The comparethemarket.com ads, about competitive car insurance deals and featuring Aleksandr the meerkat are too amazing for words... not sure how or why, but every time these ads appear on TV, I find myself laughing - out loud usually...no matter how many times I've seen them.
(don't even look same!)
On almost every level, it's a whole mass of wrongness; the cliched Russian accent and mispronunciation, the ancestral home, the velvet gown and cravat, the animated puppet (yes it's an animation) - it's all totally nonsensical...and maybe that's why it works. I've even gone on the web site - comparethemeerkat.com and his facebook page - now that's a world all it's own too.
I guess, for all my enthusiasm for Aleksandr and his ads, the joke is really on me; first, I'm not (as you may have guessed) a meerkat and secondly, I don't need car insurance. I can't even drive...
But no matter how funny he is, you can be sure there are some folks out there who are just as frustrated by comparethemarket.com as Aleksandr Orlov professes to be. Price-comparison service, confused.com have recently hired ad agency Farm to look after their creative side. They're also increasing last years ad spend from £16 million to £25 million for this year and have created their own character - Confucius - in a bid to gain market share and maybe outshine that pesky kat.
www.comparethemeerkat.com
