The least distinctive aspect of the Winter Olympics is the fact that insane people will throw themselves off mountains or hurtle head first down spiraling ice chutes. They do so with monotonous regularity on a quadrennial basis, invariably with spectacular mountain scenery as the backdrop and a lot of powdery snow shooting up at the cameras. And after mounties and moose, the most clichéd aspect of being Canadian is that we trudge our way through life enduring a crap climate.

The BBC’s commercial for their coverage of the Winter Olympics presents a more intriguing (because unexpected) image of Canada than all the domestically produced tourism and Olympics ads put together.

On the whole Canadian marketers are slavishly literal and woefully unimaginative. The amount of money we waste on showing customers what they already know is perhaps only equaled by the amount of money we spend on research to confirm that they in fact know what we think they know.

If advertising dies anywhere I predict it will be in Canada. And it won’t have anything to do with a disrupted mediascape or the triumph of the conversation over the marketing monologue, it will simply die of boredom.