Comic insurance company ads not necessarily a good policy

My father-in-law was an ad man in the Mad Men era of two-martini lunches where pitches were concocted for cars and boats and kitchen appliances and booze. There’s a picture of him on a business trip to New York City visiting the construction site for the World Trade Center in the mid-sixties. Maybe he was in the city for meetings at his company’s offices on Madison Avenue. I wish I’d asked.

He was a savvy student of the advertising world as it rode the shifting trend from the conservative postwar era to the swinging Sixties, much like Don Draper went from pitching cigarettes as cancer concerns loomed to dreaming up a world-uniting soft drink ad. I wonder, though, what the beau-père would think of one curious trend today.

While much of the advertising of the recent past has been pretty much a reflection of the consumer world in general, from high concept offerings for high-end products to low-brow pitches for quotidian products, of late one ad phenomenon in particular is perplexing.

Here’s the thing, as we dwindling non-streaming TV watchers endure mind-numbing ads: When did it become the accepted convention among insurance companies to use questionable humour to sell their catastrophe-hedging policies?

Therewouldbegeneralagreement among we the people living in the real world that insurance does not exist to celebrate favourable turns of fortune. People buy insurance for protection from the mishaps and shattering cruelties of life: Fire, theft, car accidents, floods, tornadoes, lightning strikes, plane crashes, foreign diseases, vacation cancellations and plain old death by natural causes - in short a litany of woes that not only may but will befall folks at any time and rarely with notice.

So, insurance should be no laughing matter. Yet, whether it’s sunny Flo for Progressive, the psychotic Mr. Mayhem for Allstate, avuncular J.K. Simmons for Farmers, that annoying little Cockney reptile for Geico, or an endless parade of idiots by the Hudson River with the (surely embarrassed) Statue of Liberty in the background for Liberty Mutual, all these ads have a disturbing theme of ignoring the grim reality of situations where folks need financial assistance to recover from loss or tragedy.

Perhaps there are marketing studies somewhere that prove the lamer the insurance ad the more likely the consumer will bite? The fact is insurance is as ferociously competitive business as there ever was, and likely to be even more so as natural disasters and cell phone use become more frequent.

In a place like the U.S. where private insurance for health coverage is the dubious distinction of that society, it’s no surprise there are few boundaries of appropriateness in the pitching of insurance coverage.

Not that we in Canada are above going for the yuks in insurance advertising. Take the ad running for Ontario-based Rates.com that features a scene from an auto repair shop. The mechanic points to a cow’s bulging udder on the underside of a car up on the hoist, saying “there’s your problem.” As he tugs a teat to squirt milk into his cereal bowl, he says to the perplexed woman customer, “you’re getting milked on your car insurance.”

The company behind the ad is Zulu Alpha Kilo, whose boss Zak Mroueh explained: “We know insurance can be a dry subject and that most Canadians can be complacent about their automobile insurance renewal. We knew we had to do something that would break through and get the attention we were looking for.”

Quebec, home to three of the five largest insurance companies in the country, is not immune to ads that try to tickle the funny bone rather than stimulate critical thought. The best example might be Rogatien, ubiquitous actor Patrick Huard’s annoying chatterbox taxi driver character for Intact Insurance.

Mercifully, it seems Rogatien has retired and a new Huard character has emerged with an ad called the “Butterfly Effect,” whose theme can be summarized as “bad stuff happening leads to more bad stuff happening.”

Sure, the ad is funny in a schadenfreudian way, but each one of the chain reaction of little disasters depicted means a costly mess for folks to deal with. How will the insurance companies help? Who knows or cares as long as they get a laugh.