Worst adverts of 2010: results
So, with a sense of inevitability I'm here to name Halifax as the most despised adverts of 2010, running away with over one fifth of the vote in the worst adverts of 2010 stakes.
These adverts certainly annoyed me - the Ice Ice Baby one particularly drove me to turn the television off on at least one occasion - but they seemed to drive AdTurds readers to frothing, spasming apoplexy. Some of the keyword queries and comments were actually chilling to behold.
It's easy to see why these ads have irritated people so. Their very raison d'etre is to annoy anyone who sees or hears them. You know it. They know that you know it. You know that they know that you know it. It's like a restless tween asking you the same question over and over again simply to get on your wick.
Halifax is pretty much alone in the banking industry in deploying these tactics in its advertising, which have been widely adopted by price comparison sites; a kind of carpet-bombing of your consciousness with concentrated naff. These weapons are not laser-guided, they have no precision. They are the advertising equivalent of daisy cutters and there will be collateral damage.
The point of these adverts, certainly for price-comparison sites, is simply to embed a name and impression in your mind so that when you need to insure your car those Go Compares and meerkats and Omid Djalilis are right at the front of your mind. There's little customer loyalty in these most volatile of markets or much to differentiate one offering from another, which is why they must resort to pester power when it comes to putting their brands out there.
Banks have normally eschewed these tactics, with most preferring to put themselves over as rather stuffy, slightly dour but eminently trustworthy places to keep your hard-earned; think of the old-fashioned image of the stuffed shirt bank manager. NatWest sticks out in my mind as attempting to engender some sort of affection among potential customers with ads decrying the transition of bank buildings into trendy winebars and its recent - rather silly - customer charter adverts.
TSB liked to be the bank that said yes; Lloyds had its black horse; Santander has Wild Beasts and Lewis Hamilton; HSBC has those Gambon-voiced efforts that place it firmly as a global banking behemoth, which it is.
But Halifax has thrown off any attempt to make it look respectable, trustworthy, serious or even worthy of affection. It's going out of its way to annoy customers and potentials alike; displaying its staff as blithering twats and incompetents as if they were working in a shit leisure centre in a sitcom.
Clearly Halifax thinks this works as they've been ploughing this furrow since they launched Howard Brown onto an unsuspecting world a decade ago.
What's even more remarkable about Halifax's effort to place it as the Ryanair of the banking sector is that, a couple of years ago as part of HBOS, it nearly went down completely partly due to mind-boggling exposure to its own incautious lending, taking the rest of the UK banking sector and the national economy with it. At one point, no-one knew whether cash machines across the UK would dispense any money come the following Monday. A shotgun marriage to Lloyds followed, along with tens of billions of public money.
How has Halifax - admittedly only part of what's now an enormous toxic-bank clusterfuck - responded to nearly destroying, erm, money? Not with a mea culpa, or an element of contrition notable in things like NatWest's 'customer charter' adverts but with its most annoying advert yet.
This is our reward for bailing out the banking sector. Something that's beamed into your home on a daily basis with the express intention of putting you in a bad mood. The alternative to saving the banks may have been unthinkable, but the idea of societal apocalypse seems almost preferable when viewing the Halifax adverts.
Worst advert of 2010 - results and analysis
As mentioned, Halifax ran away with it in the end, but it looked like an equal three-way tie for a while, with Go Compare and Iceland performing strongly until the last week of voting. WeBuyAnyCar made a strong late surge too.
If this were any kind of serious attempt to find the most hated ad of the year, it would require some effort to measure the frequency of the ads and peoples' exposure to it through scheduling times - and determining the channels on which they were broadcast.
As it is we can probably afford slightly more bile towards some of the more obscure ads as, presumably, they were much less viewed than others.
The thing of it is, the results for the top four - if not a majority of the adverts featured here - will be seen as a positive for the brands the advertise, as they're exclusively of the 'exposure through annoyance' genre. By voting for them, you've validated them. Sucks, huh?
'Other' answers suggested by readers included the following:
Sainsbury's double points
LLoyds TSB
Comparethemarket.com
Funky Pigeon
The Times online
Talk Talk
NatWest public charter advert
NatWest has apparently made a pledge to the the country's most helpful bank, as Paul McGann keeps telling me.
