Wednesday, April 15, 2009

15 Minutes Could Buy You Better Advertising

There are some companies that just annoy me.  For whatever reason, be it lousy customer service, allegiance to some sort of ridiculous something-or-other, or bad advertising and branding, they just grate on me.  One of these companies is Geico.  It's not that their gecko has gone from an Queen's English speaking lizard with a beef against people calling him rather than Geico to a cockney accented spokesanimal talking about just how great it is.  It's not that the cavemen are doing whatever it is that they do.  It's not even that they have a spokesman that does nothing other than sit there.  It's that they have all of the above at the same time.  It's so schizophrenic that it drives me up the wall.  It was bad enough when they just had the caveman and gecko, but it seems like someone was sitting around in their marketing department trying to justify their salary.  I can imagine the conversation with his supervisor after he spent all of a minute and a half thinking .
Marketer: Sir, I think that I've got a brilliant idea of how we can up our advertising.
Boss: Okay Jim, what is it?
M: What if we got a new spokesman?  The gecko and the caveman are a bit long in the tooth.
B: Fair point.  So we'd replace them with something new?
M: No, we'd add something and keep the others around.
B: Why would we do that?  Isn't that too many options?
M: Car insurance has lots of options, so our marketing should too!
B: Fair enough.  So what's this new mascot?
{pause as the marketer pulls out 2 small stacks of bills and a pair of googly eyes and places them triumphantly on the boss' desk}
B: BRILLIANT!!!

No, not really...anybody could do that.  I've got a DVD case, maybe I could slap some wax lips underneath it and have it become DVD man, which would help people save on their DVD purchase.  Columbia House, the offer is open if you want the idea.

1 comment:

Ammo North said...

Hah. I'll pass the idea along, but I think CHCanada will probably leave that one for the bigboxes of the world to toy with ;)

cheers,

kyra