Whilst travelling up or down an escalator, you may come across 3 or 4, (or if you're in Angel going up the reaaaally long escalator, it's more like 5 or 6) which will give you plenty of opportunity to look, look again, and maybe think to yourself as I did: WTF??
I think this might be the worst advert I have ever seen. It looks like something my 9 year old self might've bashed out in Word at 11 o'clock at night for a piece of IT homework. All that's missing is a shitty 3D WordArt title, some clipart of a kooky little stick man enjoying a cocktail, and a gradient. And maybe some Comic Sans, just for good measure.
I'm not sure what upsets me more. Perhaps the photographs themselves - a series of uninspiring cut-and-paste jobbies of semi-unattractive people looking happy doing random 'fun stuff' (e.g. the smiling bride and the man in a chef's hat - what is this meant to imply exactly? Come to Madeira, where people sometimes get married, and, erm, eat food that someone else has cooked?) - or the fact that whoever pooed this out in 5 minutes seems to have purposely chosen not to align the 2 photos at the bottom, in order to create a 'jaunty' but visually chaotic little step effect for the sub header to sit on.
I don't know why this ad offends me so much, but it does. :P I think what adds to my bafflement is that there are SO MANY of them dotted around the London Underground - the Madeira tourist board clearly have the money to place these ads, so why didn't they pay someone to actually do a decent job? I half think it'd be better to just have a big headline against a plain background saying something like: "Madeira....it's where the cake's at." It'd certainly be less, shall I say.... half-baked??
The thing is, I was so bugged that I actually google-searched Madeira to see if I could find a version of the ad online so that I could share my pain with others. Turns out I didn't find anything, hence having to resort to photographic evidence, but you know what I did find out instead? That Madeira actually looks really nice. And full of tropical flowers, dramatic landscapes, crystal blue sea, and posh marinas:
http://www.madeira-web.com/PagesUK/index.html
So, this got me thinking. Is this the worst ad ever, or is it in fact a cunning stroke of genius? I'm starting to lean towards the latter, cos the irony is, I knew nothing about Madeira before, but now it's established itself in my brain as a potential holiday destination, and not an unappealing one either. Ooh, Tourist Board, you little scamps.
