As a companion-piece to last week’s look at the state of British car insurance marketing I’m moved to present the following viral advert from Romania, which features two women dressed in lingerie crashing into one another on space hoppers.

The advertisement has been so wildly successful that links to it on Google greatly outnumber links to the insurer’s own website – to the extent that it’s hard for me even to be sure what the firm is called.

It could well be ASIROM, Romanian partners in the Austrian VIENNA Insurance Group, and more specifically ASIROM’s motoring insurance division which I believe is called RCA. The letters RCA do get some screen time (without getting in the way of the ladies, of course) along with a Romanian script which various sources quote as saying:

"In case of an accident: get out of the car / and inspect the damage / ask the guilty driver for an RCA insurance policy / fill in the friendly ascertainment form / if you can't reach an agreement, a police officer can settle your dispute / always buy RCA insurance."

Predictably, the viral succeeds in being something most men would want to look at – but as an advert for car insurance, it falls rather wide of the mark for British tastes (mine, anyway).

Here, humour is the preferred sweetener for the bitter pill of rates, deals and telephone numbers normally meted out by car insurance commercials – I’m thinking of the GoCompare singer in his underwear and have to admit that his singing may be preferable.


Image © Bert23 via Flickr, under Creative Commons Licence