Rina Chan Board's Blog: Random And Funny Ads That I Found!

Here's Some Random Ads, I Just Found Them For You To See!

An Australian ad for the Yellow Pages had the officials at an international sporting event flying into a panic when the tiny African nation of Robohta unexpectedly wins a gold medal and they discover they don't have a copy of the Robohta national anthem. The control room hurriedly calls a music store and asks them to play the Robohta anthem over the phone, which they broadcast straight into the PA system. Cut to the players on the podium, and what comes out of the speakers is "Row, Row, Row Your Boat".
In the 2010 NBA playoffs, you saw this one a lot—there were ads for the new Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time movie, interspersed with shots of basketball players doing manly things.
One of the first and most well-known examples is a cross-promotion with Hatsune Miku: players could earn Miku's costume and hairstyle, and monitors in the lobby would play a music video for The MMORPG Addict's Anthem from Hatsune Miku Project Diva F, featuring Miku in PSO2's shop lobby wearing a FOnewearl costume.
In 2022, Phantasy Star Online 2: New Genesis engaged in cross-promotion with hololive. In addition to a promotional short showing some of hololive's talents travelling to Halpha that debuted in-game, players could also win costume parts that allow them to dress as hololive GAMER's Fubuki Shirakami, HOLOSTARS' Shien Kageyama, and holoMyth's Ina'nis Ninomae.
Hatsune Miku: Project DIVA F is a song 'Tell Your World', which includes a stylistic rendition of how Vocaloid has spread globally. The original use of the song was for a Google Chrome advert that advertised how Miku is a global phenomenon, almost as a love letter to the same fans who, years after its first use, brought the game to the West.
Any supermarket ad which mentions a specific product you should buy there. Or a product ad which adds that it's available at a specific supermarket. (In the UK Tesco is particularly prone to this.)
A 2014 ad features the Ms. Brown M&M struggling to purchase insurance from the GEICO Gecko, because they only do insurance plans for humans, and not sentient candies. She proceeds to bump into the Hump Day Camel on her way out. Berkshire Hathaway owns both.
They also had an ad revealing that Geico customers were happier than the Pillsbury doughboy on his way to a baking convention.
Foghorn Leghorn appeared as an example of a bad audiobook narrator (I say, a really bad audiobook narrator, son) in an ad from the early New Tens.
Way back when they started using the Gecko, he was shown at a talking animal audition which included the recently fired Taco Bell dog.
An ad promoted both Google and Zootopia.
A YouTube commercial in November 2016 promotes both the 2017 Ford Fusion and the Viz dub of Sailor Moon. A very odd choice considering Ford's withdrawal from Japan several months earlier, and also since the target demographic for Sailor Moon generally does not consist of people who would be interested in sedans, and vice versa.
The Lorax (new movie) + IHOP; The Lorax himself is eating pancakes in the chain restaurant, and has some light comedy with his buddy. There were also Mazda's ads for their new SkyActiv cars, complete with the Lorax and his forest friends shilling for the car, also incidentally promoting the movie on top of that.
DNA testing service 23andMe did a cross-promotion with Despicable Me 3, in which Gru learns he is lactose intolerant (oh, and has a long lost brother!), among other things.
A December 2017 UK radio ad for a furniture store announced "Everyone can save at the DFS winter sale. Even the cast of Early Man, in cinemas from January!" This crossover worked better in the television version of the campaign (Aardman Animations, the producers of Early Man, have also made DFS' TV ads for some years, so the link-up was more logical than most.)
A UK advert for Barclaycard in May 2018 featured The Electric Mayhem talking about gigging in Britain, with cameos by the rest of The Muppets. They didn't actually say "And that gig is The Muppets Take the O2, tickets still on sale!" but...
One MetLife ad praised Colgate, Chevrolet, and Crayola for using MetLife insurance, with the Peanuts characters visiting the companies to check out the products.
In the lead up to the release of Turning Red, Disney partnered with Mozilla to promote the film alongside the Firefox web browser, as red pandas are also known as "firefoxes".

Panda Express also promoted the film in an ad that featured their panda cub meal.

