Meerkats may look cute, but beneath that cuddly exterior they’re ruthless killing machines. Never trust a meerkat. They’re tough as anything, they will eat their own young and they can dig their own body weight in seconds if they see you coming. In other words, the perfect poster boys for the car insurance industry.
So we should all tip our hats to the ad agency that made this association. Most people, sadly, aren’t in on the joke, and consequently the Compare the Meerkat marketing campaign has been hailed as one of the greatest advertising campaigns of all time.
It was based on a simple premise. Meerkat sounds a bit like market- if you’re speaking in a comedy Russian accent. They got huge mileage out of this one joke and, as you might expect, it’s wearing a bit thin now. As Viz magazine pointed out, anyone who uses the Meerkat catchphrase – Simples – is effectively advertising their lack of wit and giving you a Top Tip that they’re worth avoiding.
On the other hand, the ‘Simples’ would make perfect fodder for the car insurance industry’s latest scheme. In case you’re not familiar with this new ploy, they encourage everyone involved in a road accident to cash in by applying for injury compensation. Like all the best hustles, it appeals to people’s greed. But then suddenly the tables are turned and the claimant discovers that they are liable for the legal bills for their failed injury claim.
Meanwhile, the Compare the Meerkat joke plods along, with more money being poured into a huge digital marketing campaign and a web site dedicated to Meerkovo. I supposed it’s a good way of separating out all the simpletons from the herd who could be targeted for exploitation. There seems to be a lot of them. Simples-tons!

I feel desperately sorry for Barclays Bank. Not a sentiment you hear every day but, by my calculations, they’ve just spent around £3million on the world’s worst digital marketing campaign. For a return worth £4000.

For every 15 minutes of every morning, every commercial radio station in the UK has run an advert extolling the virtues of the OneSmallStep Barclays’ promotional campaign.

OK, the OneSmallStep competition is supposedly about giving small start ups the chance of winning £50,000. (Terms and conditions apply, as the ads say). But we all know the real rationale behind the campaign. “Hello? We’re Barclays and we’re lovely.”

Judging by the stats for onesmallstep the campaign hasn’t been a huge success. One web analysis company estimates the value of the site (based on the numbers of hits and unique visitors etc) at just short of $6000. Given that publicity is the currency of digital marketing, these are pretty risible returns.

Leaving aside the £50,000 prize money, The OneSmallStep campaign, with its web site, email marketing, social media and guerillla marketing campaigns, must have cost a hundred times the return. Factor in the price of TV, radio and print advertising, and you’re looking at seriously large investment. Three million pounds, one insider told me.

All for a web site worth £4000.

There’s me thinking the banks were experts at business.

Ha!

An email from Dorset Cereals comes bursting past my spam guard, like a bull charging through a spiders web.

Much as I try to ignore it, my eye is drawn to the prize they seem to be offering. Win a VW Campervan. Damn, that’s the temptation that got me in trouble in the first place.

Against all my instincts, I applied for the prize draw to win a mobile home. My head told me I was signing myself up for a lifetime of junk mail. But my heart wanted a holiday home and somewhere to sleep off a hangover.

Which is how I ended up ‘opting in’ to a lifetime of junk mail from Dorset Cereal (courtesy of their digital agency, Big Fish Design). You can tell a lot about a company from the prizes they put up as junk mail bait.

Readers Digest offers a millions pounds a month as a prize. It always seems to be claimed by someone who wishes to remain anonymous. Funny that. If you’re one of the common herd, who likes to think inside the box, you’ll offer an iPad as a prize. Why not? Everyone else does. Why be different?

I liked the sound of Dorset Cereals, with their quirky prize. Mind you, they’ve had that VW Camper van for a year now. It’s about time someone won it.

I’ve had it with time travelling. It might sound glamourous, visiting all these exotic places, but after a while it becomes a chore. At my age, it takes me several days to get over the trauma. Sometimes on these jaunts you don’t even get to use the loo once, in a journey spanning 200 years.

So imagine my distress over the week-end when I woke up and discovered I’d been transported back to 1997. Minister Michael Howard was being grilled by Jeremy Paxman, who kept re-phrasing the same question, to which Howard supplied an identical scripted answer.

Numbed though I was by this excruciating interview, I suddenly realised this wasn’t the famous Newsnight incident. It was the infamous Alistair Darling BBC interview from 2009. No, hang on. It was George Osborne’s repetitive refrain interview from 2010.

Finally, to my relief, I realised that the buzzword loop I was listening to was set in the present day. It was Ed Miliband, leader of the opposition, being interviewed by ITV’s Damon Green on Saturday.
Miliband, like any media trained politician, speaks the dialect of Westminster Village, known as KeWorDe (KWD).

KWD, is a derivative of key word density, the Google-centric SEO technique, where you cram a bunch of ugly words as tightly as possible into a sentence. It doesn’t make for ‘compelling content’. Then again, neither does any sentence containing the phrase ‘compelling content’.

The popularity of KWD does, however, show just how influential digital marketing is today.
But I sometimes wish we could fast forward a few years, so we could miss its difficult adolescence.