Sunday 11 March 2012

Today's Review: Adverts Featuring An Ensemble Of Regular People Singing

There seems to have been an epidemic of these things lately. On the way home yesterday I was treated to a radio ad for Morrisons, a supermarket chain, in which several "regular joes" participated in a singalong to a well known tune. I can't quite remember what it was, I was just spending the time wondering why on earth being forced to listen to people singing would make me want to go and buy my groceries from a particular chain.

It started out innocently enough. These mass singalongs had purpose, they brought people together to convey a message about the product or company. Here, for example, is a T Mobile produced singalong flash mob to promote the togetherness that the network can provide:


But apparently that ad fared quite well, because before long everyone was doing it, regardless of the message they were trying to convey. We have endless ads featuring regular people crowding together to go to places, singing feel good songs and trying to inspire us to buy products through a sense of national togetherness. Well, I ain't buying it. Sure, a bit of patriotism isn't a bad thing, but that doesn't mean I feel a sense of national pride when I hear a bunch of members of the public brutalising an otherwise good song by singing it segmented and off key. Here's the latest in the line of wonderful singalong ads, released by Cadbury to "inspire" our athletes in the Olympics. I was stuck watching this in front of a video on the internet, and the damn thing was longer than the video I wants to watch:


Isn't that just great? A bunch of people screeching into microphones at radio stations as if people are actually encouraging this. If I were a British athlete and woke up to that noise in the early morning, I'd throw my event at the games, and when they asked me what went wrong in the interview afterwards, I'd lay the blame solely on Cadbury and their stupid advertising.

Call me an unpatriotic jerk all you want, but if these people were on The X Factor we'd be laughing them off the stage. Just stop this madness, people. Hearing regular people screeching on TV will not inspire me to buy your product.

My rating: 0/5

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