It’s New Year’s Day. Literally the very first day of 2012, and as if to agree with all the plankton claiming that this year will be the end of the world, I’m already compelled to write about one of the worst ads ever to exist.
I’ll set the scene for you, because it won’t seem as bad without the context.
I was sitting on the sofa in my pyjamas. It had just gone 7pm on New Year’s Day, and I was quietly enjoying the second-to-last day of my Christmas holiday, watching trash TV (Come Dine With Me).
Then, without warning, an ad started that never seemed to end. It was a dire, dire song which I eventually realised was being sung by Mis-Teeq refugee Alesha Dixon. It featured middle-aged women dancing and lip-syncing embarrassingly. It had cringe-making lyrics about ‘checking me out’ and ‘do-do-doing it our way’. And dear god did it ever go on.
Through our grimaces, Andrew and I tried to guess what brand it might be for. My first guess was Weight Watchers because of all the saccharine female positivity (unless I’m mistaken, there is precisely ONE man in the whole ad), but it also brought Coca-Cola to mind because of the excessive repetition of the word ‘always’.
As it turns out, it IS for Weight Watchers. And worse, it’s by the former advertising glitterati at Saatchi and Saatchi London.
This is probably a good time to let you watch the ad. You don’t have to watch all of it (unlike those of us it was forced upon):
And it really was forced: this monstrosity was played on all commercial channels between 6.45 and 7pm today. But why?
Andrew makes the excellent point that you don’t NEED to advertise weight-loss strategies on the first of January. Early January is the one time no-one needs to be reminded that they’re a bit podgy – it’s on all of our minds after the excesses of Christmas. Are Saatchi’s really going to show their client the inevitable enormous upswing in registrations and try to put it down to their ad?
You can make an argument that while people don’t need to be told to look for a weight-loss strategy, they might need to be reminded of Weight Watchers. Fine, I get that. And I get the ‘real women’ angle, borrowed from Dove, which staffed the video with actual Weight Watchers dieters. But why the godawful song? Didn’t Saatchi’s staff see the lampooning meted out to SapientNitro after their similarly toe-curling YouTube ditty?
Apparently not. And moreover, why Alesha Dixon? She’s never been fat. She’s never used Weight Watchers, or needed to. And she represents both Fitness First and Strictly Come Dancing – strongly suggesting that any desirability in her figure comes from exercise and movement, not carefully totting up how many ‘ProPoints’ her lunch is worth or chugging down low-calorie milkshakes.
Overall, this is a diabolical start to UK advertising in 2012. I hope it gets better – surely it can’t get much worse.
Edit: Does the tune remind anyone else of Miley Cyrus’s ‘Party in the USA’? There’s a definite similarity.
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Tags: agencies, fail, marketing, saatchi & saatchi, TV, TV ads, YouTube
