Badvertising

Eat, Turn, Uncho! Greedily! Thank you!

Of course there’s no nation on Earth with a monopoly on baffling, pointless, annoying, off-putting and inept advertising. The advertising industry as a whole is one of the things that the planet would be better off without, the unscrupulous deceiving the unwary. In my experience, though, there’s no inexplicably bad advert like an inexplicably bad Asian advert. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s often because the product being advertised is a solution to a problem that nobody in their right mind thinks is a problem. That’s the case in the following advertisement, for the “Unchoken Lucky Dog” money box. Tortured puns are quite common in Japanese product naming. This one doubles up on kanji for “lucky saving dog” and “unko” (poo). Yes, basically the dog eats your coins and then craps them out into a hole. I’m not sure where we’re meant to understand the luck coming into play. Is it lucky to save coins in a money box, or is it lucky for the dog that it’s able to safely and painlessly excrete small change?

This doesn’t work with real dogs. Don’t make the same mistake I did.

Recipe for a Japanese promotional video: too much text (include some mangled Japlish to confuse native English speakers and Japanese people alike, obviously), show the same action over and over again, random Street Fighter sound effects, hi-NRG music bed from the mid 1990s. All present and correct here.

She fell in love when he glued a beard on

Gentlemen, are you humiliated by your lack of prissy, overly-managed, wispy facial hair? Do ladies dismiss you out of hand because you know nothing of postiche? If so, it’s time for Propia Make Up Hair Contact Hige… and frankly you deserve to be shouted at by a man who sounds like a particularly psychotic gym teacher.

I imagine if women are hanging off you as seen in this video, there’s a good chance one of them may end up with a goatee glued to their forehead or tangled in their hair or something. As the advert says, the possibilities are INFINITE.

“Ah. This, is the. SSD. I’ve heard of it.”

Finally an effort from South Korea’s Samsung, which has been so roundly mocked on Reddit and elsewhere that the company seems to have twigged that it’s damaging them. Although I can almost guarantee they still don’t understand why it’s damaging them. Watch this mirror of it (below) while you can. Presumably it’s either aimed at Korean sophisticates or was made in simultaneous blind hope and total ignorance of the international market, because it’s in something only resembling English and featuring people who only resemble Westerners. You may think that the product being advertised is a new type of android that can almost pass for human, but in fact it’s promoting a solid state disc drive.

The three individuals here speak as if they have a concussion, they don’t know who they are and they’re reading from a card taped five feet to the right of the camera. “Ah. This, is the. SSD. I’ve heard of it.” Of course the woman– if that’s what she really is– doesn’t need a laptop and an advanced SSD because she just looks at pictures of her family and helps her children with their homework. If only she could remember their names. Her lady brain also cannot comprehend the components inside her laptop, or how to use a screwdriver.

More random magic sounds, too!

“I’d love to have the Samsung SSD 840 EVO…” because in the real world people always spell out the complete manufacturer’s name, nomenclature and model number when they’re in love with a product.