10 Awesome Ads (For Traumatizing Children)

Sometimes it's because TV ads try a little too hard to be "edgy." Sometimes it's because ad executives are fucking insane. Regardless of the reason, since the television was invented, it has brought us ads so unintentionally terrifying that they'll haunt you forever.

So hold on to your butts, because we've gone out and found 10 ads that are sure to leave a lasting impression . . . in your nightmares.

The Marketing Meeting:

Ferrero President: We need a hook for our horrible chocolate eggs filled with two cents worth of plastic. For some bizarre reason kids are not all over them.

Marketing guy: I propose a commercial with a Humpty Dumpty rip off. A beloved icon shaped as an egg.

Ferrero President: Wonderful. But what if we give him a nightmarish face and gently imply he is mentally retarded?

Marketing guy: And then when the children start weeping, their parents will comfort them with our chocolate! That is why you are president, sir.

The Result:

What the Fuck?

If insanity were a living creature, chances are this is what its nightmares would look like:

So this creature appears, and he's the love child of Humpty Dumpty and all of our darkest fears. He addresses the viewers who are now sitting in a puddle of their own piss, with an important announcement on the versatility and intrinsic details of the Ferrero Kinder Surprise: "Kinder, yebbol shakey." Well, thank you Humpty, that certainly needed to be said. "Me unscrabbly," continues the giant egg wrapped in human skin.

After that, the whole thing spirals into some sort of gibberish, which we are forced to assume are spells from the Necronomicon.

The monstrosity strategically forgets to tell you anything about the chocolate which holds the "awesome" prize, proving to us that even Ferrero knows they are behind a barrel of surplus WWII diarrhea in the taste department. But that's okay, because the lousy chocolate holds an even lousier plastic toy inside.

The Marketing Meeting:

"I don't know man, cod roe pasta sauce? How will we make kids want to eat it?"

"Come on, all we need is a cute mascot. Like a toddler in a red blanket."

"Well... that sounds OK, I guess."

"And then we'll have thousands of them emerging from a spaceship, marching in formation in a terrifying mass with the obvious goal of enslaving humanity."

"What?"

"Nothing... let's go film this thing."

The Result:

What the Fuck?

In what brings to mind a rendition of Village of the Damned... in Space, the invading identical army of blanket wrapped toddlers descends upon Earth from a turd-shaped spacecraft, all singing in perfect unison the immensely creepy chant of "Tarako."

Now, children are hideous monsters as it is, but when you have an apparently limbless army of them, advancing in a Roman Triangle Formation with their doll faced frozen expressions, chanting a tune which can only be described as a war song, then you are not that far away from your brain sending an evacuation order straight to your bowels.

But believe it or not, this is not even the fucked up part. No. What really drives us insane from horror and bewilderment is when the obviously tripping albino Japanese boy-girl stares emotionlessly at the hive consciousness legion of alien babies...

...after which the commercial cuts straight to the kid enjoying a plate of spaghetti. Why is that terrifying you ask? Here is what cod roe looks like, compared with an image from the commercial for your convenience:

That's right. The commercial implies that the kid ate the invading alien horde by turning them into pasta sauce. So, suddenly, what was probably devised as a cutesy commercial for a food product becomes a dramatic tale of a young albino on acid saving Earth by eating alien babies in the shape of human toddlers. We'll give you one guess as to which country this came from.

The Marketing Meeting:

Guy#1: We need to tell our customers just how awesome and totally sweet the PlayStation is.

Guy#2: We could talk about its hardware, the assortment of games and online...

Guy#3: No! Creepy alien girls in pigtails talking gibberish with a Scottish accent!

Guy#1: ... promote this man!

The Result:

What the Fuck?

Never before has the theory of the uncanny valley been proven to such an extent. The... thing in the commercial possesses enough features to be sorta labeled a human, we guess, but there is something off here... something that makes you quiver in the deepest corners of your very soul... we don't know what though. Could be her hairstyle, lack of make-up or the fact she is an alien-human hybrid.

Our collective acid fantasy from Venus babbles nonstop for almost 40 seconds about humans, making a point to tell us she is not one them, in case you were wondering if subtlety was Sony's forte.

And just as a bonus, E.T. Girl laughs the laugh of the damned after something growls off camera, perhaps the sound of a fellow alien eating a human child. After that, the tagline, "Do Not Underestimate the Power of PlayStation," sounds very much like a threat.

The Marketing Meeting:

Mark: I don't get it... we keep losing customers. What are we doing wrong?

Stuffed tiger: ...

Mark: Yes, I see, but where will we get the dancing hippo?

Stuffed bear: ...

Mark: I never actually tried cantaloupe.

Cop mannequin: ...

Mark: But isn't murder illegal?

The Result:

What the Fuck?

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to hear a furniture credit pitch from the bastard love child of Peter Lorre and Mr. Miyagi amidst a sea of stuffed animals giving away random growls? What? What do you mean "No"? You lie! Well, even if you didn't, Norton Furniture still provides an answer. A creepy, disturbing answer.

Welcome to Norton Furniture, can I paint your nipples green?

"Now, seriously, if you can't get credit in my store........ you can't get credit anywhere." The unusual emphasis on "seriously" and the long pause before finishing the sentence gives the whole thing an unintended feeling of danger. We are now afraid that if Norton declines us credit, we will not leave the store alive and end up inside one of his stuffed animals.

After you are left uneasy with this subtle threat and try to decide if Norton's voice sounds more like Igor from Frankenstein or Christopher Lambert's Rayden, you are a served a large portion of baked creepy when another of the supposedly "dead" animals growls at the furniture salesman causing him to consult his current situation with... a policeman mannequin.

The Marketing Meeting:

Nike.... Nike... Ni... ke.... shoes... shoes, people wear shoes on their feet, they play sports... Yes, sports, sports... ee... football, baseball... pro athletes.... arena sports... arena... big open arena... the Coliseum... Coliseum... dead Christians.... blood and gore.... Unrelenting horror strapped to the heads of pro athletes! I am a genius!

The Result:

What the Fuck?

Holy donkey balls on fire, what the hell is that in the first 0.5 seconds? Rewind. What the hell? Can barely make it out, the images move too fast. OK, in slow motion. What... in... the...

OK... so, from the very first nanoseconds of the commercial, Nike decided to thoroughly roofie up and rape our minds by planting subliminal messages of pure horror in their ad before immediately cutting to a bunch of MLB and NFL players posing for Sports Illustrated in some dark dreary basement which still looks, to us, like solitary confinement. To pass the time at their... well, prison--we guess, because we aren't seeing an exit anywhere--the guys engage in some typical sports oriented activities: throwing baseballs, footballs, swinging a bat. And then the whole thing not only goes back to Insanityville, it sets up shop there:

My sweet baseball is the only thing keeping me from going insane. That and my kickass wooden monkey mask.

In what we can only assume to have been the end result of a bet gone horribly wrong, each of the pro athletes starring in this cerebral enema of madness gets transformed into David Lynch's rendition of Power Rangers.

The last guy clearly does not understand the basic premise of a helmet.