Four more years

I suppose it would be fair to say I'm no sports fan. Pretty much as soon as I could escape from compulsory rugby at school, I made a point of reading a book whenever my peers were talking about, watching or indulging in sport. But this is not the reason that I'm glad we're out of the World Cup.

The last few months have seen, some of the most sloppy, cliche-ridden advertising in history. As each international sporting event gets bigger and the commercial opportunities are mined deeper, the ads don't seem to get subtler or more clever. We just get more carpet bombing of unthinking drivel.

How many times during the run up to the competition have you seen any of the following?

1) Completely pointless shoehorning of soccer celebrity into a piece of communication. Admittedly the big players are now brands in their own right and subject to the same rigorous control but this means that we're not only subject to Beckham's supposedly brooding scowl on every product from tyres to sofas, but it's the same scowl... one of three approved shots which are supposed to add the cachet of international sport.

Personally I have a problem with Beckham's 'Blue Steel' look as I can't help imagining his voice whenever he appears. An incongruity which undermines any credibility. I have similar issue with shots of Rooney who, with his sullen, lumpen scowl, so often used to imply grit or patriotism, looks for all the world like a pink Shrek.

2) Images of 'passion'. This usually manifests itself as a photogenic fan, mouth open in a scream of triumph. Probably the biggest black hole in advertising at the moment is the lack of passion or engagement. Advertisers know that punters are switching off in droves, bored to death by the repetitive messages of undifferentiated products and services. More than anything else, clients desperately want consumers to care about their product or even, frankly, to give a toss. The logic seems to be that, by co-opting the public's genuine passion for sport they can help us to understand how truly, viscerally, orgasmically exciting their new fixed rate mortgage really is.

This is noticeably the kind of advertising that disappears fastest when we get knocked out.

3) Face painting. I don't know quite when face-painting took off as children's party entertainment or as visually interesting supporter behaviour but it certainly seems to have been a godsend to advertisers. Getting the consumer to wear your logo was always an advertiser's wet dream but now they can tattoo it on the face of a good looking model or an adorable kid for the ultimate in glaringly obvious communication. This is particularly favoured for Europe wide or global ads - always a sure sign of an facile idea.

Mercifully, the online world doesn't seem to have fallen into these traps. New media's reduced reliance on iconic imagery and having more than a single brain cell to share across the agency seem to have saved us.

I can't work out why the ad world collectively shuts down its brain during a big event. Perhaps they're more like me than I care to admit and bunked off to the art room during games with a slim volume of romantic poetry. Perhaps they're just as bewildered as I am with a phenomenon that has no point but seems to animate the whole of society. Perhaps the idea of attaching one's product to the World Cup is so absurdly simple that even clients will buy it.

Whatever the cause, the ad industry have distinguished themselves as predictably poorly as the England squad. Thank God we get four years off..