Absurd Marketing: Does It Work?
I haven’t owned a television in almost seven years (not a hipster brag), and I became a cord cutter six years ago … yet somehow I find myself regularly hunting down commercials for either this blog or “What Were They Thinking?” Some are funny. Some are boring. Some are poorly executed and bring out my inner rage demon. And some are examples of perfectly absurd marketing, hooking my attention and dragging me down the rabbit hole of hunting down anything else the marketer has put out.
For example, MoneySuperMarket.com, who I profile in an upcoming #WWTTMarketing, struck absurd marketing gold with me. Well, I guess they struck gold twice, because I went to talk about the initial set of ads that I discovered AFTER I came across the sequel (we can talk about that commercial and the surprise 80s super villain next week).
The initial “You’re So MoneySuperMarket” campaign ran from 2015 to 2016, and featured three main characters, Dave (the twerking businessman); Colin (the pole-dancing construction worker); and Gary, (the body-lockin’, booty-poppin’ bodyguard).
Along with these three over-the-top characters, there are three hashtags: #epicstrut, #epicbuilder, #epicwolf, all of which played into social media, giving viewers the tools to talk about their favorite characters.
And then this happened:
MoneySuperMarket.com brought all three characters together for an Epic Dance off, and yes, hashtagged it like so: #epicdanceoff. Was it ridiculous? Yes. Yes it was.
The ads are absurd, hilarious and you can’t stop watching them … trust me. I showed my boyfriend the bodyguard ad, and we stayed on Youtube to watch the rest of the ads this past weekend.
But I wonder, does all this fantastic creative juice — I mean, c’mon, the commercials are well done — equal bottomline revenue? Does the absurd marketing pay off?
It’s hard to tell with MoneySuperMarket.com. First off, they’re a U.K. comparison website, letting you find the best deal on insurers and such. Aside from discovering that the twerking businessman ad upset a few thousand people, I couldn’t find out if they had seen a jump in usage.
So let me ask you: Would an amusing, ridiculous ad hook you enough to research more about the marketer, and then possibly take the next step to buy?
Note: Videos from The MoneySuperMarket on Youtube are, for some reason, not available in the U.S., so all of these clips are sourced from a variety of YouTubers.
