When the good people at Hoseasons asked us to come up with ideas for their flagship new TV ad for 2011, I was pretty excited. This was going to be the first time I had ever seen a TV ad all the way through from concept to execution. And to be fair, it didn’t take us long to come up with some ideas.

The main challenge was how to convey the breadth of the Hoseasons proposition in just 30 seconds. We started as most creatives do by asking ourselves a very simple question: just what is it that we’re trying to sell? The answer was more than a little daunting.

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A few years ago at Red C we had some fabulous TV scripts that sadly never went into full production. Despite never seeing the light of day, the animation tests that were done for the adverts always made everyone here smile with how incredibly cute and well-executed they were. The guys behind the animation tests were a couple of fellas named Tom & Rory and their colleagues at Once Were Farmers… and thanks to the great experience we had with working with them, we knew that one day it would happen again.

Fast forward a few years and the opportunity to engage the fabulous skills of Once Were Farmers came by when we decided to try some new thinking on our latest Marisota DRTV Advert. The script was simple and charming and required something memorable and cute… so who better to get our Production Company, The Gate, to hire than Tom, Rory and the guys at Once Were Farmers.

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Like a lot of agencies, at Red C we have some great ideas that never see the light of day… sometimes I think it would have been great to have saved up all the politically incorrect, subversive and downright funny ideas we’ve come up with over the years and put them on Youtube… but since we didn’t, I thought I’d make you smile and highlight some incredibly funny joke adverts that only a very brave client would dare to try and run.

First up has to be this classic Yellow Pages advert from the very funny 70′s film ‘The Grove Tube’. The ‘Groove Tube’ is well worth checking out for the hilarious Kramp TV Kitchen and the KoKo Clown Show, which if you have young children, will make you think twice about leaving them alone watching a friendly Clown on TV… think twice though before watching ‘Brown 25 from Uranus’.

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Salman Rushdie in 1989

What do John Milton, Salman Rusdie and Frank Zappa have in common? They’ve all written adverts.

Yep. It might come as a surprise to the purists amongst you, but there’s a whole raft of notable novelists, poets, scriptwriters and lyricists who cut their literary teeth as copywriters. So what could advertising have offered these talented writers, aside from a steady income?

There is a theory that John Milton, author of the epic poem, Paradise Lost, was also the writer of the first ever trade advertisement to appear in the UK press. In September 1658 in Mercurius Politicus, the progovernment newsbook of which he was editor from 1650, there was an advertisement for a ‘China Drink’ with purported health properties:

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