There is a funny ad that’s been on the air for a little while where a rattlesnake shakes a baby’s plastic toy rattle to try to intimidate a bunch of rabbits, and they all laugh at the snake. Then the announcer says something about the importance of knowing how to identify risks, yadda yadda. It’s kinda cute. But the thing is, it’s still a poisonous, venomous snake whether it’s using a child’s rattle or its own rattle. It could still bite you and kill you, because the threat isn’t the rattle; the threat is the poisonous bite. And even if it wasn't a poisonous snake, it would still hurt like hell if it bit you, especially if you were a little rabbit. I can’t really understand why it doesn’t just bite the hero rabbit character, as the rabbit is being a jerk. (Actually it’s because the script tells it not to.) I mean, after all, the rattle sound the rattlesnake makes is a warning; it’s basically doing you a courtesy by saying: “Hey, I’m here, and I’m going to bite you if you get too close.” I would think that laughing at a snake like that would be pretty dumb. Then maybe next time he’d just bite you without giving you any warning. So I guess the idea is that Travelers Insurance laughs at whatever they consider to be not very risky, thereby tempting fate, like when you say: “Oh, I never get pulled over or get a ticket.” And then as soon as the words pass your lips, just like clockwork, the flashing lights and siren appear behind you to prove you wrong. I’m not sure how that’s supposed to make me want to buy insurance from them, though, when this ad basically shows them essentially doing the same thing as laughing at a gun-toting murderer just because he’s wearing a tutu or something. He could still shoot you, no matter how silly he looks, and laughing at him may not show intelligence so much as idiocy. I don’t think that shows very good judgment in identifying risks. But isn’t having good judgment about identifying risks something that would be more important for the insurance company’s profit margin, rather than something on which a person looking to insure something would base their decision? (That is, assuming that they weren’t so bad at it that they went broke immediately from paying out fraudulent claims all day long.) So wouldn’t this ad be a better ad for trying to attract corporate stock investors rather than clients? I mean, if it actually showed them being intelligent rather than reckless in identifying risks.
