Friday 15 August 2008

Moonpig.com, possibly the worst advert in the world?

Isn't it almost precisely the most hateful advertisement to disgrace the world of Commercial Television? 

I know I've ranted in the past about the hateful nature of adverts that don't tell you what they're supposed to be selling. The Moonpig ad is definitely NOT one of them. Oh no.... appearing as a perverse form of punctuation are the words Moonpig  dot com. No, in the land of the poorly drawn pig, there are no commas, no full stops, no exclamation marks, just the words moonpig dot com. Imagine that was normal...

Hello mooonpigdotcom I have come to repossess your sofa moonpigdotcom I moonpigdotcom m sorry moonpigdotcom you really should have kept up with the repayments Mrs Smith moonpigdotcom

What's worse is the fact that the words are not said, they're sung, badly. How hard would conversation be if the world really was as it appears to be in these hideous adverts?

Now let's look at what they're peddling. It would appear that all the crummy greetings cards in the world have been collected together in one place, cards just as they were sold in my local post office when I was about seven, with jokes that weren't particularly funny even then. Then of course, being as this is a dot com company they let you customise the cards. Lucky recipient, he or she gets a shitty card and to top it off, his name is there emblazoned upon the cackness. Even more insulting, they  don't even get a card sent personally by the sender, no, Moonpig send it direct to the recipient, removing all effort on the part of the well wisher, kind of the Internet equivalent of the boss getting his secretary to buy all the presents for his family. Thankfully I've never been the recipient of a moonpig card, so I can't be drawn on the quality of the printing, but really I suspect that it's the equivalent of setting your lexmark to draft mode an printing it on a sheet of 80gsm that you fold up roughly square before bunging it in an envelope that you've tucked the flap inside.

The advert works well enough, you see the product, you certainly do know what the name of the company is so it's all boxes ticked in Alan Sugar's book of advertising. Pity it's such a fucking stupid name, I mean what in the name of all things good and holy does moonpig have to do with greetings cards? You could say what the hell does Currys have to do with electrical goods, but there was once a Mr Curry, who flogged the great and good some bicycles and then the odd radio. Is someone going to tell me that Mr Moonpig and his wife Millicent have started a company? And no, I haven't heard of the Moonpigs of Nether Wallop, and neither have you. I just looked the name up on Ancestry dot com, and there weren't any. So ner! Worse still, or possibly not worse, but at least just as bad as the name is the logo. Look at it there as it grins at you, the head of a happy pig pickled in a goldfish bowl sat next to the chalk outline of a recently murdered half eaten biscuit, and then drawn by an inept blind man with rudimentary  computer skills using a ZX-81.

Not since the last time an advert pissed me off this much has an advert pissed me off this much, and I can't see it being equalled till the next time I get annoyed by crummy advertising. I'll be glad to see the back of it!

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Quite! But if you want to read about a time when ads weren't so infuriating (some of them were actually very funny) and the crazy time idiot admen had making them, then read my book: 'Get Smashed! The Story of the men who made the ads that changed our lives.'

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Get-Smashed-Story-Adverts-Changed/dp/0340922516/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1219061492&sr=1-1

Irritating people who post shameless ads on people's blogs? Maybe that could be your next subject to rant about?

Anonymous said...

I hate the beginning of the current adverts at the moment:

* Supposed toff bloke from the past: "I say old chap, did you know Moonpig..." etc.

* Awful fake Brummie accent accompanying rubbish drawing: "Moonpig offer a mindboggling..." etc ad nauseum.

David said...

Amen,

Someone report them to ofcom for crimes against humanity. Hateful, hateful advert. I will never purchase any of their rubbish products, purely off the back of that ad.

/ARGH

Lucy said...

Couldn't agree more.

I shamefully admit to using them too. I hunted for hours to find a decent card, as you say, they all look like petrol station cards. The best part of all was that the card was 5 days late.

I've since found another less irritating company: cardbored cards

www.cardbored.com

They range isnt very big, and they dont personalise (which personally I think is really impersonal anyway), but the cards are great, and mine have always rolled up on time.

That my way of responding to an irritating ad. Flick over the tv, and then find another company to use... that'll learn'em.