Anybody who, like me, watches too much television will have noticed that car insurance advertising is enjoying a kind of renaissance at the moment.

Work by the cheap and irritating school of advert making has been replaced over the past few months by adverts which are actually bearable to watch four or five times over - and in a few cases they are genuinely funny, too.

The change was spearheaded by comparethemarket.com’s ‘compare the meerkat’ commercials, which were and continue to be inoffensive slices of cute randomness, seemingly unconnected (but for a spelling mistake) with the drab world of affordable premiums and no-claims bonuses.

The genius of these adverts is a realisation that most people would rather not think about car insurance for any more time than is necessary to buy it. It is enough – in fact, it is preferable - just to mention the brand name half a dozen times so you know what to search for at renewal time.

Next to comparethemarket some mention must be made of the Go Compare trails which, while murderously annoying to begin with, have entered an impressively creative phase of late. The advertising people who came up with the original ‘it’s only a tenner/tenor’ gag have been hard at work transplanting it into a variety of surreal contexts; most recently that of a silent movie.

With the soundtrack stripped down to the tinkling of a western piano, what was really annoying (i.e. the singing) about previous versions of the commercial is effectively muted - leaving a creative and actually quite watchable thirty seconds.

Despite these and other improvements in the general standard of car insurance marketing, I was still shocked by the outright funniness of the new More Than adverts. The joke is so simple and so deftly told, and I can’t help wondering how many people actually get it – but a Morgan Freeman monologue should be something all of us can relate to, right?

If you think about it, this means More Than are targeting car insurance holders who enjoyed The Shawshank Redemption.

For once, a demographic I am happy to be part of.


Image © .reid. via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence

Labels: car insurance