Here’s some Friday “fun” for you…
My lovely wife opened her Yahoo! Mail account this week to be surprised with the banner ad above for AccuQuote. A corpse with a toe tag? Really, AccuQuote? When I first saw it I thought it was some kind of joke from The Onion, but it’s real. AccuQuote is a company that provides multiple insurance pricing quotes from its website. It might provide a good service, but this ad does a disservice to the company and to the marketing profession.
And it’s not the first or only banner that attempts to scare the hell out of people. I found a post from 2007 by copyranter that shares the banner below:
I’ve met a few of the people from AccuQuote at digital marketing conferences and I found them to be good folks. I believe that they feel their service is important and beneficial to many consumers. They might rationalize this by saying that some percentage of clickers are happy to be reminded of this issue. However the other 99.99% of us who are interrupted while checking our email are unwillingly disgusted. It also sets a new low for other banner advertisers; after the “toe-tag corpse” visual no longer gets attention, what do you show next? A good service and desire to help people prepare for life’s realities is no excuse to delve into this kind of tasteless tactic, even if the click rate is .02% instead of .01%.
Further, I also hold Yahoo! to blame for allowing this kind of nonsense on its ad network. These and many other questionable ads by Yahoo! deteriorate any equity and trust that it has earned with consumers. People form their closest bonds with content providers that exhibit some restraint on the ads they run, such as NBC (which demands claim support on commercials submitted) and The New York Times. The people who run these brands realize that the advertising inside is also a reflection on them. Here, Yahoo! looks like just another Web property desperate for ad dollars. And Gmail is just a click away.
Using (or, in Yahoo’s case, benefitting from) cheap tricks to capture an audience’s eyeballs is one of the many reasons that our advertising profession is looked down upon. I hope that shining some light on the worst offenders—and offering a positive solution in the concept of Marketing with Meaning—will help turn that around over time.
so how do you feel about the Road AD in australia i think it was? that cries blood or something like when it rains to warn about speeding? :S
i don’t find this so distasteful :S over here in latam we have several insurance companies campaigns that dwelve on those issues with ads similiar to the Dad if you die.. one you show.
I’m just failing to notice why this alarmed you so much :S
Bob,
Thanks for sharing your views about this ad. You are correct in your assessment that we feel our service, and more importantly life insurance in general, is extremely important. It’s our passion as an organization.
The fact that we’re dealing with a product that involves death makes marketing a sticky situation. You can’t really sidestep the nature of the product without produces lousy non-impactful ads. That said, sometimes the always moving line is crossed. Sometimes we have to go out on a limb and test when we’re in this gray area. It turns out that the positive response rate on this ad was very high. Regardless, we’ve taken your criticism as well as a few others constructively and pulled the ad.
Bob,
Also, looking forward to catching up and hearing your keynote at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coronado next month.
My bad, Sean, your comments were caught in my spam filter, but tomorrow’s post will feature this and my positive reaction.