Roll up, roll up. We’ve got the worst tech ads ever committed to film, right here for your perusal. From Flashdance-inspired 80s lycra to cringe worthy ‘comedy’ turns from business peeps, they’re the spots that make you think ‘who the hell thought this was a good idea?’ In part one we’ve got a creepy TV, a game that promises to give you skidmarks, and possibly the most desperate Apple ad of all time.
10 Pole Position
“HEY! YOU LOOK LIKE A REAL JERK!” So begins the advert for Pole Position on the Atari, what has to be one of the shoutiest ads in history. In all fairness the action on-screen is actually pretty adrenaline-fuelled, but that just makes the in-game graphics look all the more tame. It should be the first day of advertising school, really: make the product look good. And the line “It’ll leave skidmarks on your soul” could’ve been phrased a little better.
9 Logitech TV Revue
Now this is just creepy. The idea behind it is everyone watches TV on their laptops rather than their TVs, so Logitech wants us all to use its remotes to get back in touch with the big screen. So how does it go about doing this? By having a massive, animated eye on the telly, with feet protruding from the bottom. No wonder people are using their laptops, at least they don’t look like something from a David Cronenberg movie.
8 Apple Mac Performa
If you ever find yourself swept up in the Apple hype, just take a look at this and remember it wasn’t always quite so slick. In it a man in a bad suit practically begs us to buy a Mac, bigging up how intuitive it is, and its multimedia abilities, which, to be fair, were streets ahead of Microsoft’s at the time. Among the other selling points is the mammoth 350MB hard drive. Magical.
7 Amstrad Studio 100
No rundown of bad adverts is complete without some ill-advised stab at rapping. The Siralun-owned Amstrad gave it a good go in the 80s, with the Studio 100, a turntable-cum-tape deck. Features include “Twin speakers, and a ra-di-o, and a four track recording studio.” And seeing a backwards film of the whole set-up exploding, there’s not enough of that in adverts nowadays.
6 Nintendo Virtual Boy
Before the 3DS there was Nintendo’s Virtual Boy, Nintendo’s first effort at a 3D console. Here it is chasing a man across a post-apocalyptic setting that’s straight out of Terminator. “It came from the third dimension,” the voiceover says, “with its own brain, its own voice, its own legs. There’s only one problem: it needs your eyes.” Sadly the Virtual Boy was banished back to the third dimension, as it was discontinued less than a year after launch.
WHAT WILL BE NUMBER ONE? HAVE YOU SEEN A WORSE ADVERT? PART TWO COMING TOMORROW!
