Simples

The meerkat mafia are back. This time as fluffy toys for those who use the insurance broker they advertise. Use website = get toy. Simples. Yes? No. Gimmick. Why would I want, as an adult, to acquire a fluffy toy? Particularly a branded one. I have no need or desire for one, and yet somehow, the cute-fluffy aspect is supposed to draw me in, make me putty in the advertisers hands.

I like meerkats. I grew up with them in the garden. They’re very cute, especially the babies. But they’re also aggressive wild animals, hunting down and devouring the insect and invertebrate population. I like my meerkats alive and animated and in their natural environment, being meerkats. Not wearing smoking jackets and lab coats, talking with incongruous Russian accents and trying to sell me insurance services I don’t need by throwing in a cute-fluffy gimmick I really actually don’t want.

I have to wonder what age-group the advertising agency think the product is aimed at. The same goes for its rivals. Lately the ad campaigns seem to find a concept, a gimmick and then ride it in increasingly complicated ways until long after the legs fall off. Especially when selling things like insurance, TV chat shows or anything health related. Things that tend ot have something of an easy market because they’re selling something people need (legally if not actually). So, ad men, if I might make a suggestion: think about the product: what it is, who will actually spend hard-earned cash on it. Then aim it at them, not at some patronising concept of their mental age just because you like to make things overly-complicated because you think that somehow makes you look more intelligent than the overawed client signing off on it. Then maybe, if I need it, I’ll buy.

Simples. Yes?