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Dada Ad (view source)

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Now [[Values Dissonance]] can come into play here. What's confusing in some countries and regions is normal elsewhere, so examples of ads should make sure they're confusing in the region in which they are placed. Alternatively, they may have been trying to make a splash for their ad company and forgot about the client. A third possibility is that a bizarre ad may be less likely to be fast-forwarded through by DVR viewers.
 
Compare [[Gainax Ending]], [[What Do You Mean It Wasn't Made Onon Drugs?]], [[What Were They Selling Again?]]. Contrast [[Exactly What It Says Onon the Tin]], or at least the [[Trope Namer|trope-naming]] Ronseal adverts.
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== Anime ==
* In [[Gintama (Manga)|Gintama]], what started off as four minutes of talking mannequins suddenly became a PSA for the switch from analog to digital television.
 
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
* ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' loved to parody this (at least in [[The Eighties]]). One ad had two people standing around making small talk for 30 seconds, and then the name of a defense industry company appears.
* ''[[The Apprentice (TV series)|The Apprentice]]'' usually features a task where the teams create a television advertisement for a certain product. [[Reality Show Genre Blindness|Almost invariably]], the first team's ad will be a heavy-handed and unrealistic scenario, while the second team follows this trope to the letter. The first team will usually win, as perhaps best illustrated by the task in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iq2EcDgqXg Series 4 in the UK]. (The ads begin at 0:30 and 2:48, and Alan Sugar voices his opinion on Dada Ads at 4:13)
** There was one time when ''both'' teams (tasked with advertising a body wash) came out with something like this. One depicted a runner splashing the soap ''on his face, without rinsing it off,'' and the other was entirely themed around gay sex innuendo, which doesn't fly on mainstream US advertising. Needless to say, ''neither'' team won this round.
** Alan Sugar once described this trope as one of his pet hates on ''Room 101'' so it's not surprising he would rule against ads using it.
** Although some of those ads were horrible anyway, like the already infamous Pantsman advert from the most recent series. An attempt to sell a cereal called Wake Up Call by advertising it as what you need to stop you [[What an Idiot!|putting your pants on over your clothes]]. And the mascot was Pantsman, a superhero who wears his pants over his clothes. The team [[Hand Wave|Handwaved]] the [[Fridge Logic]] of this by saying only Pantsman can wear his pants over his trousers, [[Do Not Do This Cool Thing|never mind that most kids view superheroes as role models and want to do what they do]]. Unsurprisingly, they lost and Philip, the creator of Pantsman, will most likely [[Never Live It Down]]. Because [[Who Would Be Stupid Enough...?]] to design an advertising campaign based on pants?
*** [[Did Not Do the Research|Creator]] of Pantsman? [[VG Cats|Scott Ramsoomair]] has a lawsuit on his hands then.
* ''[[The Gruen Transfer]]'' has two regular segments that deals with this type of ad: "What Does It Mean?", in which they often contact the original ad agency to explain what was going on, and "What Is It For?" in which the product shot is cut off the end, and the panelists have to guess which product is being advertised.
* A ''[[30 Rock (TV)|Thirty Rock]]'' episode featured an eccentric businessman played by [[Steve Martin]], who owned a company called SunStream. Eventually, it's revealed that he's a fraud and SunStream is a sham company. He points out that "If you ever watched our commercials, we never said what we did" and then the show [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlymNLAAzUM cuts to one such ad].
 
== [[Newspaper Comics]] ==
* Mocked at least once in ''[[Dilbert (Comic Strip)|Dilbert]]'' with the Amorphous Ad Company.
 
