Boy George vs Captain Risky: how to sell insurance

Everybody knows insurance is a bore – so what’s the least boring way to advertise it? Dominic Mills goes Down Under to find out.

Unless you have the unlikely habit of watching insurance ads, you won’t have met Captain Risky. He’s from Australia, and he’s flogging an insurance brand called Budget Direct.

Boy George is also flogging insurance, indirectly at any rate. Karma Chameleon is the soundtrack to 18 Feet and Rising’s new UK ad for German-owned Allianz, out a couple of weeks ago.

To use an analogy, Captain Risky crashes into your living room, farts, and helps himself to a drink…but he makes you laugh and lifts your spirits. You don’t forget Captain Risky.

By contrast, Allianz and Boy George are courteous, quiet and gentle. Sticking with the analogy, they believe, to borrow from Martin Boase, the B of BMP, that a guest who charms and amuses makes the hosts more likely to buy.

You can watch Captain Risky playing around in his ‘Temple of Risk’ hot tub below. With his ‘kick it ‘n rip it’ mantra, he’s the sort of idiot who thinks he’s a daredevil, and takes the risks to prove it – in this case jumping into a solar-powered hot tub.

I’ve seen it 20 times and laugh at every viewing. Indeed, Captain Risky has become a cult hero or, from an insurance point of view, anti-hero. He even has his own website where fans can follow his hapless adventures.

Contrast this with Allianz’s ‘Every Car Has a Story’ ad (below). It has its own anti-hero, a sulky teenager called Ellie. She rolls her eyes at every opportunity, and treats each query from her parents to a monosyllabic response. Reluctantly accepting a lift to a singing lesson from her dad, they bond over a duet of Karma Chameleon.

It’s a scenario every family will recognise, right down to Dad’s tuneless singing.

It is indeed an ad that sets out to charm and woo, laden with a heavy dose of music-induced nostalgia that signals it is aiming for 40-50 year-old parents (middle- to upper-middle class incidentally, since the dad is driving a Merc). In many ways it’s a 90s-style ‘slice-of-life’ commercial.

So here we have two ads for essentially the same product, and two completely different approaches.

Planners call insurance a low-interest category; consumers call it boring. It’s a distress purchase since no-one actually wants to buy insurance.

I can’t find it now, but many years ago the now-defunct insurance brand Eagle Star confronted this with an ad featuring a hedgehog. It just sat on the screen for 20 seconds, doing nothing, accompanied by a voice-over that effectively said: “Insurance is boring. So here’s a boring ad. We’re boring but we’re safe.”

The contrasting ads make you realise that, after a couple of hundred years, no-one really has a clue how advertising works. Sure, there are dozens of theories out there.

At one end of the spectrum sit the traditionalists: they focus on giving consumers a rational reason to buy.

At the other, there are those who believe it’s all about emotion and the subconscious.

Somewhere in the middle, there are those who say fame is the only thing that matters.

Then there are the the nihilists, like Kevin Roberts of Saatchi & Saatchi, who recently declared in an interview with the Guardian that advertising and marketing were dead – and so was everything else, apart from his own ‘lovemarks’ theory.

In a sense, Roberts is part of a long tradition of hucksters who peddle a scorched-earth theory of advertising in order to sell themselves rather than, say, their clients’ products.

I raise the question because I’ve been reading a fascinating new book, The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising. It’s by Paul Feldwick, who used to be worldwide planning director for DDB, which gives him sage-like status in my eyes, and it’s from him I’ve borrowed Boase’s theory of advertising.

And here’s the thing: Captain Risky is actually a brutally hard sell, wrapped up in a bundle of laughs. It has one clear proposition – that Budget Direct’s premiums are lower because it doesn’t insure high-risk lunatics. Every consumer understands this.

This is rationality stripped to the core, and for students of advertising theory, a direct descendant of Rosser Reeves’ USP theory. Insurance, it says, is a rational purchase.

The Allianz ad, by contrast, plays straight to the emotions. There’s no hint of price or premium, indeed hardly a sell at all. It’s all about family and security. And, if I may say so, a million miles away from most other financial services advertising.

Versus, say, Moneysupermarket.com or Confused.com, which shout loudly, Allianz is quiet to the point of being self-effacing.

There’s method in the apparent madness, of course. It’s difficult to outshout Moneysupermaket with Dave and his epic strut, so it’s worth going the other way.

But the real point, business-wise, is that Allianz escapes the trap of price. The others are stuck on price, and price only goes one way (down).

As we know from the heroic analysis by Les Binet and Peter Field of the IPA’s Effectiveness Databank, the more emotional the connections you make with the audience, the more your product is insensitive to price.

But here’s the interesting point. Both ads are also chasing fame, albeit in their own way, and as Binet and Field also make clear, fame is a powerful component of advertising success.

Budget Direct is pursuing instant fame like a shooting star, Allianz is taking the slow-burn route.

Assuming they last, and don’t fall victim to ‘new-marketing-director’ syndrome, both have the potential for long-running series ideas. I’m keen to see what Captain Risky does next, and I’m equally keen to see the next in the Allianz series, coming in May or June.

P.S. You can find out more about Paul Feldwick’s highly readable book here.

P.P.S. In case anyone thinks I’m an insurance-obsessed sad-sap, I saw the Captain Risky ads in Australia where they were on heavy rotation.