! Gay business! Hit the jump for some gay business!

Go Compare - Did They Kill Him?

Earlier today the countdown of the Go Compare adverts ended. They had been building up all week to something happening today, and I speculated earlier today that they would kill him - the purposefully vandalised billboard posters and the irritated viewers included at the end of every new advert, along with the countdown, seemed to point to an impending paradigm change. The advert is finally online so I can finally link to it and put you all out of your suspenseful misery.

Either follow this link to check out the theories from earlier in the day or check out the new Go Compare generation:

Now let's just do a quick review and put this all behind us (after the jump in case of spoilers)

Go Compare - Will They Kill Him?

Here's something that might make your day: for the past week or so the Go Compare adverts on TV have been counting down to something. Nobody knows what it is. There's some speculation that they will be retiring their renowned, infamous opera singer Gio Compario.

For essential therapy, print out this image and attach to a punching bag

Seek satisfaction after the click:

Cars of the Future - Part 2

A while ago I told you how car companies Smart, Renault and Nissan were all releasing electric cars this year. Electric cars with realistic range and power, not just token gestures for showrooms and trade expos. We examined the adverts and ultimately concluded that I want a spaceship. But it has to be a good spaceship with faster-than-light travel and everything.

This will also suffice

Anyway, the paradigm shift continues after the click!

Cars of the Future

If a car isn’t burning precious natural resources and clogging the lungs of small children with noxious, cancerous tar then what good are they? You might as well be on a bicycle! So who the hell would buy an electric car? What kind of pathetic loser would you have to be to get rid of your huge pedestrian-cruncher or midlife-crisis-mobile? What, are you going to ride a bus like some kind of peasant? How will anyone know how big your cock is, unless you drink diesel like lemonade and tear down the road like a bull making sweet, sweet love to a lion – deep and noisy.

...and sensual.

After the click we'll find out about the other, correct side of the argument.

Superbowl Advert Recap 2012

It’s only been a day, at the time of writing, since some kind of major sporting event finished in the US. I gather it’s called the Superbowl, and like all major sporting events it involves huge amounts of money floating through the air, invisible, above our heads. It changes hands between sponsors, building contractors, ticket vendors, event caterers, local government, wholesale food warehouses, security firms, media broadcasters, merchandise manufacturers, law firms to arrange and broker these deals and stock-market analysts to analyse the stock-market impact of all these transactions.

I guess there’s also something about some sportsmen doing something on a field with a weirdly shaped ball or something, but it hardly seems relevant at this point. I’m a Brit living in the UK and I don’t even follow proper football or rugby, let alone the infantile, specially-padded offspring of the two.

Nevertheless, all that money zooming around produces ADVERTS! Some of the best adverts ever produced by Western culture, maybe even all of humanity. You can see a collection of this year’s Superbowl Adverts here, but let’s talk about some of the most interesting after the click.

The Toyota Yaris Adverts

Enough long-winded theoretical nonsense about time travel. I have some more adverts to complain about! This time it’s the stupid Toyota Yaris rappers. If you’ve not seen them, then yes – for some reason, there are three separate adverts for the Toyota Yaris that all feature a 30-40 second rap tune. It gets weirder. 

I’ll tell you now I don’t know anything about music, let alone cool music. I know the general history of rap music, from the ‘golden age’ of the 90s to how they added ‘rhythm’ to the blues in a kind of secret underground laboratory sometime during the 20^th century. I also know that a ‘gravel pit’ somehow refers to a lady’s… sex bits…? Probably? But apart from that I’m pretty clueless.

I try to avoid getting too krunk these days, but I still love me some bitches

What I do know is adverts. The beats might be phat, they might be spitting lyrics like lightning for all I know, but that doesn’t sell cars. Also, in all three the singer-rapper-people-folk are cartoons. For some reason. Cartoons. It still gets even weirder, after the click!

This is where Josh took over

If you’re reading this, then you’re reading it in the future. Probably not so far in the future that you’re reading it in a flying car, while a robot massages your erogenous zones, but you’re certainly not reading it today. This means you read an article on this blog which hasn’t been written yet, from my perspective. It means you liked it so much that you decided to read through the archives. Congratulations, you have excellent taste.

It also means two more things. One possibility is that you’ve been clicking from previous article to previous article, reading backwards through individual posts, lured on step by step by my charm and wit. Congratulations, the proper flow of time means nothing to you now, and you’ve been procrastinating so long that whatever you needed to do is probably no longer relevant. The second possibility is that at some point, you decided to go all the way to the very beginning and read forwards. You’ve just committed to reading over one hundred years’ worth of blog posts, you poor fool (depending on when you’re from).

So you’ll either have been confused, or will be confused very shortly. See, all the posts prior to this one were written by Henneth; my good friend, helicopter pilot, waffle cook and occasional unicorn wrangler. This was a watershed moment, when the blog changed hands. For the sake of continuity and narrative, I’ll say this: Hello, my name is Josh.

To me, the name One Click Too Many implied that I should not only bring you the successful, professional stories that Henneth used to write, but also information that made you wish you could Ctrl+Z your brain. It sounded like a place we can confess the things we found when we surfed too far in the wrong direction. A place where you can find safety after being driven crazy by that one link you shouldn’t have clicked.

So, I’m sorry about doing that to your brain. But you’re partly to blame too. You helped build this. Without you and your precious page views, dear reader, how could I have grown an audience of millions, an empire of flying cars and an army of sex-robots.