Joy of Compare The Market…
I remember a time, when I was younger, when advertising had to be very specific. By this I mean that if you were selling trainers, your TV ads needed to show trainers, and if you were selling cars then your ads…well, you get the picture. If you weren’t specific then it was believed that the consumer wouldn’t have a clue what you were trying to sell. It was a sad and terrifyingly dull time in advertising history…and this was very much how it looked set to remain for the rest of all time.
Then, sometime during the 1990s, things took a turn…an interesting turn. A turn which would see the world of advertising quite literally turned upon its head whether it liked it or not. I first noticed it with a company called Diesel Bradford , whose TV ad involved horses and other kinds of animals. This, I now realise, heralded a calling-in of a brand-new age in advertising. An age where anything-goes and if you can think it up, it can go on screen.
…isn’t a good advertising campaign supposed to stick hard and fast in the memory?
Enter easily one of the zaniest advertising campaigns in many years, by www.comparethemarket.com. Putting a twist on the conventional car insurance genre, this company decided to take a big risk. By the looks of it, it’s really starting to pay off.
The risk, if you happened to have been living under a luxury rock for the last 30 years, was to front their advertising campaign with…yes…Meerkats. Those loveable standy-uppy animals normally seen burrowing about in zoo enclosures. And not just any old Meerkats either, but talking and all-singing, all-dancing Meerkats. The kind which have a big sense of humour and know a thing or two about selling car insurance!
The issue with these ads, of course, is that you either love them or hate them. But there again, isn’t a good advertising campaign supposed to stick hard and fast in the memory? In this case the makers succeeded on all counts. I highly doubt that there is one person who has seen these ads and then managed to forget them.
This, of course, opens up the playing field to an infinite array of other animals. Already the last ten years have seen advertising featuring monkeys, dolphins and every kind of insect you can possibly imagine.
The future? I don’t think anything would surprise me…
(Side note: please don’t get Compare the Meerkat confused with Compare the Market…)
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