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Weirdest Ads of 2009 More Depressing Than Strange

by Leila Brillson on January 1, 2009 at 12:01 PM


With advertisers constantly competing against each other with catchier jingles, bigger celebrity endorsers and better effects, a tactic that has grown in recent years is to simply make a product known by being as weird as possible. Case in point: that horrifying, masked Burger King 'King,' who effectively has emblazoned everyone's brain with the terrible image of his deadened-but-all-knowing face. So AdWeek has compiled the weirdest ads of 2009, most of them not from the U.S. While most of the top entries are public service announcements (and aren't so much weird as they are shocking), a couple of selections are truly nutty (e.g., a sexy pig doing a Flashdance strip-tease and then dousing itself in delicious BBQ sauce for White Castle).

Many of these videos have unintentionally gone viral, and garnered plenty of attention, for better or worse. AdWeek reports that the Swedish commercial for the skincare line Apoliva scared viewers so much that around 100,000 people joined a Facebook group in protest. Then there's the nightmare-inducing, but much forwarded rollerskating babies for Evian. The roundup also proves that public messages and safety advisories pull out all the tear-jerking stops. Take Number 2 on the list, for instance: a four-minute-long depiction of the dangers of driving and texting. PSA's have always toed the line between shocking, hilarious, and haunting -- or maybe just downright eerie. [From: AdWeek, via: Neatorama]

Tags: ads, advertising, PSA, Texting while driving, TextingWhileDriving, top, viral video, ViralVideo, weird, white castle, WhiteCastle

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