There are many reasons to be depressed. You’ve run out of milk, you have to look at a loved one, or worse the only way you make it through the day is chewing razor blades.

What makes it even better is the art of advertising, which when you’re slap bang in the middle of a metropolis, is damned hard to miss. Everywhere you look, on TV, billboards, newspapers left on the tube, there is yet another image, more text, all feeding into your mind the idea of a lifestyle or some more crap that you know you don’t need but in order to help the devastated economy of the world, but somehow you can save the day with a new microwave.

So is it little wonder that sometimes, just every once in a while, you start twisting it for your own amusement, with various pictures warped to show a different reality. For example, earlier this year, you could not hide from this campaign from the fashion chain Esprit;

Ugh.

Yes, it was one of those things where people wearing all nice things, being hip or pretty, whichever the giant corporate entity wanted, holding up boards stating something they wished for, the majority of which were sentiments such as wanting everyone to be happy, or wanting everyone else to get what they wanted.

You are fully aware that this is just a set of adverts that are meant to raise awareness of their products but really? Did the advertising agency which came up with this employ a bunch of three year olds who had overdosed on the Teletubbies?

If you didn’t vomit to any of it, you are a better human being than I.

This whole campaigned starred at me day after day for two months, through various bad times which only increased the level of hatred felt towards each and every panel, each with another more dopey looking, clean living f**kwit who gets an erection when shopping for lamps.

It was made worse that the website for Esprit at the time invited people to do the same thing and take a picture of themselves to upload with some equally mind-numbing wish, in a way becoming a census for the number of “special” people in existence.

So there was no way in hell, even if Satan was ice-skating to work, that any of those adverts could be left alone, even after they have been off the public stage for a few months now.

There were a great many things wished for, which would fit the various people holding their wonderful boards of written joyless tat, so in order to maintain a level of humour which will not horify anyone too much, here are two examples of only some of the things dreamed up;

Perhaps this one is more family friendly;

Dare I ask, what wishes would you have written on a board and posted? Then again, it’s often too easy to feel disdain for most fashion campaigns if you’re not the target audience so perhaps we should move onto another area of advertising foolishness.

Some advertising is meant to be well-meaning, to highlight an issue in a manner that gave the point across in a direct way. This can be from political billboards about how evil the other parties are, charities asking for £2 a month to feed dogs with human remains, to recalling fast food which was mis-sold as washing powder.

Then there are some times where adverts are used by different sides of a social argument to go at each other in Mortal Kombat. We begin with this advert telling there are gay people out there and that we should get used to it.

Didn’t care then, still don’t care now.

Basically the above picture illustrated the public transport in the capital displaying the ‘Some People Are Gay. Get Over It!’ adverts from Stonewall, with a link to their equal marriage campaign website. The issue of gay marriage was a recent hot topic in the UK, buried under headlines of breast implants exploding and some celebrity caught on camera having a sleep in a bed.

This topic managed to upset most of the priests, who did so well when it came to not buggering kids to speak out on such matters as well as anyone else who was bored and didn’t have anything better to worry about.

It’s well known that there should be equal rights to marriage, if only so everyone gets to experience the nightmare that is legal union, to then have kids, get sick of each other and divorce, which leads to a drinking and drug problem, which then ends with their lifeless body being discovered head first soaking in a toilet.*

* Apparently not all relationships work out this way. So I’m told.

Well some people so jolly upset, that they decided to take a leaf out of Stonewall’s book (and font as well);

Someone’s hiding a lamp shopping fetish!

The above advert got pulled by TFL under direction of The mayor of London, a kitchen mop aka Boris Johnson, as the advert was promoting the idea that gay people can be converted to heterosexuality.

As this was one issue where everyone gets annoyed about and nothing ever progresses, it’s quite unbelievable that the The Core Issues Trust whose leader, Mike Davidson, has apparently stated “homoerotic behaviour is sinful”, thought they could get away with saying they can change people to be naughty with the “right” gender.

Even if they do that sort of thing in America all the time.

After your eyes were left bleeding from social adverts, perhaps something which can be agreed upon by all sides, is the fact that the car insurance adverts with big musical numbers should be destroyed.

The tenor from the wonderful GoCompare adverts has shown up so often, that if you hear him tell you to go compare one more time, you’ll tell him to gof**k himself, before beating him to death with a shovel, with which afterwards you gobury him in a ditch.

The confused.com adverts where everyone seems to go ape over getting some points on a card frequently, do make you wonder if their lives are so devoid of joy, that the only way they can find happiness is shopping online for a saving of £2 a year for a hunk of metal sitting in the driveway.

Mind you, the same thing goes for those snack adverts where various woman are so happy they can eat a bag of pretzels and wear clothes they owned. Really? Do you not have anything else going for you? DON’T YOU!?!?!?

And please, no more “Bingo-ing mad” cash my dead wife’s gold till pay day adverts either.

So it is little wonder that I do indeed go out of my way to avoid adverts as the vast majority are just utter crap and invoke nothing but a weary sigh. The branding for the Olympics only served to remove any thought that it was about running around fast, and it was about BP setting someone on fire with official Olympic Petrol, with BT being the official Olympic phone line used to ring for the emergency services.

In fact the only advertising in recent memory which other people were right to inform me about as indeed something to watch, an oddity in itself when it comes to advertising, were the Fosters adverts where two gentleman of the world inform various people on how to handle certain situations, like crimes aganist sliced meat for example at a fancy party.

You’re not more likely to drink, but far happier to accept there are people with a working sense of humour who are allowed near a keyboard to write these things.

Maybe we’d just pay attention more to adverts in general if they didn’t suck the very life from us and it didn’t feel like there was nowhere to hide from them, instead of achieving what the adverts were designed for, to inform you about a product or issue with which you will act on accordingly.

Just one last thing before we sign off. When you saw this advert for another fashion chain;

Did any of you think of this?