Worst Ads Ever!

 Hey, Worst Ads Ever?, Let’s Check This Out!

This abysmal Health Hotline commercial for knee braces. The ad itself is mostly just mind-numbingly boring, but the animation is what makes it horrible: it's almost entirely made up of static stock clip art with barely-animated mouths flapping randomly as the characters speak in bored monotones against a blank white background. Additionally, the clip art isn't even consistent, as the grandma character had her model switched at the end to an old lady that barely even looks like her. For some odd reason, they made a second version of this commercial that is identical except the girl and her grandma are black. Even their dialogue uses the exact same audio

If you live in one of a handful of major cities in the United States, chances are you've heard the Kars-4-Kids ad on the radio at least once, which is one time too many. The incredibly grating jingle has two versions: one sung out of key by a child who sounds bored out of his skull, and another sung with heavy Auto-Tune. The ads also make no mention of where the money is going to , confusing viewers as to why and how they should donate their car. On top of that, the video version of the ad (featuring precocious kids that seemingly were ripped out of a Life With Mikey-esque casting room miming instrument-playing terribly

Nationwide Insurance's second contribution to the Super Bowl XLIX was an ad that attempted to school parents about preventable home accidents, but ended up backfiring spectacularly. The advert starts off with whimsical Imagine Spots, as it shows a young boy lamenting about how he'll never learn to ride a bike, catch cooties, fly, or get married... not because he's intimidated, but because he died in an accident. The advertisement then follows this with a grim montage of an overflowed bathtub, some spilled cleaning supplies, and a fallen-over television. The ad was horribly tasteless in its execution, especially within the context of Super Bowl advertising (which is usually funny at best and uplifting at worst), and came under fire for using dead children to sell insurance.

Many of the ads for RockAuto are often poorly animated (with faces taken straight out of the Uncanny Valley) with dialogue that sounds like it originated from a radio ad. Given the infamy of the business' delivery of cheaply-made auto parts, the quality shouldn't come off as surprising. Some of their most infamous ads include:

• Their garage sale advert features a man whose car's window got skewed in an impossible way and having to sell his action figures and letting others rent out his dog just to pay for a replacement.
• Another advert in addition to having terrible animation (it features talking 3D animation heads, horribly drawn, whose jaws move like cows chewing cud whenever they speak) also tries to present your typical commercial auto parts store as bad because it does not comply to some pretty outlandish requests

SalesGenie released two Super Bowl commercials in the late 2000s that were not only blatantly racist and out of the times, but also soul-suckingly humorless.

• The first shows an Indian telemarketer using the service to improve sales. This would be funny, if it wasn't for A) him speaking with a stereotypical Indian accent; B) him having to feed a stereotypically large Indian family; and C) the ad insulting Americans who were losing their jobs to outsourcing offices in India and China at the time. The company's CEO at the time, who was Indian, defended the ad by saying that he was used to encountering stereotypes and mockery so he didn't find it offensive.
• The second released the following year, ripped on Chinese families by portraying them as fat panda bears who speak broken English in one of the most stereotypical Chinese accents ever.

This ad for a bathroom service named Walk-in-Tubs is of a very low quality. The music is just a looping generic theme from a stock music site, the audio quality (especially when S. Ward gives her opinions, it's very hard to tell what she's saying even at maximum volume) is laughably horrible, and the stock effects and sound are extremely cheap and low-budget

One Greenpeace ad against nuclear power stations shows a family's recording at a beach being interrupted when a plane crashes into a nearby nuclear power station. Not only does the plane seem to crash into the plant for absolutely no reason, the implication that the crash would be followed by a nuclear explosion or mass radioactive contamination is unfounded, as nuclear power plants have their walls reinforced specifically to prevent such a thing from occurring

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals(more commonly known as PETA) has garnered a reputation for using controversial, graphic, or fallacious marketing campaigns about animal rights that grab the public's attention. A few of their campaigns have gone so far that not even people who agree with them have been able to get their message.

