The advertising rule book is changing. Although flashes of boobs and bottoms to sell everything from swimwear to toothpaste are still obligatory, another element has been added to the advertising mix. It seems that nowadays any self-respecting marketing agency won’t issue an ad unless potty humour is involved.

Apparently the sight of a gormless man sitting on a toilet and clutching a tablet computer should somehow spur me to want to purchase the services on offer- Claire Bonello

If your ad doesn’t contain any lavatorial jokes or reference to bodily functions (preferably with accompanying pictures) there’s a very good chance that it won’t be considered as attention-grabbing enough. If, on the other hand, you manage to insert some toilet jokes or references, you’re deemed worthy of advertising gold and considered to be the creative brains behind a cutting-edge campaign which will be rolled out across the country.

I get to think about this every time I’m stuck in traffic and come across those billboards advertising the wares of a particular internet service provider.

Apparently the sight of a gormless man sitting on a toilet and clutching a tablet computer should somehow spur me to want to purchase the services on offer. The Youtube version of the advert is even more uninspiring.

The same man – wearing oversized geeky glasses – enters a toilet booth, drops his trousers and pants and shouts his way to blissful release. The person in the next booth and the janitor mopping up outside overhear his groaning and come to the obvious conclusion considering the circumstances. But all the excited When-Harry-Met-Sally-type moans coming from inside the toilet booth are not the result of a bowel movement but simply the happy yelling of a football fan watching a match on his tablet computer. Well. If this was a performance, I’d expect the audience to clap very, very slowly.

It’s not that I find the ad particularly offensive. I’m not going to be reaching out for the smelling salts because of the mild visual irritant of seeing a huge billboard plastered with the picture of a man on the loo. But I can’t see how ads of this sort are going to fire me up and have me salivating for the products or services advertised.

In this particular instance, the campaign tagline urges me to ‘Join the revolution’. Oh dear. I suppose that’s referring to the permanently online digital society we’re living in where bandwidth and connectivity are everything.

In that kind of scenario not having the best and fastest service provider may appear to be a calamity – and that’s why you need the service being provided – to spare you from a situation where you don’t have internet access. That, I presume, is the message the ad is trying to convey. Unfortunately all I’m getting is how utterly pathetic we’re going to be if we can’t detach ourselves from our computers for a couple of minutes to take a dump. Nothing very revolutionary about that I’m afraid.

The adoption of tacky ads isn’t a purely local phenomenon. The usually classy Harvey Nichols promoted the sales with photographs of models with their clothes soaked around the groin area next to the slogan: ‘The Harvey Nichols Sale. Try To Contain Your Excitement.’ Instead of customers wetting themselves in excitement at the prospect of being able to make some bargains at Harvey Nicks, the ads attracted a wave of disgusted criticism from viewers who complained about the sheer tackiness of it all.

Apart from the association with incontinence, the campaign was seen as being out of keeping with the upper-end tasteful image of the store.

The company was forced to defend its campaign and issued a statement saying it was all meant “in a playful, inoffensive manner, which was in-keeping with the tongue-in-cheek spirit in which we intended our campaign to be taken”. In other words, ‘We were trying to come across as cheeky and edgy – the type of company which pushes the envelope and gets talked about.’

If getting talked about is the Holy Grail of the advertising world, then I suppose Harvey Nichols has found it. And after all, ‘All publicity is good publicity’ isn’t it? To a point. If we’re basing ourselves on the assumption that name recognition is the be all and end-all of an advertising campaign then there’d be nothing better than having the most shocking campaigns imaginable, and dismissing critics as being humourless and po-faced. And we can look forward to even more controversial ads.

Maybe next time I drive through Marsa there’ll be a car ad with a graphic representation of cream being applied to haemorrhoids with the exhortation to ‘Glide Through Life’. Just another edgy advert to get up the nose of all the prudes out there.