From time to time, we all get fed up with certain advertising slogans or phrases. It's bound to happen, because television and radio adverts are repeated so often.

However, at the moment, there's something, in TV advertising that I hate, loathe and detest more than any product catchphrase ever heard before.

I hate it more than my normal advert-loathing, because it's not in just one advert, it's in a number of adverts, for vastly different products. It's the "phrase du jour" for 2002.

History Repeating
In 1999 it was the word, "zesty". Every sodding advert, for anything to do with food that had a sauce or mayonnaise element, seemed to be using the word zesty to describe it.

It was if the creative writing teams for US TV & radio commercials had all taken a couple of months off, and left a pre-recorded message for their clients, should they ring:

" < click > ...
Thank you for calling the creative team. We're not here right now. If you have an urgent creative requirement, just keep using the word 'zesty' to describe your product. Otherwise, please speak clearly, after the tone....
< beeeep >..."

It was used to describe sauces, and in some cases cleaning products, with all manor of flavours or scents. Zesty Tomato sauce, zesty Chipotle mayo, zesty lime floor wax, zesty deadly Anthrax spores. You name it, it was zesty.

There was even one advert, on TV (I think it was a Taco Bell one), that I suspect, was a deliberate satire on the zesty phenomenon by the very people who had been perpetrating it*. It involved the main character and his buddy, watching the world going by and passing judgement on everything as either, "Zesty!", or, "Not zesty!".

Of course, that might by my cynical British sense of humour. It could very well be that the advert was sincere, but it makes me feel better to think that the creative team who wrote it were laughing at their clients falling for it.

At the end of the day, however, I think you can only call something 'zesty' if it's made with citrus fruit, and is edible.

The New Bugbear
So, now on to this year's most over-used and irritating phrase. Here it is folks:

You know what I'm talking about. It's in every advert (in the US) with a voice-over guy that sounds like a jock**, advertising something that "guys" are interested in. This means adverts for:

? Pick-up trucks
? Shite domestic mass-produced urine ... err ... I mean, beer***
? Power-tools
? Anything by Taco Bell
? Any one of a number of characterless, tasteless, knuckle-head filled sports-brewpub-bars

So you'll hear, "You gotta love that Ford have added another five feet to the length of the new Excursion." or, "You gotta love that we've now added an extra 15lbs of low-grade synthetic grated cheese to our new pizza?"

One advert, uses the phrase, about three times, about three different features or facts! By the end of the commercial, I'm left thinking, "You gotta love that I don't have a shotgun by the couch, because if I did, I'd probably have shot up the TV after seeing your POS advert!"

There's a thought. What if a bunch of us rounded up the creative team that did that commercial, tied them to a chair, in an abandoned commercial premises, á la Reservoir Dogs, and started pacing around them saying:

"You gotta love that I'm gonna slowly cut one of your ears off."
< swish >
"...and you gotta love that I'm gonna douse you in gasoline."
< slosh >
" and you gotta love that..." etc. etc...

I think you get the idea.

Even if you don't. I'm sure you've gotta love it.

Footnotes
*the Advertising agencies' creative teams. Do follow along!

** Non-American readers note: Jock is a term for athletic, muscular, thuggish, piss-beer chugging, dumb as a bag of rocks, student types, and not a derisive term for Scotsmen.
The nearest British equivalent to a jock is a PE Student - that is, someone studying to be a PE teacher. And yes, I have a good 30 minutes stand-up comedy material about such types, as there were a lot of them at my college.

***This is not all American beer. This is just the mass-produced lageresque crap pumped out by the likes of Coors and Budweiser. There are many delicious and interesting micro brewed beers in the US. Fat Tire (US spelling of 'Tyre', not the verb to describe inducing tiredness) is my favourite.

?Yes, apparently adding up to twice your own body weight of cheap grated cheese to any food, makes it even better. Quite how Americans have the gall to criticise British cuisine??, when all they've given the world is the fucking Big Mac, is beyond me.

??Oh, and for the record, that whole "boil everything" rumour about British cooking hasn't been true since at least the 1960's, if indeed it ever was. Get a clue people.