The meerkat conundrum

The billboard is for one of the comparethemeerkat animals, agent Maiya, and cunningly can only be purchased if you buy insurance or a credit card. So far, so brand extension. Starting off as an achingly clever ad-words case-study in how to get it just right, the campaign is now about telling the back-story, the side-story and is effectively redefining the notion of character development in advertising. Sponsor idents on our favourite soap and spy-novel parodies have given this campaign legs, and really, deservedly so. It is an ad strategy case-study in having a plan and growing a brand.

But when you praise something like this, there needs to be a benchmark, and there is a glaringly obvious example in a competitor. GoCompare has gone through a literal killing-off of the tenor character but has been revived of late. Someone, somewhere has told a focus group they quite like him, and rather than send the whole campaign through the trap-door, it was given a bounce and is back. The campaign regularly wins most irritating ad, and while RyanAir can prove that front page bad news can be good for business, the end is surely nigh for this campaign. While CompareTheMarket went for meerkats, struck at the heart of cuteness and told a good story, GoCompare started ok (a wee bit of jingle works well in moderation) but has drifted without direction pretty much since - in short, the former is proper advertising, the latter, not so nuch. It's what I would call the 'meerkat conundrum'. Planning and strategy are part of ad/marketing high stakes poker. Get it right - play the odds, bet sensibly, and you'll have proper ad sustainability. Get it wrong - gamble big and lose and you'll do often irreparable damage to a brand that has been well built and well defined. Aleksandr Orlov has outwitted Gio Compario, the meerkat spokesanimal has trumped the tenor.