Advertising Morphosis – Comparing Confusion

Over the last few months, it’s been interesting to see the adverts on TV that have changed radically – and as it happens, there are two main industries who appear to have changed their advertising massively in that time. The first is insurance comparison websites, the second is payday lenders.

In both areas, I suspect the reasons for change are the same – of all the adverts on TV, those two sectors had the adverts that were the most annoying. Insurance Comparison sites advertising was pretty much universally loathed – I know that their ‘recognise the brand’ methods worked, but backfired in that I remembered the brands so I could be sure to never ever give them any money.

GoCompare was the biggest culprit on this, with their poxy opera-‘singer’ character.

He’s still around, but they’re fading the character out. (And not a moment too soon, in my opinion) 

They’re interesting, because in a lot of ways they now seem to be acknowledging that the character is/was ridiculously fucking annoying, and they’re now working on keeping the character while hopefully reducing the annoyance factor significantly.

The next biggest one was Confused.com, who’ve got rid of their super-annoying animated and musical adverts…

And replaced it with a weird Wall-E-esque robot instead…

It’s all definitely an improvement, and on the rareish occasions I watch adverts (more often caused by forgetting I’m watching something recorded, and still watching the ads) I no longer feel the need to poke my eyes out and block my ears.