But this isn't some advertising bullshit of the kind at which banks excel. It's 'a real commitment'. Well, that's nice. But by whose standards, exactly, is NatWest going to be the most helpful bank on the block?
There's some stuff about flexible opening hours and shit, which is certainly helpful, but how to measure something as nebulous as 'helpful'?
How helpful is it, for example, to charge me £20 when I go overdrawn, despite the fact there's no significant cost to the bank of me going overdrawn by a few pennies? That's very unhelpful to be quite honest.
So was the period in the early part of this decade when, once a year, NatWest would simply cancel all of my bank cards without warning. Very unhelpful when stuck on a weekend break in the Lakes without cash.
You know what's phenomenally unhelpful? The complete inability to move your money around, pay bills and the like via electronic banking unless you have you own titting card reader.
Extending my overdraft to a whopping £2.5K when I'd asked for a hundred quid seemed helpful at the time, but it wasn't in the long-run. It was more helpful to NatWest, thinking about it.
I don't really object to any of this in terms of this silly ad; as I've said before it's a bank's prerogative to fuck you every which way.
It's this ludicrous idea that, up and down the country, there are people trying to judge whether NatWest is more helpful than Barclays, or Halifax, or Lloyds TSB. It's just inane.
By the same token, I could make a pledge to the nicest person in my circle of friends; Piers Morgan could pledge to be the smuggest **** on telly and Monica Galetti could pledge to adopt the 'most surprised' facial expression on a cookery programme.
A panel of judges will be required, including Stephen Fry and John Barrowman. An audience that boos or cheers whenever another fatuous 'helpfulness' target is achieved or missed. A rosette pinned to the chest of a bank clerk in Frome.
And somewhere a lonely printer in a back room at a NatWest branch is helpfully printing off another £20 bank charge.
Ten worst adverts of 2009
It's been a tough year for TV viewers, assailed by telecommunications or financial services adverts at every turn. And to think people still want the licence fee scrapped.
On certain satellite channels this year I've been convinced the amount of advertising may have outweighed the amount of actual time devoted to showing programming, so ubiquitous were the adverts in questions.
And what a load of utter shit those adverts have been. Smugness and attempts to annoy brands into the minds of viewers are the two things that really get me.
In those instances you can almost picture the guilty creatives, gurgling beatifically as they masturbate onto a digestive biscuit before writing 'Impatience is a Virtue' onto an oversized whiteboard.
I find it all quite hateful, but that's the world we live in. I like to think that the people involved are every bit aware of how utterly depressing it all is. But, while they are all going to hell, they earn more money than I do – so who's the real chump?
It's been a bad year for banks, Stephen Fry and the unlikely triumvirate of Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Thierry Henry. But it's been worse for Duffy, a singer potentially destroyed by a particularly catastrophic commercial.
My only hope is that the money was worth it for those celebs taking the shilling, especially if the ads they patronise appear is this list of 2009's worst.
You may disagree with my choices, but I think this was about as bad as it got this year in advertising.
Peter Jones and his godawful Money Supermarket ads escaped the pits of despair on a turbocharged shopping trolley.
If you think I've missed any obvious others feel free to suggest them – and vote at the bottom - and remember that the people responsible will be lined up against a Shoreditch wall the second the revolution comes.
Ten worst adverts of 2009
Kebab pot noodle adverts
An ad that has the sheer effrontery to start with the words 'We know you find us annoying' goes straight to the top of my personal list through its sheer hatefulness.
My personal rejoinder to whoever was responsible for this will always be 'I know you'll find this agonising'.
The first, a Flight of the Conchords rip-off, was bad enough. The High School Musical One was actively evil.
The fact that it will be enjoyed by those low on gorm via their mobile phones and Bebo accounts makes it all the worse.
T-Mobile's Life's For Sharing advert
Flashmob advertising really seemed to hit its stride this year, with advertisers realising that a unique, joyous and spontaneous event could be harnessed by the forces of evil.
T-Mobile did an ad at Liverpool Street station that I actually thought was quite good – the reaction of people watching is what makes these. They all looked amused and cheered up; a brief chink of sunshine in their miserable trudge to work.
However, as flashmob ads have become more prevalent, the public has become more jaded. Nowadays its possible to see 'making of' and handheld footage of such events where people actively ignore flashmobs and similar stunts.
So, what was once something rather glorious and heart-warming has been transformed into someone trying to sell you a monthly telecommunications plan.
