One thing you’ll discover when comparing traditional and digital law firm marketing strategies is that it can be a real challenge to make a memorable TV commercial. We see so many in between our shows that most are lost to time, and some are never seen at all as we use the commercial breaks to use the bathroom or grab a drink or snack.
Sometimes, though, companies take being memorable a bit too far, and you’ll get to “enjoy” a few such instances below.
Remco
Many people find dolls to be pretty creepy, but even people who don’t have pediophobia (fear of dolls) will probably want to stay far, far away from Remco’s doll, Baby Laugh A-Lot. The concept of a doll who laughs as she rocks back and forth on her little rocking chair is already weird enough, but the commercial takes it from a little bit weird to downright creepy.
A girl sets the doll on a table before making the mistake of pushing the button on the doll’s body. The doll then starts cackling loudly as she rocks back and forth. It then cuts between other girls whipping their heads around to see the source of the sound and the doll still rocking and cackling away.
Eventually, all of the children and even the narrator start laughing with her. The commercial then ends with the doll and the narrator being the only ones present, laughing away.
Mountain Dew
Mountain Dew found itself in quite the position. It needed to create a new Super Bowl ad, but it couldn’t just be a normal commercial. No, too many people tuned into the sports game just for the ads for that to be a good idea.
Instead, they looked to the past to create a whole new commercial and found that cute puppies and babies were popular and that recent years had a monkey trend. They fused all these three things together to create the infamously uncomfortable creature known as the puppy monkey baby.
It bursts into the commercial by lifting a wall panel and walks in with a bucket of Mountain Dew before it jumps up onto the table and begins just repeating its name over and over in a monotone voice and dancing. The guys in the commercial only get to say one line before being confronted with this nightmare monster and then following it as it dances its way out the door of their apartment.
The commercial was rated 4/10 at the time but has become infamous over the years for just how odd both the commercial itself and the creature it spawned truly are.
Little Baby’s Ice Cream
Before discussing this ad campaign, it needs a disclaimer. All of Little Baby’s Ice Cream ads go beyond just being weird and are full-on creepy, to the point that you’ll find at least one of them on many lists online of the creepiest ads ever created. While they have created a few, three stand out above all of the rest: Love Lickers, This is a Special Time, and Eyes Scream.
Eyes Scream features three actors who open their mouths to silently scream about ice cream while a soft-spoken narrator tells you about the ice cream. However, instead of eyes, they each have two more tiny mouths where their eyes should be, which also open to silently scream.
The background is a turquoise color that has the Little Baby’s Ice Cream logo dotted around it, each slowly spinning. And, of course, you can’t ignore the slightly distorted music box song playing throughout the entire commercial. While this one is undeniably creepy, the two others are arguably worse.
Love Lickers and This is a Special Time both feature a black background to contrast with the star of the show, a person covered in presumably vanilla ice cream. The distorted music box song is featured in both of these commercials as well, and so is the narrator.
Luckily, the person in both commercials has their eyes this time, but that just means they can stare intently at you in This is a Special Time. The narrator describes how good the person in the video’s life is as they take spoonfuls of ice cream from their own head and eat them, their eyes never once looking away from the camera. From you.
Love Lickers is also pretty weird but is a bit less creepy than This is a Special Time. The person just intently stares at the ice cream they’re holding, which has a smaller version of themselves doing the same as it zooms out several times.
The final person is looking intently at the Little Baby’s Ice Cream logo as a tongue slowly appears behind them. The narrator in this one tells you how much they “love lickers” and encourages you to lick their ice cream. At least you weren’t being stared at this time.
PlayStation 3
Gaming is no stranger to strange commercials, but none can truly match the campaigns Sony ran to advertise their newest console at the time, the PlayStation 3. Almost every ad for this console is weird and kind of creepy, from Mental Wealth to Rubik’s Cube. Of course, one stands head and shoulders above the rest: the baby commercial.
A baby doll sits in a stark white room, its only companion being a PlayStation 3 console. It does some of the things you’d expect from a baby doll: it opens its eyes, laughs, cries and says, “mama.” However, its laugh quickly turns from that of a baby to an adult man, and it cries real tears, which slowly recede back into its tear ducts as its eyes flash scenes that are presumably from the games on the console.
The commercial ends with the console floating and the words, “Play Beyond,” appearing beneath it. The intent of this commercial is honestly unclear, but it definitely stuck in the minds of those who saw it, for better or worse.
