Movies, Another Winner for Britain’s Most Consistent Campaign

There are brands that dominate their sectors in advertising terms, and then there’s Compare the Market. If you go to our Test Your Ad platform and look at the UK Aggregators and Comparison sites category, Compare the Market takes up the entire Top 10. And the entire Top 20. In fact, you need to scroll down to the 48th best ad in the sector before you find one that isn’t about the Compare the Market meerkats and their extended family.

It’s no surprise that the meerkats are held up so often as an effective campaign – agency VCCP’s creations turned Compare the Market into the market share leader in its category, and they’ve won multiple awards. They’re one of the best-in-class examples of creative consistency and the benefits of investment in a long-term Fluent Device.

What’s even more remarkable is that they keep doing it. The campaign got a new twist a few years back with the introduction of hapless cousin Carl the Wombat from Down Under, and audiences warmed to him quickly. He’s now become part of the family, and Compare the Market keep finding new stories to tell about their mascots.

This latest ad is a fine example. It’s a return to their long-running and highly successful Movies promotion, where customers of Compare the Market can get a weekly code giving them a 2 for 1 deal on cinema tickets*. With the UK cinema industry still struggling to return to pre-COVID numbers a promotion like this makes even better sense, and the ad takes a typically comic look at what families might be doing instead.

Set in a soft play area, the ad finds the meerkats dealing with an extremely dazed Dad who’s got himself trapped in the ball pit looking for his kid. If only he’d gone to the cinema instead! The meerkats get them out, after some initial confusion in finding the right kid in the chaos of the ball pit and send them on their way to a more enjoyable trip to the cinema – using 2 for 1 cinema tickets from Compare the Market, of course.

The meerkat characters are so well-known and so strong that the ad doesn’t need to talk much about the brand or even the specific deal. It can concentrate on storytelling and silliness and still get its point across, with a dose of highly effective schadenfreude for the put-upon Sergei. In fact, when we tested it on Test Your Ad, “Soft Play” turns out to be one of the best Compare the Market ads we’ve seen. It scores a very strong 4.9-Stars, only slightly below the highest 5-Star Rating, and that’s enough to place it in the Top 5 Compare the Market ads. Which means, as we said, the Top 5 ads in the whole comparison category.

The ad also does extremely well on short-term metrics, with an exceptional Spike Rating predicting strong sales gains – exactly what you want to see in an ad for a promotion. And Brand Fluency is, as usual, very strong too for Compare the Market. The meerkats show no signs of losing their effectiveness, or their place in the hearts of the British public. They are to campaigns what Taylor Swift is to the pop charts: sixteen years at the top and showing no signs of slowing down.

*2 for 1 cinema tickets every Tuesday or Wednesday when you take out a qualifying product through Compare the Market. 1 membership per year. Participating cinemas. 2 standard tickets only, cheapest free. T&Cs apply.