An ad for Winnie the Pooh, which opened the same day as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, featured Pooh finding four letter blocks that spell "POTR", which he then rearranges to spell "POOH".
A sign above an auto insurance company took a shot at GEICO's ad campaigns with the text, "No lizards. No cavemen. Just great service."
A Burger King poster illustrates how much bigger its burgers are than McDonald's burgers by depicting a "silly Whopper" sitting on top of a Big Mac box, unable to fit inside.
A commercial featuring Foghorn Leghorn, Foghorn tells the viewers that a lot of burger restaurants have told them they make chicken as well. Foghorn then says that burger restaurants don't know anything about making chicken, as they know cows. He then puts a chicken mask on Toro the Bull (from "Bully for Bugs") and asks them if it looks right to them.
To promote their breakfast menu, Taco Bell had ads where people named Ronald McDonald enjoyed Taco Bell food.
Cox started running an ad around late 2022 that targeted the nascent 5G Home Internet services from phone companies by showing an animated girl trying to build a house of cards with smartphones and failing. The message was that 5G Home Internet services wouldn't be as good as Cox's home internet services because "It's just phone internet, not home internet"
Nickelodeon:

A 1992 ad for the Nicktoons block featured a solitary kid waiting for a train, no doubt a jab at USA Cartoon Express. Another ad included stock footage of a literal trainwreck.
A 1993 ad for Nonstop Nicktoons Weekend advised viewers not to watch the "same old cartoons" over a picture of a checkerboard background.

While Nickelodeon hyped up the premiere of the SpongeBob SquarePants special "Have You Seen This Snail?" in which Gary runs away, Cartoon Network programs featured a network bug where a snail would move across the screen, holding an "I Love CN" sign. The implication was that Gary ran away to be on Cartoon Network.
Blockbuster once ran had a campaign against Netflix saying "Goodbye Netflix, Hello Blockbuster!". This too ended up becoming ironically Hilarious in Hindsight after Blockbuster went bankrupt due to services like Netflix.
An ad for Universal Studios mocked the Disney Princess characters with a little girl remarking, "If I have to hug another princess, I think I'm gonna hurl."
An ad for ajcjobs.com actually works the "anti-monster.com" metaphor to the point where people in their radio ads are having one-sided conversations with a monster that sounds [and apparently behaves] like The Tasmanian devil from Looney Tunes.
Insert-city-here-jobshop.ca frequently has characters excuse their not using a job website by saying they went to one that was "monstrously complicated," a jab at job site monster.com
An ad for helpwantednewmexico.com criticizes a "monstrously monstrous" job website for being useless when looking for local employees.
Car donation charity 1-800-Charity-Cars had a radio ad that began with a Suspiciously Similar Song to the infamous Kars-4-Kids jingle, only for everyone else to react with disgust at having to hear another annoying jingle.
A 1989 commercial for the Warner Bros. catalogue which featured one of Mel Blanc's final performances as Daffy Duck ends with Daffy getting annoyed that the director's chair he got for his dressing room from the catalogue says Donald Duck instead.
- The famous CN parking lot ad is also funny in another way in hindsight. The primary joke being the cartoons can't find parking spots because the network keeps adding more and more shows to the lineup. Back then the network had dozens of different shows airing throughout the week. Nowadays with their lineup so limited the modern characters have their pick of multiple parking spots.
- In 2002, Nickelodeon ran a Nickmas bumper that was a parody of Frosty the Snowman with Patrick Star playing the snowman. Three years later, The Legend of Frosty the Snowman comes out with Bill Fagerbakke, Patrick's voice actor, playing Frosty.
- Land-O-Lakes dairy products were frequently abbreviated to "LOL" on receipts and signs some time before the text speak meaning of "Laughing Out Loud". You may LOL if you see LOL CHEESE on your receipt these days...
- In early 2000s there was a Gamefly store commercial where customers walked to a store that only had games such as Let's Count Sand, Bean Farmer Extreme and Let's Wait In Line. Ten years passed and Steam was filled with games such as Garbage Truck Simulator and Line Linulator.
- A few advertisements from Canada also do this: