36 Comments on What kind of black swan is a meerkat?

Louisa Wells on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 11:42 am


I would imagine most advertising agents strive whole-heartedly for world domination when creating a campaign and whilst they obviously can never tell if it will be a success or not, the hope is always there? Compare the Meerkats is genius in my opinion, along with Pot Noodle, Muller & of course, Calsberg – I can’t say I’ve actually ever bought a Pot Noodle or a Muller yogurt or had a pint of Carlsberg and I’ve never compared the meerkat.com but I certainly know all the words to the songs and think Carlsberg do, do the best advertisements in the world…

James Horn on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 1:06 pm


People always have a soft spot for animals, particularly if they talk (try not to remember crazy frog) – it’s one of the safe things in advertising surely?

Everybody loves strange animals (Dime Bar Armadillos, Churchill dog) or Pirates – two solid gold marketing assets. If you can add a pun and a catchphrase in there too then you’re sorted…

Adrian McEwen on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 1:12 pm


I think there’ve been two main reasons for its popularity:

1) Its ubiquity. The advert has had a lot of exposure, so it’s been hard to avoid hearing about it.

2) More importantly (as far as worming its way into the Nation’s affections) is the fun element of the web side of the campaign. In our household, the ad migrated from annoying and stupid to fun and likeable after my girlfriend discovered the comparethemeerkat website, which lets you create your own meerkat and compare them.

John Stevenage on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 1:40 pm


One remembers Leonard Rossiter and Joan Collins for a brilliant campaign some years ago . Quite a few people however surprisingly name the rival product when talking about it.

The ad may be popular and people talk about it – but is the product being sold (insurance) showing an increase in sales ?

Will Davies on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 1:47 pm


This doesn’t really answer your question, but raises an interesting issue about contemporary marketing, along the following lines.

Peter Bazalgette (he of Big Brother-creating Endemol TV) wrote a provocative piece for Prospect recently in which he claimed:

There’s an old industry adage: half of all advertising is wasted, but no one knows which half. Now we may be on the verge of finding out. Advertisers are willing to fund much of the information and entertainment we receive in the future—but in exchange for knowing precisely how and when we have received their promotional messages.

It strikes me (from a position of total ignorance) that the challenge of advertising must be getting easier and harder in equal measure. On the one hand, as Bazalgette points out, there are greater and greater technologies available to plot consumer responses to certain stimuli. But on the other, as you point out, there is the hideously difficult task of getting a message to ‘go viral’. Done right, and you have a very famous gorilla playing the drums. Done wrong, and… well we have no idea how many animals have been thrown at us without us noticing.

No doubt there are whol business schools trying to work this out, but I wonder how the additional scientificity of marketing (consumer surveillance) and the additional chaos (consumer discretion) impact upon and moderate one another. Is the goal to get enough data on consumer behaviour that eventually humour and imagination can be reduced/elevated to a science? I recently heard Nigel Thrift give a somewhat chilling paper suggesting that this was perfectly conceivable.

Beth on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 2:41 pm


I’d go with the “benefiting from a unpredictable cultural mini-epidemic” explanation – it’s a lot about luck (maybe not quite the right word). I’ve been mulling over for a while (and it seems related to your blog post) the fact that social policy and social research needs to understand the importance of ‘luck’ in social outcomes. With the growing ‘resilience’ agenda, it’s too easily forgotten that individuals ‘assets’ or ‘resources’ might not explain why they’re coping against the odds. This outcome might also be ‘unpredictable and inexplicable’ and this has fundamentally important implications for policy, especially in the current political climate.

Phil Draper on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 3:07 pm


The answer has to be ‘luck’. It is the aim of every marketing agency in the world to create a campaign that sinks into the public concscience (or in web 2.0 speak ‘goes ‘viral’). The fact that it happens so rarely means that it cannot be purely down to skill, talent and planning.

Matthew Kalman on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 3:27 pm


Beth wrote “it’s too easily forgotten that individuals ‘assets’ or ‘resources’ might not explain why they’re coping against the odds.”

This is perhaps why I rather like the emerging approach of working with the ‘positive deviants’ that are already out there and somehow manage to beat the odds.

There was a nice article on this in Harvard Business Review a few yeas back: ‘Your Company’s Secret Change Agents’: http://www.nogaps.nl/pdf/changeagents.pdf (PDF!).

Much better than importing external ‘Best practices’, targets etc.

On that note, anyone who’s a fan of ’systems thinking’ etc rather than targets, command-and-control etc might want to vote for John Seddon to become the Government’s Public Sector Czar on the No 10 petitions website!

604 people can’t be wrong!

I’m not a huge expert on Seddon’s approach, but it seems able to circumvent an awful lot of bureaucracy and foster the actual work that needs doing.

And even if he only lasted a couple of months, he’d probably get a monster discussion going!

Matthew

Matthew Kalman on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 3:31 pm


Correction: it’s ‘Public Services Tzar’…

I hesitate to put the link up, in case it’s just too spammy for the RSA.

But here it is anyway: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/PublicServices/

Feel free to delete it, or this post, if this might invite unwanted behaviour on the blog…

Louise Macdonald on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 4:05 pm


Interesting – was just having a conversation about how that whole campaign has gripped the nation earlier this week. All I know is, simples has entered my vocabulary seemingly unconciously… But what I really want to know is, not just who came up with the ad – hey, creatives come up with crazy ideas that might just work all the time – but who at ComparetheMarket.com then said yes and paid the cash. Don’t they also share the mantle of potential genius – or was it a case of the sequins thrown by the creatives caused a sparkle that seduced?

Lopa Patel on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 4:09 pm


Hey Matthew

VCCP London made the ‘Comparethemeerkat’ adverts. You can see the latest version here: http://www.vccp.com/showcase/comparethemarket.asp

According to their showcase “In the first 3 days of the campaign over three quarters of the monthly quotes target had been achieved. The year on year uplift in quotes was 45% and vitally, over 50% of the site traffic in the first week was coming direct to comparethemarket.com” as a result of this advert.

Whether they anticipated the Ad worming it’s way into the nation’s psyche – personally, I doubt it. But tag lines, jingles, great words and great copy always have a way of resonating with all of us for years to come.

Jonathan Oldershaw on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 4:41 pm


The agency was VCCP – http://www.vccp.com/

Its a really interesting question. Two of the thoughts I had about this were -
(1) There are a lot of adverts that aim for this kind of irreverence, many of which do fail. A great comparison is the Cadbury’s Gorilla and the follow up they did with vehicles chasing down a runway to Queen’s Don’t Stop Me Now. The first was a massive success, the second a massive flop. Clearly, then, advertisers don’t always know whats going to work and maybe having a success its a guarantee for future success.
(2) What helped to make this advert successful? James and Adrian’s reasons are very plausible. The other is perhaps the catchphrase generation – the culture of saying a catchphrase that reminds others of a shared humourous experience – even though just saying the catchphrase offers nothing humourous itself. This was exemplified in the Budweiser adverts – ‘whassup’ and the ‘bud-weis-er’ frogs – but also throughout all our popular cultural outputs – without a few catchphrases they’re doomed – yeah, but, no, but?

matthewtaylor on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 4:58 pm


So, do I laugh at the brilliant comments already up on this post or cry at how much easier it is to get comments on jokes and adverts than public services and the future of democratic socialism?

I laugh.

And I pledge to write more posts about things that actually interest people rather than reheated versions of the commentariat blather you can read every day in your ‘viewspaper’.

matthewtaylor on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 5:00 pm


Thanks Lopa

I guess that tells us whether it worked.

matthewtaylor on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 5:02 pm


Good point. If an idea doesn’t work the creatives (designers, architects, management consultants) always blame the client, so it must work the other way too. Love the alliteration!

Sumit Paul-Choudhury on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 5:35 pm


I don’t know about the meerkats, but those behind the similarly infectious 118 campaign did everything they could to ensure that it would become inextricable from the national consciousness, including borrowing a few tricks from evolutionary biology. I imagine that there’s still a large amount of happenstance involved once your particular memeplex has been released into the wild, though.

“…the best work of the forgotten may well have been better than the less good work of the masters.” I have a pet theory that forgetfulness works to enhance geniuses’ reputations; their less good work (particularly follies of youth) is more likely to be overlooked and lost, making them seem more consistently brilliant than they actually are. At least in the pre-digital era; now the internet has given us all feet of clay.

Philip on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 5:52 pm


I always get to these too late….I must have work to do on a Friday!. Great thread – really enjoyable. So for what its worth. The ad is genius, but probably by good luck. Like making a great cake, they have added every yummy ingredient they could think of. They relegate the service to the background (selling car insurance) so that you don’t feel you’re being sold to. They introduce a unique character to associate with the product (a cute talking animal). They add some ridiculous punning. Then a catchy jingle and finally a catchphrase….simples.

It could have gone horribly wrong. Some years ago a hugely popular ad featured a comedy Scotsman, an animated stags head and dancing bagpipes as a whole room of a castle came to life to a fantastically catchy tune ending up with Hoots mon theirs juice loose aboot this hoose. It won loads of awards, but unfortunately hardly anyone remembered the product. They reran it some years later with the product name splattered over the beginning.

Now what was that product name again?

Richard on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 7:14 pm


The other thing with the meerkats is that I think maybe it is also partly based on a pre-existing meme – the lolcats of http://icanhascheezburger.com

This becomes a bit more evident when you take a look at the ’spoof’ comparethemeerkat.com website.

So my reading of it is that the there really was a genius in taking ‘market’ as ‘meerkat’ and then applying the lolcats meme to meerkats.

I think one of those ideas would have been good, but both is very smart.

Matthew Cain on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 7:21 pm


Re your point about creatives and clients, Seth Godin makes the point that it’s all about aligning interests: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/06/direct-and-useful-project-feedback.html

I bet that the creative briefs for the contracts saw really close working between the client and project team and considerable risk taking from both sides.

Joe Nutt on Fri, 12th Jun 2009 9:51 pm


As a regular reader, I suspected something was afoot when I read this post. One of the things I’ve discovered about corporate blogging (I run an internal company blog as well as my public one) is that very few people are actually confident enough to want to commit their thoughts to the web 2.0 page about anything serious, in spite of all the hype The more humorous or light hearted the post, the more likely you are to coax them into taking part.

I have a very old friend who works in advertising who is one of the funniest men I have ever known and for a wallpaper company ad many years ago, featuring Winnie the Pooh wallpaper in a child’s bedroom, he came up with the copy…”put Pooh on your walls.” The client wasn’t impressed. As Louise notes above, we should perhaps be just as impressed by the client who is brave enough to go with the Meerkat, as with the guys who dreamt him up.

Amelia on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 9:26 am


Found your blog post via Twitter and really enjoyed this conversation about Aleksandr Orlov and Compare The Meerkat. I work at VCCP and am part of the comparethemarket.com team. This campaign has been a joy to work on – creatively its a labour of love (there are 1000s of meerkats that have been developed on http://www.comparethemeerkat.com , loads of little touches like the meerkat logo Vs the market logo, all his tweets, the TV bloopers etc) and the business results have been even more than we predicted. Let me just check what stats I can post, but here are results after one month,
http://ameliatorode.typepad.com/life_moves_pretty_fast/2009/02/compare-the-market-meerkat-when-social-media-takes-off.html

Amelia on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 9:28 am


Oh and to echo Joe and Louise, hats off to a hugely brave client who took an intelligent risk, breaking all category advertising conventions.

matthewtaylor on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 10:48 am


Hi Amelia

Thanks for dropping in. But can you answer my original question, did the team know they had something special as soon as they had the idea or is it just that – through processes too complex and indeterminate to predict – some campaigns reach a tipping point?

Matthew

matthewtaylor on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 10:50 am


Hi Philip. I remember the advert – it was great. Wasn’t it wine gums?

matthewtaylor on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 10:53 am


Good point Sumit. The popular version of this is those ‘before they were famous’ shows. I think it’s a good thing if we see that even the great sometimes got it badly wrong – it gives us all hope.

Amelia on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 11:05 am


To be honest I think that the agency was divided when the first meerkat script was developed. Half thought it was genius, half buffoonery. In reality it was probably a bit of both. Given that we knew the issue was about being front of mind (lets be honest, we all have more interesting things to think about than car insurance comparison websites) I think that we were all convinced that this would do wonders for comparethemarket.com. However with all these kinds of creative ideas, its all down to the execution I think. It could have been badly brought to life and it would have been horrorifically shocking. The charm I think is in the way that it was brought to life (an animation company called Passion Pictures in Soho) and the script.

So, the simple answer to your question is, yes we knew that we had something special but you can never really predict whether something will take off to the extent that Meerkat has.

(PS, have you tweeted with Aleksandr yet? http://www.twitter.com/aleksandr_orlov )



Faizal Farook on Sat, 13th Jun 2009 11:39 am


This reminds me of an excellent Gladwell article from a few years back where he discusses people that had tried to develop a formula to understand why certain songs and films were hits. If I remember right, in summary what they found was that the vast majority of hit songs had certain musical components that had to be present, though having those components was not a guarantee you would have a hit song. In that sense it’s a bit like a Ronaldo free kick – with skill and talent you can you set up the circumstances for a chance unpredictable occurrence happen as far as you can, and then hope it does.

Gladwell article: http://www.gladwell.com/2006/2006_10_16_a_formula.html

(The Ronaldo point is about the physics of a free kick – Dr.Ken Bray explains more here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8096738.stm)

Philip on Sun, 14th Jun 2009 7:20 am


Matthew. Yes it was. But which brand?

A new school politics? : Matthew Taylor’s blog on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 11:00 am


[...] my focus. I wanted to try out some of the ideas today. If the wonderful thread about ‘compare the meerkats’ is anything to go by, I will get some very interesting [...]

matthewtaylor on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 4:35 pm


Maynards?

Adrian McEwen on Mon, 15th Jun 2009 6:31 pm


Philip, was it Maynards?

Matthew (and the real reason for my followup comment), the weightier topics are definitely appreciated – it’s just that I’d be more likely to end up writing a blog post in response rather than a couple of lines of comment. It’s not all about the numbers you know

(of course, the problem with that is it’ll just be added to my huge list of blog posts I never find time to write…)

TimHood on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 7:52 am


A really interesting thread but perhaps it is all too easy to over-analyse this.

Meerkats have been funny throughout history-possibly even before the invention of You Tube. I remember watching them getting drunk on fermented fruit in a 1980’s wildlife documentary, for example.

Heavily accented Russians have also been considered funny since at least the early-eighties: see this Cockburns ad from that time: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JEgJjz3Oz4&feature=related

So a heavily-accented Russian Meerkat was always waiting for the right product to come along. Making him a smoking-jacketed aristocrat and avoiding the obvious temptation of him being a bit drunk- that was the real genius.

matthewtaylor on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 5:50 pm


Ah yes, it is all so simples when you think about it. But – see Philip’s comment – there is something funny about mad jigging Scotsmen playing the bagpipes but I still can’t remember who made the bloody wine gums

matthewtaylor on Tue, 16th Jun 2009 5:53 pm


Thanks Adrian – know the feeling.

The RSA - do you get it? : Matthew Taylor’s blog on Thu, 25th Jun 2009 9:28 am


[...] and I very much doubt my idea will end up being chosen. Sadly, we can’t revert to the use of talking animals and a jingle but I’m keen to hear other [...]

Matthew Cain on Fri, 4th Sep 2009 10:47 am


Interesting report here which claims the slogan was thought up down the pub:

http://paidcontent.co.uk/article/419-confirmed-compare-the-meerkat-was-devised-by-drunk-ad-men/

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