Adverts

From Frikipedia

Adverts are used to mediate the flow of TV into the brains of a generation possessing the combined attention span of a goldfish with Alzheimers. They are also used by the writers of 24 to allow their programme to last the requisite 24 hours without them having to write more than around 18 hours worth of actual material. It is during the advert breaks that you are supposed to assume that Jack Bauer has his breakfast and goes to the toilet.

Advertising Techniques in the UK

Advertisers in the UK base most of their ideas these days on the principle that men are useless at everything. Even traditional masculine duties like buying a car or doing some DIY is likely to be portrayed by a long-suffering woman rolling her eyes to the heavens at the sight of her inept boyfriend accidentally slicing his own arm off with a power saw.

There are a few exceptions to this rule. To maintain the feminist to misogynist equilibrium, adverts for beer or male toiletries will continue to operate on the mistaken "laddish" assumption on a Friday night in the local Lloyds that a womans clothes will spontaneously fall off if you spray an entire bottle of Lynx Africa into your pits and drink excessive amounts of pissy lager in front of them.

Types of Advert in the UK

• Beer - "Woooah! Yeeeah! You're a geezer, ain't ya! You're definately man enough to drink this beer, and the ladies will love you for it. Particularly when you end the night unconscious and face down in a gutter with your trousers round your ankles being playfully whipped with a traffic cone by one of your mates!"
• Feminine hygiene - "Ever wanted to spend every day of your life riding around on a bike wearing white trousers whilst grinning insanely at bemused passers-by? You can now! And look, our product is also useful should you ever spill a small beaker of blue liquid!"
• Supermarkets - "Cor blimey! I'm Jamie Oliver! Let your mince pies take a butchers at this supermarket where I'd definately do all my shopping was I not an unfeasibly rich celebrity who orders all of his food from Harrods. But come and buy your frozen peas from here, and you can pretend to be as classy as me, guv'nor!"
• Cars - Actually the most difficult thing to advertise, due to the fact that fundamentaly, all cars are the same. Engine, four wheels and some seats. Hence tend to be slightly poncy arty adverts that usually confuse people to the point that they barely understand what they're supposed to be buying.
• Male hygiene - Either fall into the "lad" Lynx category, so will involve gawky bloke using said product and suddenly becoming more sexually attractive to women than a shirtless Johnny Depp tending to an injured puppy, or will be for posh scents and aftershave, so will usually revolve around a chiselled, hunky metro-like gentleman wandering around an impossibly swanky flat in the nip. Presumably because any man who takes that much interest in his own appearence hails from Narnia.

Things You Can't Advertise in the UK

• Cigarettes - Because there was a direct link between the most heavily advertised brands and the brands kids started smoking when they were cool enough. Not that banning adverts has cut the number of young smokers at all, but at least now no single brand dominates. Marx would be proud.
• Fast Food - At least not at times when young kids may be watching, which given the trend of 5-year-olds now being bought TVs for their bedrooms to prevent their parents having to entertain them, is pretty much any time, really. Leads Friki to wonder whether nowadays, instead of pubescent boys surreptitiously staying up to try and catch a glimpse of nipple in the slightly risque film on late at night on Channel 5, now obese kids will stay up late in an attempt to catch the new Findus Crispy Pancake advert which so dominates their wet dreams.