• In late 2019, a PSA from World Animal Protection  began circulating on YouTube. Beginning with the line "Ever heard the sound of suffering?", the ad then instructs users to turn their volume up as far as they can as the wondrous sounds of a factory farm play and two pictures showing a chick and pig respectively suffering briefly flash on the screen. The ad was heavily criticized for how tasteless its execution was, especially since you couldn’t skip it. It was also accused of preying off of epileptics and people with anxiety disorders, one user even commenting that it caused their friend to break down and have a panic attack.

In 2006, Sony launched a series of billboards in the Netherlands advertising the PSP White that ended up sparking worldwide controversy. In it, the words "PlayStation Portable White is coming" are overlaid atop an image◊ of a white woman aggressively grabbing a black woman by the chin. While the intent of the ad was to show that the PSP White is superior to the older, black PSP models, people were instead quick to point out the racist undertones surrounding the ad, noting that it looked as if it was advocating violence towards black people. The controversy was so severe, it prompted global news

In 2007, the NYU Child Study Center launched the "Ransom Note" campaign to raise awareness of childhood psychiatric disorders, putting up billboards in the form of ransom notes from various mental illnesses holding children hostage - for example, the one for autism said "We have your son. We will make sure he will no longer be able to care for himself or interact socially as long as he lives. This is only the beginning." Although the ads were meant to encourage parents to seek help for their children with mental illnesses

The initial ad campaign for Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs, specifically this poster◊ shown at Con-Can Movie Festival in 2017, depicting the heavyset Snow White and her thinner self caused by her magic shoes alongside the slogan "What if Snow White was no longer beautiful, and the 7 Dwarfs not so short?". The poster garnered loads lots  of criticism the moment it appeared.

• Miracle Mattress, a San Antonio-based mattress shop, posted an incredibly insensitive and unfunny ad in 2016 on their Facebook page. The ad had two men asking a woman, Cherise Bonanno, the daughter of Mike Bonanno, the owner of the store, about a "twin tower" sale. Bonanno then pushed the two men into stacks of mattresses, knocking them over while she screamed in mock terror, and then ended the commercial with "We'll never forget." This ad gained a ton of backlash, resulting in the shop shutting down. The shop has since re-opened with new management, but it's unlikely they'll ever recover from the reputation of the advert.

The ads for hangover remedy Thor RX are aimed at college students, with the premise being that you can party and get drunk while still letting you ace an exam the next day. It's more well-known for its horrible animation, especially the character's arms. The audio is also horrible, with staticky audio and high-pitched sounds peppering the track like a bad college DJ composed it. Even worse, the party scene is just a bizarre compilation of random tidbits loosely connected to each other, with so many rapid cuts and camera motions that it's ironically likely to give you a headache, leaving the audience confused before the ad even finishes its pitch.

• In the early 2000s, a small wills-and-trusts website called Wills.com ran a banner ad that stated "Pray for the best, prepare for the worst." It showed a simplistic animation of an airplane crashing into the Twin Towers. After the animation, there's a message that half of their profits will be donated to a victim relief fund, but the presentation is so terribly exploitative and disrespectful towards those very victims that you likely wouldn't even notice that text. The banner ad is long gone, but Vincent Flanders of Web Pages That Suck.com fame did a YouTube video about it. Wills.com would eventually shut down in the mid-2000s, and the site would remain blank until a new company brought back the site around 2021 with a completely different look to their name in the process.

• "The Memesteins", part of a 2018 ad campaign for Comcast's Xfinity internet provider, absolutely embodies the much-hated "How do you do, fellow kids?" style of advertising. The most infamous ad, "Success” uses memes from 2011 (Success Kid) and 2012 (Ain't nobody got time for that), giving the impression that the people behind the ad were five years late on understanding what memes were popular. The ads were made private on Xfinity's YouTube channel, and the reupload linked here has 80% dislikes and comments almost entirely dedicated to insulting the ad.