Advert Review: Compare the Market (Meerkat)

Every Monday here on Profit Duck we will be looking at marketing techniques used by companies to advertise their services or products. Last week we looked at the television advert for Lloyds TSB, featuring a very memorable tune. This week we will be looking at another television advert, this time the advert uses a memorable character.

Today’s Marketing Techniques – Television Advert

You can read a bit of a background on television adverts in the previous post. I won’t post that here again as there is no need.

Today’s Advert – Compare the Market

Compare the Marketing came out of nowhere with a very recognisable advert. I bet if you ask anyone ion the United Kingdom about Meerkat’s they will say something about the Compare the Market advert.

Not only did the Meerkat character, whose background is explained below, take over the television screens, but because of the success he is now being sold as a toy, ringtone and much more. Anyway, here is a little bit about him (Wikipedia);

Aleksandr Orlov is a fictional CGI anthropomorphic Russian meerkat. He is portrayed as being of aristocratic stock, and the founder of www.comparethemeerkat.com. The character is central to an advertising campaign on British commercial television for the comparethemarket.com price comparison website. It launched in January 2009 and centres on his frustration that people keep coming to his website looking for car insurance, not meerkats, because ‘Market’ sounds similar to ‘Meerkat’ when spoken in a Russian accent. Orlov’s catchphrase is ‘Simples’, pronounced ‘Seem-pels’.

These adverts caught the attention of many because of the way they were done, the creation was executed perfectly, such as the images, the voice over and how the advert worked. In many ways it wasn’t just advertising the company, it was showings its culture, that it could take a joke. If you actually watch them then you will see that most of them don’t mention the product/service until the very end, much like the Lloyd’s advert.

The Massive Growth

Part of the growth of this advert has to credit such websites as Twitter and Facebook, if this was launched ten years ago, it wouldn’t have gotten so big at all.

Since the advert’s launch in January, Compare The Market has had an increase in internet traffic of 80 per cent, receiving 3.6 million hits and counting.

Aleksandr has more than 500,000 Facebook fans and 22,000 followers on Twitter. And on photo-sharing site Flickr , there is a popular gallery of Aleksandr’s family.

Too Much of a Success?

The Compare the Meerkat website receives nearly as much as the Compare the Market website, so although this shows that the advert worked in many respects, are people just interested in the Meerkat? We can’t really answer that without doing a lot of research and seeing how much the traffic on Compare the Market increased when the advert came out.

All I can say is that this is one of the best adverts I have seen in a long time, the character, voice and well, the set-up is wonderful. The main problem is that it has been going over two years now, yes they do different versions, but I can see this running out of steam very soon.

Your impressions are very welcome…