dfs featuring Nickelback

Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear.

I do not pretend to be an expert on adverts, in fact I am incredibly impatient and attempt to use my skyplus box to minimise my watching of TV advertisements. But at some stage this week I had the terrible misfortune to see this advert for the sofa selling company dfs (nice lower case branding there, by the way).

I won't go into too much detail but the point is that the advert mimicks the Nickelback video for 'Rockstar', the song that is used in the advert. The Nickelback video has a number of US celebrities and members of the public mouthing the words to their song and this advert has members of the public singing amongst some sofas.

If you wish to see the advert, I am sure you can find it on Youtube, but I will not be sending a link. If you have been lucky enough to avoid then congrats to you. Actually, I have changed my mind, it is worth following this link, not to see the videos but to see further outrage and user comments....

Anyway I have two problems with these adverts (I now see there are two of them!):

1) They are absolutely awful, painful adverts, full of particularly annoying looking people making idiots of themselves.

2) How on earth did Nickelback allow this to happen? They aren't that popular in the UK anyway and surely this must kill off their remaining fanbase.

I guess the answer to 2) must be that they take the view that all publicity is good publicity. Personally I would use this advert as a case in point to disprove this hypothesis.

Now Nickelback are not renowned for their artistic integrity and I say this as someone who used to like them (their single 'Breathe' from their 2002 release 'The State' is a great rock song). And in a world where US Hollywood stars appear in overseas adverts for instant cash rewards (Brad Pitt selling Rolex in Japan, anyone?) maybe this is the norm....but surely someone should have told them about this outrage...

I am guessing that most people share my views on this one but if anyone likes this, would admit it and argue that it has some worth I would be interested to hear why....