Pizza Shut (The Fuck Up)

If three different adverts for the same food chain are advertised one-hundred times a day on seventeen different channels, how long does it take before one cynical teenager becomes so annoyed he feels compelled to write a blog entry about it?

The answer? Ooh, about ten minutes.

The more astute among you (i.e. those who can read), will have noticed that, in my last entry into this electronic home of witty cynicism and general contemporary pessimism (lots of isms there), I wrote about the Coca-Cola advert which is more annoying than being tied to a chair, having your eyelids held open with lollipop sticks and being forced to watch old Madonna videos.

Today(night)’s entry is once again, as you may have guessed from the opening paragraph, about adverts.

Pizza Hut recently came up with what is apparently an incredibly witty take on an old phrase, in the form of, “You do the maths, we’ll do the pizza”. Clearly this is just something that a bored marketing arsehole thought was clever, and who, in his (or her) moment of euphoria at being awarded another slice of pizza at the Pizza Hut HQ lunch, overlooked the rather glaringly obvious fact that mathematics has bugger all to do with the consumption of circular bread-based foodstuffs.

Not just this, but also the fact that the adverts themselves, once you’ve seen them once, are about as likely to make you want to go and buy a pizza as watching a cow getting skinned alive is going to make you want to buy a real leather sofa (possibly from DFS – home of the eternal half-price sale?)

There are (as far I know) three of said adverts. The first one features a family, fingers of some sort, and a waitress who deems it necessary to look smug and carry the tray above her head.

The second involves two families who play tennis. They're clearly all middle-class Tories, so that pretty much rules out that advert having any effect on me (apart from maybe kicking the TV in).

The third, and the one which prompted me to write this entry, is about a couple (Yvonne and John, we are reliably informed) who buy some pizza. Apparently, Yvonne has some new rollerskates, and poor old John has the box, and subsequently, Yvonne ‘treats’ John to some kind of pizza meal-deal, and allegedly “goes up three times on eight wheels”. Following the insertion of said pizza into said couples’ respective digestive openings (that is, their mouth, not their arse); we are asked some stupid question about submarining.

So, not only are Pizza Hut clearly stating, in a very visual way, that they don’t mind if you come round to one of their outlets and roll around on flashing rollerskates while wielding pizzas above your head (and breaking a few H&S laws while you’re at it), but they quite obviously don’t respect their customers time as they just wasted a precious 45 seconds of my life with some crappy advert which culminated in me being asked how often two social rejects like to dress up as sailors and go submarining.

Is it just me, or are adverts just shit? I want to go back to the good ol’ days of Honda’s “Cog”. That is a true piece of commercial genius.