Sunday, November 2, 2014

Like An Annoying Neighbour

Often, companies will use a common character or concept in their ads. Like Wendy's with that red-haired woman who seems to have a different circle of friends every week. I'm sure that people in the ad business have a name for it.

Anyway, usually a brand will only have one of those ad motifs at a time. Wendy's, for instance, used to have Dave Thomas, and before that they had the Where's The Beef lady. But you wouldn't try to have two ad styles going at once, unless you are trying to cover up the fact that you have an insane number of ads.

Which brings me to insurance. All the big American insurance companies run two campaigns.

So why would insurance require so many ways to advertise? I know insurance is one of those businesses that is "sold, not bought" but still, that's a suspicious amount of effort put into selling something.  Usually if people use so many cutesy gimmicks in advertising, it's either breakfast cereal, or they're trying to distract you from something.

At this point, I was going to rant about how bad the Esurance ads are.  But they are so misguided that I thought first I should google, "esurance 'half that time' 'is that a joke'".  I think the ads are serious - taking on GEICO's "15 minutes could save you 15%" ads, by promising to take half the time, but not saying how much money they save you.  But I came across another blog that has already disembowelled the ad campaign, so I won't bother.

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