One of my favorite commercials in recent years is an ad for some boat insurance plan that used a reference to the old Snake River Canyon jump attempted by Evel Knievel in the 1970s. The spot is no longer running on television, and I’m afraid I can’t remember what company it was advertising for. But the idea was really fun, and definitely not the usual boring, annoying or nonsensical crap that we see so often with insurance commercials. And this ad used a technique which I think is the best possible strategy for successfully advertising products or services: in an entertaining and amusing vignette, explain what the product or service is, and demonstrate why you might want or need it; that way if you find yourself in a situation where you need that product or service, you’ll remember the ad and (hopefully) get it from that company. In my opinion, this is the best kind of advertising, and I’d be willing to bet that a study testing the efficacy of this advertising technique vs. other styles (like, for example, doing a “lifestyle” piece, like the Bud Light commercials, or doing a sketch comedy bit and then mentioning the completely unrelated product at the end, like so many others) would show it’s also the most effective.
So this ad shows a guy watching the live press coverage for an Evel Knievel-type of daredevil guy attempting to do something akin to the classic failed attempt to jump the Snake River Canyon in some kind of rocket-sled, like Evel Knievel did in the 1970s. From the shot, we can also see out the window of this guy’s house, and it overlooks a power boat tied up to a dock on the water just off the guy’s back yard. So the guy is watching the Evel Knievel daredevil on TV, and the Evel Knievel daredevil launches his rocket-sled thingy, and it goes out of frame on the TV set; after a second, we shift focus to the back yard and the boat, and the rocket-sled comes crashing down onto the boat, and it explodes and bursts into flames. Then the narrator says something about being covered with boat insurance for when stuff like this happens, and we all go running out to get boat insurance.
This is a great ad, but somehow it doesn’t quite ring true to me, and this has always been a problem for me with this ad, although it’s hardly the commercial’s fault; it’s something about the insurance industry that’s the problem here. You see, insurance companies are infamous for being slippery and fine-print-y when it comes to actually covering you for a claim, even when it’s a perfectly valid claim. So when I see this wonderful ad, I think to myself that if the events depicted in the commercial actually happened to someone who had boat insurance with this insurance company, they would still have their claim denied. I mean, color me cynical, but from my experience, they’d still reject the claim. No, if you had boat insurance, and an Evel Knievel guy came flying out of the sky with some rocket-sled and smashed into your boat and blew it up, you’d submit you claim, and the insurance company would deny it. Then when you asked them about it, they’d say that while you did have boat insurance with them, you were not insured against having Evel Knievel-type guys smashing into your boat. And then if you had been insured against that happening, they would still reject your claim for the reason that the Evel Knievel guy smashed into your boat and blew it up with a rocket-sled, and that it had to be a motorcycle he crashed into it with for the claim to be honored. And if you had it insured against being blown up by a rocket ridden by an Evel Knievel guy, they would still deny your claim for the reason that when the rocket struck your boat, the Evel Knievel guy was no longer on it, since he had parachuted out beforehand, and that in order to be covered, the rocket would have had to have hit your boat with the Evel Knievel guy still in or on it at the time of impact. Because that’s just what insurance companies are like.
BTW: I would love to have been able to put a link to this ad here, because everyone should see it if they are interested in great advertising, but I can’t find it online anywhere! Sorry about that.
