In my last post I criticised Go Compare for having an irritating and catchy jingle and complained that simply annoying your audience isn’t a good way to get customers. Therefore you’d have thought that I’d hate this advert too, and that would probably be a pretty safe bet…
…except I’m really rather partial to it. In fact I’m beginning to think that it may well be a work of genius.
Hypocrisy? Yes. Definitely. But it has an air of freshness about it that Go Compare doesn’t. The Gio Compario character reeks of marketing hegemony; custom built by skilled media trend analysts and tweaked to perfection by a team of suited advisers – whereas webuyanycar.com feels like they threw whatever meagre advertising budget they had into having a bit of a laugh.
webuyanycar.com is the underdog, and for some reason their using of the patented ‘Bug the Fuck Out of the Audience’ technique is allowed; they had no other option. Their approach is tongue in cheek and self depreciating, especially with this really rather funny dance routine instruction video. Go Compare should do better, and they knew it – they just didn’t care.
I can’t explain why I like one and why I hate the other. The first time I saw webuyanycar.com my jaw dropped open and I was ready to sacrifice the television to live in whatever jingle free world its demise offered, but I’ve come round to it now. Upgrading their first advert to this second one was a smart move; not hanging around long enough to see the tide turn should be another.
If they’re really smart they’ll now move onto something else. Right now this ad feels like a little bit of fun but it will irritate soon enough and our patience for them will wither if they opt to do another rave jingle. Well done, you took a gamble and it worked; you got our attention – now tread carefully.
Advertising that make no pretense to be anything other than a plea to buy their product is the way to go. Buy my product! Err, ok.
[...] charge of trolling Twitter for references to used cars for @webuyanycar got in touch in response to my article about how I actually quite like the webuyanycar.com [...]
I did not see the television advert but I heard their advert on the radio. The “we buy any car dot com” radio advert uses the same song as the video above. I think the radio advert is spot on, it is done with humour. It has a very catchy tune and beat. It gets it’s message across really well, it does not annoy and at the end of the advert the listener can remember the website URL. It is so easy to annoy listeners with certain music genres but this song does not annoy, it simply amuses me. Please bear in mind that this is a big change to the usual music played on Nation Radio as you can see from their playlist , it is mostly adult orientated rock/blokey rock by blokes for blokes. For a radio advertisement to please me and for me to remember it whilst driving my car shows that the advertising team has made a classic.
I wrote about the first ad, because annoying as it is, it’s simple, it’s unpretentious, and with probably a pretty small ad budget, it gets the message across. Which is the whole point of advertising, right?!
The new version loses some of that cartoon charm – it’s tongue-in-cheek and annoying as hell but somehow probably appeals to even more people than the first ad would have done in our X Factor society?!)