Back in the days when The Guide was a chunky A5 newspaper supplement rather than this sleek digital newsletter, it ran a column called The Hard Sell where, every week, a TV advertisement would get a gentle shoeing by a writer. Any ad that was particularly egregious would make an appearance – celebs whispering about perfume, ads for whisky companies where everyone is having fun “responsibly” rather than drinking themselves into a stupor, Kevin Bacon shouting about 5G. There were certain recurring themes that would crop up, too – there was a period where 90% of adverts seemed to feature a Yorkshire man reading a poem (“this is for the dreamers, the strivers, the deep sea divers … visit sandalsholidays-dot-com for more”, that sort of thing). And who can forget the betting site reign of terror of the mid 00s, when braying lads with nicknames like The Gut Truster roamed the land, barking odds at whichever consumer had the misfortune of encountering them.
The Hard Sell was retired in 2017, but if it was still continuing today there is one trend that would dominate. I’m talking of course about excessive advert dancing. In 2023 it is impossible to survive an ad break – be it terrestrial or on streaming – without being assailed by someone witlessly bouncing around or waving their arms about like Joey from Friends. Mostly they involve members of the public, or people pretending to be them, dancing goofily to dance hits of years gone by.
The most egregious example is We Buy Any Car’s hideous series of ads involving various people breaking into a jig to the tune of Nightcrawlers’s 90s dance hit Push the Feeling On upon selling their old bangers. Then there’s Hey Car’s spots, with their car dealers dancing in a showroom, Zopa Bank’s pair of anthropomorphic air fresheners bopping about, and the older gentleman sauntering around with a loo roll in the NHS’s (admittedly very worthwhile) bowel cancer screening ads. Plus, in a rare sighting of the awkward dancing trend intersecting with the celeb hawking something trend’, there’s Daniel Craig tangoing with a bottle of Belvedere vodka (this one arguably gets a pass, being a well-choreographed piece of work rather than a man doing the worm in a car showroom forecourt.).
This trend, I should add, is distinct from the dancing ad trend of the early 2010s, which involved skilled professional performers rather than tax solicitors from Ipswich. That trend I didn’t have a problem with: it’s nice to see someone displaying masterful control of their own body, and if we’re going to have products rammed down our throats for five minutes every quarter of an hour, let us at least witness something genuinely impressive in the process.
But amateur ad dancing is not impressive: instead it brings to mind, with a shudder, my own two-left-footedness on club dancefloors across the country. There are few things worse than having to watch someone dance badly, and with a sinister rictus grin spread across their face to boot. I find it genuinely chilling.
There’s an air of desperation, too, to these adverts. Many of them are hawking car insurance or price comparison websites – painfully uninteresting products that require an awful lot of heavy lifting to build name recognition with consumers. (It’s why comparethemarket.com has constructed a decade-long meerkat-based storyline that, by now, has become more difficult to follow than Twin Peaks.) And many of them are having to contend with a cultural environment where adverts do not have the primacy they once did: the days of 23 million people tuning in to see the conclusion of Renault’s “Papa, Nicole” spots are long gone. Today, thanks to platforms like Netflix or Disney+, people are used to avoiding adverts altogether. And if they do encounter ads, they’re usually accompanied with a skip button, or a little timer indicating how many seconds of adverts they have to sit through before they can actually watch what they tuned in for in the first place. Adverts are treated as something to try and avoid at all costs – no wonder the TV ad market is projected to shrink by 5% in 2023.
In this climate then it’s perhaps understandable that adverts are trying to do everything they can to frantically grab your attention. I just wish they’d do so without flailing around like clowns. Leave that to the real amateurs – like me.
