I’ve had it with all these irritating coronavirus TV adverts and their over-sentimental lockdown messages

Rather than such saccharine promotion, companies should be putting back into the community in other ways

One of the more fascinating, though extremely irritating, aspects of the coronavirus lockdown has been how well the advertising world has adapted to the pandemic, particularly on TV.

It makes sense. Appearing to share the values of the average person has always been what they do best, so really, it was inevitable that they’d slot into quarantine life so well. But did they really have to make their efforts to sell, sell, sell, so wrought with emotion?

For the past few weeks (or has it been years, now?) escaping earnest video call-themed ads has felt almost impossible. You’re there one moment, laughing along with Gordon Ramsay as he eviscerates some nervous manager about his balls, or lack thereof (Kitchen Nightmares has become my household’s nightly show of choice), and the next, some kind-looking citizen is staring you down on screen, practically bawling about how much they miss their nan’s cooking.

Or telling you that we’re all friends, or how glad they are that some computer program exists, or else they might never have had the chance to be a part of a team again. Even the name of Facebook’s latest Covid-19 outbreak offering is nausea-inducing: “We're never lost if we can find each other”.

Togetherness and community can be wonderful things; have been the undisputed reason many of us are surviving this lockdown. Unfortunately, the one thing that makes those things so valuable is authenticity. And the social media giant’s 90-second bid to replicate that entirely strips it of any pretence of genuineness.

If you’ve yet to be accosted by this ad, I’ll describe it for you: Kate Tempest’s “People’s faces” plays softly over footage of empty streets around the world. There are dancing healthcare heroes, generous shopkeepers, WhatsApp messages asking: “are we going to be ok?” and clips of friends video calling each other, laughing, or crying. Visually, it’s lovely. Aren’t people great when they work together? It seems to ask.

But instead of getting that gooey feeling, all I can hear is the silent part of that message, never uttered, but looming over Tempest’s south London accent and the hugging children like an all-seeing demon: “Use our platform no matter what. And please, don’t worry your pretty little head about our business”.

Then there’s the Virgin Media ad: “Stay home, stay safe, stay connected”. I’ll spare you the details on that one. As if communicating mostly on video call, a crushingly lonely experience if you do happen to be on your own at this time, is a positive thing, the idea that we’re all in this together is shoved down your throat with just as much fervour.

Although Virgin Media's owners only license the brand name from Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Group, the tycoon's attempts to get taxpayers to bail out Virgin Atlantic (a separate company in which he is the majority shareholder), any equating of the two by the public will likely not help their image. The advert also ignores the fact that people are looking for ways to escape their realities, not be reminded of the dreadfulness of it all every 15 minutes.

Even poor attempts at connecting with us (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Teams) are hard to stomach. Although, I will give it to Vodafone for giving us a cute Pug, and not bawling humans, to look at.

Call it paranoia, call it cynicism. After more than six weeks inside, it’s probably both. But I know not all of it is driven by a need to reassure the public. It was just a couple of weeks ago, after all, that TechUK, the UK lobby group for tech companies like Facebook, Amazon, Google and Apple, called on the government to delay imposing the new Digital Services tax on the tech sector. The 2 per cent tax on income, already rather low, came into effect this month, and will generate hundreds of millions for the Treasury.

Yet, almost as if it had no real concern for the normal people so expertly used in these tear-jerker ads, it asked for “a bit more breathing space”: i.e. a pass on paying it at all, at least for this year.

Speaking to The Times when the story broke, Alex Cobham, chief executive of the Tax Justice Network said: “This is completely shameless of the tech companies – even by their low standards. This is the industry that has engineered the lowest effective tax rates in the world, declaring their profits in low and no-tax jurisdictions instead of where their real employment and sales take place.”

I couldn’t agree more. As successful as this soppy messaging may prove to be, and as nice as it is that some of them have accidentally encouraged more consumption of poetry, or made people feel warm inside, make no mistake, it is completely out of step with their real goals: to continue to make profits come what may. And as the country with the third-highest coronavirus death toll in the entire world, those odds will be felt by the consumers of these products, not the companies selling them.

We’ve taken a relatively juvenile response to the ads in my household. When we can’t get to the remote fast enough to mute the ads, one or two out of the three of us will take to screaming nonsense, or “Oh, f*** off!” at the screen until it stops. It does help a little. But it would be better if we didn’t have to.

Better still, it would be nice if these companies stopped the posturing entirely and finally demonstrated the loyalty they say they treat their customer bases with, by paying into the societies they rely on.