While this one for T-Mobile isn't really a flashmob I've lumped it into the same mass public stunt genre.
This karaoke one is the worst of the lot. It's just so utterly fucking awful.
Red driving school
Anyone who thinks that becoming a driving instructor is their way out of a badly-paid boring job into a new world of opportunity, hard cash and self-determination is sadly mistaken.
It's a one-way ticket towards mind-shattering boredom interspersed with moments of extreme danger shared with endless, faceless, 18-year-old twunts who already have a brand new 3 Series (that you'll never be able to afford) on a promise from their Dad.
Miraculously, even though this advert doesn't reference any of these things it still communicates the extreme desperation involved in deciding to become a driving instructor.
Direct Line ads
2009 was the year Stephen Fry went massive, as if he wasn't already there. Poor Stephen comes in for a lot of stick, mostly ill-deserved by my reckoning, but he hasn't done himself any favours by agreeing to these terrible ads for Direct Line.
Paired with Paul Merton, perfectly cast as a sneering cockney shit, Fry exudes all the characteristics his critics level at him.
They're unfunny, smug, aggravating and seemingly ubiquitous – which is exactly the sort of press Fry doesn't need, as his detractors would paint him as all of the above.
Duffy coke ad
It's just possible that this coke ad, featuring Duffy riding to the shops on a bike, could have finished off the ordinary Welsh songstrel, so debilitating has its effect been.
AdTurds' Google Analytics accounts reveals thousands of combinations of keyword phrases all revolving around the words 'Duffy', 'coke', 'advert' 'shit' 'terrible' 'awful' and lots of other unfortunate adjectives in a similar vein.
There are adverts that irritate me far more than this one, but the exceedingly low quality of the concept and its execution make it easily the worst.
It almost feels me feel sorry for Duffy. One minute the new Carole King; the next a poor man's Joss Stone.
Gillette Phenom
Just what on Earth are these adverts about? They look like a modern-day demographic box-ticking homo-erotic Three Stooges played out with at least two people seemingly incapable of adopting facial expressions.
And now Federer and Woods are replaced by cartoons, with only Henry of the original trio remaining to mug around in their ongoing contest of hitting each other with their respective balls.
Just baffling.
118 118 adverts
The original standard-bearer for deliberately annoying adverts, this absurd telephone information service certainly needs memorable ads to convince people to pay upwards of a quid to find information they could easily access through a Google search in seconds.
Like a load of advertisers have sat locked in a room with ten kilos of coke for a weekend, everything in these adverts smacks of a brainstorm spiralled horribly out of control.
Beefeaters, Ghostbusters, Dave Bedford, The Stig, Elvis impersonators – every post-modern crapulous ironic reference imaginable.
I hope Ray Parker Junior got a fucking packet.
Go Compare advert
An undisputed nadir of the annoying advert genre, sewn up earlier this year by the amusing Compare The Meerkat ads.
So it's a case of diminishing returns for these ads, which are competing furiously for your attention.
Peter Jones ran this one close but it's the fact that you can almost see the working behind this - maximum possible annoyance - running through it like a stick of rock that makes this one so deleterious.
Natwest help adverts
I'm writing this on a day when the supreme court has ruled that banks are allowed to make unfair charges – an issue the banks have spent the last decade fighting - on no moral basis whatsoever.
So any suggestion that banks really give a flying one about the general public is automatically exposed as the height of hypocrisy.
These adverts for Natwest, a bank which has charged me a few hundred quid over the years for occasionally straying a few pounds over my overdraft limit, are the worst.
And lest we mention the bonuses? Everyone hates banks now, but they don't care – they don't have to.
They have a carte blanche to screw you every which way, and no amount of touchy-feely adverts (which are inevitably awful) will change that.
Samsung Jet advert
The motherload. The most hateful pile of cack ever committed in the name of advertising.
A message so vacuous, yet simultaneously horrible, that it transcends the medium. This isn't just one of the worst adverts ever, it's one of the worst anything ever.
Its foretelling of a Britain where the only ideology is the satisfaction of appetites is the most chilling portent of a nihilistic future ever seen. It would have terrified Ballard and Burgess.
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a bloke taking a picture of his cock on his mobile phone - forever.
Vote for the absolute worst advert of 2009:
OK, I changed this due to an outcry over the non-appearance of Go Compare