== [[Real Life]] ==
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* A certain Australian Toyota ad does this. Though we are told what the ad was for (a new sports car), that does not justify the anthropomorphic ninja cats kung-fu fighting against each other.[[Rule of Cool|Then again, maybe it doesn't need to be justified.]]
** [http://www.motorward.com/2011/09/video-toyota-prius-family-ad-is-creepy/ This ad], however, needs some justification for why Toyota believes an expedition to the deepest point in the [[Uncanny Valley]] will help them sell a car. And before that, they had an ad proclaiming that their new car [[Captain Obvious|is a car]], and a [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E15PE7iGT0U Corolla campaign] inexplicably partnered with [[Vocaloid|Hatsune Miku]]. Maybe they just want people to forget about the "help the accelerator pedal has fallen and it can't get up" fiasco?
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p9JYimOK6AY Is this]... an ad for ''tires?!'' Why is ''[[Astro Boy (Animeanime)|Astro Boy]]'' [[Mind Screw|there?!]]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkX3RhK4udk Las Vegas CityCenter] is trying to give the city a reputation for [[True Art]], so the advertisement shows almost nothing but a couple dramatic shots of the product in between lots of footage of people having great fun doing things nowhere near Las Vegas (riding the waves in a yacht?) Even fans who had been following the project since groundbreaking found the ad almost incomprehensible.
* If you thought the PS3 ads were weird, you haven't seen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDttY8-fLLk Future of Gaming]. It's supposedly a 9-minute promotional animated short for the PlayStation 2 (even commissioned by Sony), but it's nothing short of grade-A [[Mind Screw]]. Some of the ending is not safe for work, but that will be the least of your problems if you decide to see this. It should be clear less than halfway in why Sony disowned it.
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* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo Honda] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrQoof1F2cQ adverts]... [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W-O7jnoSWo just] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K4QlJky-sw Honda] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxZNbbxvML8 adverts].
** Surprisingly, a ''[http://www.pogomix.net/interest-from-honda/ Pogo song]'' is apparently where they draw the weirdness line.
** Hey, that Rube Goldberg machine was [[Doing It for Thethe Art|real]]!
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1s-aXtrrdpU This] Stella Artois commercial, complete with a title and a subtitle in French. Reassuringly elephants!
* At the time of writing, there are some TV ads trying to promote travel to Canada. The problem is that most of them have no dialogue, and none of them tell the viewer anything about Canada.Rea
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* [[Neal Boortz]] [http://boortz.com/nealz_nuze/2009/06/is-there-anyone-out-there.html expresses his confusion at the Lexis IS] ads.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GZyNBK6M6BQ The third Powerthirst ad] by [[Picnic Face]]. While the other two were fairly straight [[Testosterone Poisoning]]-driven tirades, this one...well...''Drink Powerthirst! Shoot the clouds! Hit Jesus! Strap him to a bull! JESUS RODEO, DEAD JESUS RODEO!''
* [[I'm a Marvel And ImI'm ADCa (Fanfic)DC|Lars M. Dusseldorf]] made a commercial for the 2011 Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo featuring random dancers, a song with lyrics that constantly repeated, "C2. E2.", and such phrases as, "Are C2 and E2 lost in a world without meaning? No. C2E2 is '''life!'''"
 
== [[Web Comics]] ==
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== [[Western Animation]] ==
* ''[[The Simpsons]]'': "Mr. Plow" hires a fancy ad firm and they give him a weird Calvin Klein Obsession knock off complete with a ''[[Citizen Kane (Film)|Citizen Kane]]'' [[Shout -Out]], as well as the source of the quote above. "What the hell was that?!"
* Likewise, the crew of [[Futurama]] has a commercial made about their delivery service, but upon viewing the finished product (which is based on the 1984 Apple ad mentioned above) are baffled by the abstract imagery and conflicting messages.
* [[Don Hertzfeldt]]'s animated short "[[Rejected]]" presents a series of Dada Ads created by an unbalanced animator who is possibly suffering from "creative stagnation in a commercial world." All of his humorously surreal and unsettling cartoons are rejected for being wildly inappropriate. The animator has a mental breakdown and his cartoon world collapses.
* ''[[DextersDexter's Laboratory]]'' had a commercial for Puppet Pals Jeans featuring [[Deliberately Monochrome]] models and an eerie lack of music. Also, the Puppet Pals themselves did not show up until the last 15 seconds, though earlier scenes had abstract references to them. At the end, [[Tom Kenny]] tries to prevent the viewers from thinking, "[[What Were They Selling Again?]]?" by informing them (with a French accent), "You know it's ''Puppet Pals'' because of the name on the label."
* Parodied in ''[[Codename: Kids Next Door]]'' in the episode where the sectors are showing off their latest advancements in two-by-four technology. Many groups put together small video presentations about their inventions. The French KND shows off their invention with a black and white video about absolutely nothing coherent. The operatives evaluating the inventions and demonstrations calls off the ad part of the way through and just asks outright what it's supposed to be advertising. Their response is essentially that [[True Art Is Incomprehensible]].
* ''[[The Problem Solverz]]'' episode "Breakfast Warz" features a commercial for Professor Sugar Fish's Psycho Puffs of Madness cereal, which involves a kid flopping around with a giant rainbow-colored fish laughing in Morse code while their house burns down and bright neon colors flash everywhere. After viewing the commercial, Horace responds with, "Well, ''that'' was crazy..."
 
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