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Clive Whittingham waxes ever lyrical on the world cup ads...

Posted: July 11th 2010
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Christ this thing's nearly over. One more game and then it's back to normality for the football fans of Great Britain. Nothing but soaps and documentaries about people who weigh more than their house to occupy the evening television schedules for the next month until Richard Keys returns hyping up Monday night football between Blackburn and Stoke.

To be honest I won't be sad to see the World Cup go. It's been the worst one I can remember personally - not only because of England's shambolic performances but also the standard of games which have been badly affected by the flight of the ball itself and dominated by teams who either keep possession for long periods without ever actually going anywhere with it thereby boring their opponents into submission or sides of limited ability who simply form a flat back ten holding hands across the edge of the area and hope to nick one from a corner at the other end.

Off the pitch the coverage has been dominated by patronising clap trap towards the African continent as a whole with endless clips of orphanages, pundits who can barely string a sentence together brought in because they lived in Senegal or Ghana for the first few years of their lives and some unfathomable belief that the entire world went into mourning the day Ghana got knocked out. Such was the over the top reaction to Uruguay's victory I half expected every slow motion musical montage of the missed Ghanaian penalties to be overlaid by Michael Buerk: "Dawn......"

The end of the coverage will see our pundits return to the status of pundits, rather than political commentators, and will also see the World Cup adverts disappear from our screens. Sport can be used to sell anything. Back in the day if you wanted to sell something you stuck it in front of a blazing cornfield, now you stick it in the hand of a sports star - although as Gillette have discovered this can be a touch risky as sports stars are liable to cheat or stick their cock somewhere they shouldn't bringing damage to the brand.

Companies love a bandwagon rolling by, and the World Cup has certainly proved to be that. Some products and companies lend themselves quite easily to this - bookies for example - but others have to work a little harder.

For me it's one of these companies that you wouldn't necessarily associate with sport that has produced the best ad in this World Cup. Visa's commercial essentially features Thomas Brolin's career running very quickly in reverse - starting with a very fat blonde bloke in a chair stuffing his face then suddenly leaping up to celebrate a goal, and ending after a prolonged sprint through time during which he sheds half his body weight to the end where he runs on as a sub and scores a goal himself before celebrating in the same manor. The only problem with it is I'm certain Brolin is a good deal fatter now than he is at the start of the advert, and I'm not sure he was ever as thin as he is at the end of it. Still, Visa would argue that it's not meant to be Brolin at all so it's all irrelevant.

I think this whole piece is to advertise Visa’s quick swipey system, the one that means anybody who finds your wallet can quickly rack up a few grand of debt before you’d even realised it has gone, but as with many adverts I can only tell roughly what it's trying to sell me.

Likewise the old people's home with Graham Taylor and Terry Venables being waited on by Kelly Brook. El Tel has been getting about a bit this World Cup, although the old people's home advert continued a good deal longer than his rendition of "If I can dream..." which aimed to sell copies of The Sun on the back of a successful England campaign. You can see why that one was pulled so quickly. I like Venables, and Taylor, and Kelly Brook needless to say, and I think the advert was trying to flog me a new television or something along those lines. However it fell into the trap of using Stuart Pearce as some kind of all encompassing authority figure - organising the workmen as they lifted the television into place.

Carlsberg did this as well with their played to death 'greatest team talk in the world' commercial that started with Psycho giving the instructions. Now fair enough Pearce was a great player, and a real heart on the sleeve character the likes of which England sorely miss these days, and he is not doing a bad job at all with the Under 21s, but he was there in that England dressing room this summer, unable to fire up and motivate the smoking millionaires that now make up our national side. He was the one sitting on the bench placidly while Capello ranted at him about this and that. Perhaps if Carslberg really did do the best team talks in the world it would be a better manager dishing out the tactical advice to start with. Quite what Steve Davis would bring to the party is also debatable, and if Ian Botham was as negative to the footballers as he often is about our cricketers, who are actually doing quite well in the grand scheme of things at the moment, then all in all it wouldn’t be the best match preparation at all. Maybe I’m taking things too seriously, still they’ve played it that often I’ve had time to analyse it.

The main problem with the Carlsberg advert, and the Carling lads in the desert receiving the scores from a man on camel back, is that standard Carlsberg and any type of Carlsberg looks like piss and tastes far worse. No amount of clever advertising will ever mask jut how God awful that beer is.

Likewise Coca Cola, the standard version of which is akin to pouring tonic water into a bag of sugar and drinking the resulting paste down in one. Somehow this fattening, tooth decaying black liquid of doom has done quite well in attaching itself to sport down the years – although perhaps picking Roger Miller, a man with no front teeth, to front their ‘history of goal celebrations’ campaign this year was something of a mistake. Drink Coke kids, and you can have teeth like Roger too.

That advert is voiced over by Ian Wright, who has made thousands out the tournament this summer despite never playing in one himself. He voiced over the Coke advert, turned up at the end of the Wii Sports advert asking to play (just when you thought you couldn’t imagine anything worse than playing the Wii with the Redknapps Nintendo proved you wrong) and most notably tried, along with Chris Kamara, to encourage you to bet on the World Cup at Ladbrokes.

Now personally I think Wrighty and Kammy, as they are affectionately known by idiots, are odd choices for a bookie to make when picking people to advertise its odds. I mean even Ray Winstone seems to carry some sort of threatening authority on the Bet365 adverts – I do find myself genuinely concerned by “the number of corners, the number of cards, the match goals, the next goal method” and all the rest of it for fear of Winstone coming to get me in the night if I don’t show an interest. This Danny Dyer ‘jog on sunshine’ style of almost daring you not to buy a product has created a series of bizarre adverts where threatening teddy bears try and get you to buy Fox’s biscuits, eat Birds Eye fish fingers, or stay at Travel Lodge. As catchlines for hotels go “sleep tight or I’ll cut you” is right up there with the idea of getting the newly single Lenny Henry to flog Premier Inn rooms while he searches for a more permanent residence. I wonder if they’ve given him a discount?

But Ian Wright is widely seen by most football fans as an idiot. Would anybody really take his tips seriously? And while I’m certainly not one to laugh at anybody else’s predictions (I had Newcastle down for a season of disharmony and collapse culminating in a new Leeds United scenario this year) Chris Kamara said that Peterborough United would be playing Premier League football next year.

There is money to be made from those two, perhaps in the form of an Iphone app that you can consult whenever you have a decision to make. Should you take that new job? Is it left or right at the lights? Is she really the girl for you? Whatever the question simply ask Wrighty and Kammy and then do exactly the opposite of everything they tell you to do.

The best advert around at the moment though, and sadly it has nothing to do with the World Cup but is included here just for its sheer genius, is the internet pervert’s eight second Windows demonstration. “Buying a secret present for your wife and don’t want her to know what you’ve been up to?” he asks while vigorously masturbating in front of a 17 year old boy on Chatroulette. “Well simply click private browsing and no history is recorded, your secret’s safe.” Never before in the history of the world has the phrase “who are they trying to kid?” been more apt, although in fairness to Microsoft they certainly know their market. How long before the tissue makers follow suit?

goalfood: probably the best football tv blogs in the world...

Clive Whittingham waxes ever lyrical on the world cup ads...

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