Why Are TV Adverts Getting So Stupid?

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Both valid points. But for larger brands there is also brand relevance, position in the market. McDonalds and Coca Cola targets children and young people. This is not just for short-term spikes in sales, It's also promoting the brand and planting seeds for the long term.

In the developing world Coke and Pepsi are branded with American lifestyle (selling the American dream) which has made both companies hugely successful all over the world.

Take Mexico for example
https://www.theguardian.com/global-deve ... crisis-acc

While there are some advertising that is so cringey it doesn't work (Like Bud Light Beer) the use of catchy click bait works most of the time, Otherwise advertisers would not keep using the same formula.

I was forgetting children. I remember being taken in by a good few ads when I was a kid.

I don't see many TV ads so I can't say whether they're actually getting more stupid but if they are I'd have to conclude it's because stupid is generating the best return on investment.

If you look at Tik Tok and instagram etc...its short "Stupid" content that generates the most clicks.
Not surprising then that advertisers subscribe to the same formula.

It must be working because it's become more prevalent

Near the door inside the local WalMart there's a sign that says "Find your fa-la-la-la-lah thing here." Are there really people who liked that? Whoever runs WalMart presumably thinks so. I like silly jokes myself from time to time, but there are limits. Not that it would have made me buy anything if I'd found it funny.

I think that the ads for the new Google Pixel phone are pretty stupid. Google, pushing normalcy every step of the way.

The very name "Google" makes me cringe. But its owners became extremely rich. I like to think that the stupidity of the name didn't help. If everybody was like me, Google would have sunk without trace years ago.

you know, that their name came from the utterance of a toddler?

It was Enid Blyton who seems to have first created the term "google buns" as a teatime treat in her book "The Magic Faraway Tree" first published in the late 1930s or early 40s.

It is more appropriate for the name of a bun with a great big sherbet-filled raisin in the centre, or something like that.

Who knows? According to Wikipedia:
"The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
Note: I also disapprove of companies deliberately mis-spelling words, and of the consumers who buy more as a result of them doing that.

Then I'd like them to be called "sherbert-filled big-raisin-in-the-middle buns" or something else that's self-explanatory. Learning and remembering terms is hard enough as it is without the term giving no clue as to what it means.

In 1920, 9-year-old Milton Sirotta coined the term "googol". Sirotta was the nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner.
Kasner asked his nephew to think of a name for the number 1 followed by 100 zeros. Sirotta may have been inspired by the comic strip character Barney Google.
Kasner popularized the term in his 1940 book Mathematics and the Imagination. The term wasn't widely accepted until the book's publication.

Who knows? According to Wikipedia:
"The name Google is a misspelling of Googol, the number 1 followed by 100 zeros, which was picked to signify that the search engine was intended to provide large quantities of information."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Google
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Yes. Thats my understanding of the name's origin. A very egg headed concept of higher math. Not baby talk.

A googol is one followed by a 100 zeros (which the number of atoms in the known universe multiplied by 1000,000,000,000,000).

A "googolplex" is one followed by...a googol of zeros.

The number of lies told by the first 44 presidents of the US would equal a googol.

The number of lies told by the one 45th POTUS would be a "googolplex".

Are ads really getting MORE dumb? Theyve been dumb and irritating for decades.

Absolutely!

Oh you must google Australian advertisements/billboards. We have a peculiar penchant for stupid in our advertising but with a local flavour.

Historically Australia has always been divided by class, the upper class being clones of the British educated class and the lower class like the lower class street cockney from industrial Britain (from where the earliest Australian migrants hail). In defining "Aussie" culture the lower class language/speech won out, the Australian accent is a derivative British cockney.

Although my parents bought us children to have a "cultural cringe" in reaction to Aussie humour, the use of crude language is still prevalent. Crude metaphors in advertising therefore elicits a good laugh. Even I have to admit when I see somethings stupid with an Aussie flavor it makes me chuckle.

Barney Google, and his goo goo googly eyes. Barney Google had a wife three times his size. And he wrote the Russian novel "Dead Souls". Or was that Nikolai Gogol?