Since the dawn of time (or at least since the 1980s), tech companies' marketing departments have concocted a slew of catchphrase-wielding characters whose overriding goal is to create affectionate bonds between consumers and their companies' products. But while the average tech company employs advertising whizzes who are significantly smarter than those employed by the local furniture chain, their efforts are still doomed to eventually fail. Why is this, you ask? Well, because the nature of advertising is to repeat things over and over again until people hate hearing them. Thus any long-running advert campaign, no matter how cleverly executed, is bound to stir up resentment if it's played often enough.

In this slideshow, we'll examine the very worst fictional characters that marketing departments have unleashed on the general public over the years, ranging from smarmy wireless salesmen to dotcom-promoting sock puppets to annoying graphics of paperclips that SIMPLY REFUSE TO GO AWAY no matter what you do.