Don't advertise; buy a smoothie instead

It has to be said that I’ve never been the kind of person who gets ensnared by adverts. This is partly because I’m not weak-minded but also because whenever the ad break starts, I take the opportunity to leave the room and relieve myself.

Most adverts are just bizarre anyway. I watch some of them and can’t figure out what the hell they are attempting to sell me. Car adverts are a prime example. What exactly were Honda trying to tell me with that hour long commercial of internal parts knocking into each other? Is the Renault Scenic really a puppy in a metal body? Is the Citroen C4 really going to turn into a Transformer every time I drive it? If so I definitely won’t be buying one. In fact I don’t really fancy getting in a car that is named after an explosive anyway. It kind of sends the wrong message.

More and more adverts from companies advising people to sue everybody for tripping over your own feet are appearing on the television these days and these make me want to put my fist through the screen. I object to the very concept of people winning money in court for being too incompetent to walk properly, or too blind to look where they are going.

Occasionally someone will produce a funny advert; the old Carling Black Label ones spring to mind, although the humorous commercial doesn’t stop the beer tasting like fetid urine.

Budweiser used to produce some good adverts as well, and I am a Budweiser drinker. However, it wasn’t the advertising campaigns that converted me to their product. I started drinking Budweiser simply because I used to go out drinking with my mate Mark who is nearly 7 foot tall and could drink a million pints a night. I simply couldn’t keep up without me decorating the pavement at the end of every night. Budweiser came in smaller bottles which allowed me to drink at the same pace but consume less liquid.

Some adverts are designed simply to ingrain a message into your brains. These are usually the really annoying ones like that Brummie bloke from the Halifax who everybody in the country wanted to choke. The company that buys any car dot com is one that is deliberately maddening and I refuse to even visit their website out of principle. Still, can anyone get that tune out of their head?

Recently, however, I have succumbed to TV advertising for the first time. I have been convinced by a subliminal message through my box to download Queen’s “Flash” as my iPhone ring tone. I have even gone as far as to purchase the single on iTunes. How has this happened? I’m not even a fan of Queen. I certainly didn’t agree with his lifestyle choice of drink, drugs and bum sex, but I will admit that Freddie Mercury was a natural entertainer and a charismatic star. Still, there are very few of their songs that I actually like.

Anyway, I digress. The reason why I bought these items was because the song was parodied on a recent advert and I was unable to get it out of my head. So although I bought the music, I'm still not even slightly tempted to buy one of those Innocent Smoothies that are actually being advertised. This just proves to me that advertising is, in fact, bollocks!

This is the argument I always had against the ban on tobacco advertising in sport. Although I think smoking is one of the most pointless and disgusting habits in the world, I never agreed with tobacco companies being forced to stop donating their money to people.

I have been watching Formula 1 for nearly 20 years and never once have I been tempted to go out and buy fags. When Michael Schumacher won the 1994 championship in the Mild Seven Benetton Ford, I never thought to myself “crikey, I must try some of those Japanese death sticks. They are brilliant.” No, I simply thought “blimey, he must be a bloody good driver to have won the championship in that underpowered blue piece of crap.”

When Hakkinen took the title in the West McLaren Mercedes I never thought to nip down my local off-license and start smoking German cigarettes. I simply thought “haha, Schumacher and Ferrari have been beaten.”

In fact tobacco advertising had quite the opposite effect on me. Even now whenever I see a packet of Camel, I still think of the 1992 Williams FW14B. Whenever I see a packet of Marlboro I still think of McLaren, even though they haven’t sponsored the team since 1996. It doesn’t work the other way round. I don’t look at McLaren and immediately think of Marlboro. I wasn’t even aware that Embassy was a brand of cigarettes when I was younger. I used to think the snooker world championship was held in an actual embassy.

I’ll admit I always used to hang around the Marlboro and Rothmans stands whenever I went to the Motorsport show at the NEC but this was nothing to do with the tobacco products on sale; it was because they used to hire the most gorgeous promotional girls and dress them up in really tight lycra outfits which, as a hormonal teenager, was like ecstasy.

With the demise of tobacco advertising in Formula 1, there have been new investors arriving. These are mostly large telecommunications companies, computer software companies and, more recently, energy drinks companies.

Most of the company logos that appear on cars are lost on me. Apart from the fact that I’m not really interested in looking at them because I’m too busy watching the cars go round in circles, I have no idea who most of them are or what they do. And I don’t care.

Obviously, the biggest success story for a sponsor in recent years has to be Red Bull. After years of sponsoring the under-achieving Sauber team, they subsequently bought Jaguar and Minardi and went on to beat establish teams who had been around since the middle-ages.

Still, just because Red Bull won the championship, it doesn’t mean their drinks won’t still give you cancer if the stomach.

This article was brought to you by Eddsport’s Product Placements Ltd. All Rights reserved.