Follow-me marketing
I get up, each week day morning, at around 5:30. That gives enough time for the usual ablutions and leaves me plenty of time to catch a lift to the station. I like a long, slow start to my day. Rather than take an extra hour in bed, thinking about the deadlines I’ll have to meet I like to get up early and lower myself into the day. Too much, too soon, could kill me.
As part of this extended ritual I take twenty minutes or so between dressing and leaving in order to watch a bit of TV. Sometimes it’s the news; a short series of rants against sofa news broadcasting and random weather reports gets me into the spirit where I can deal with my day. Some people hit the gym, I hit the rant.
At the moment my snippet of media is a Discovery Channel showing of Moonwalk One. This once lost film about the first moon landing has been sat on my Sky+ system for a few months. Incidentally, that’s not why it was classified as “lost”. I’m pretty sure mine is not the only copy in existence.
The reason I took so long to watch the film is simple: it’s three hours long. That a big commitment in fifteen minute slices and I kept putting it off. I’m glad I didn’t hit delete though. The film is proving to be a beautiful slice of documented reality viewed through the lens of perhaps the most magnificent event of the twentieth century. As cinematography goes, it ranks alongside Kubrick’s 2001 and has a similar, 60′s vibe to it. But I’ll defer real analysis on that level to my friend and colleague, Martin Riley of Lion Eyes Television whose passion is Kubrick. Just let’s not discuss AI.
Suffice to say I’ve been taken to the Moon with this programme. Its pacing has carried me gently upwards, retracing the era-defining journey. I cannot ever know what it felt like to witness the event as it happened but Moonwalk One makes me wish I could.
Back on earth, however (and here we might come crashing down) I see the adverts and take my usual detatched but professional interest in them. A lot of media observers are making a lot of fuss about one ad in particular: Compare The Meerkat. This tangential solution to a product whose late launch into a crowded market coupled with a wordy, cumbersome name, has performed beautifully. It’s a real example of how advertising can work. Finding a solution that sticks in the mind is what advertising can and should be about. Compare The Meerkat is an example students will discuss.
And where one ad goes, others are bound to follow.
Enter Go Compare. A brand that has been around for a while and featured some pretty bland, but probably quite effective, advertising. Now they seem, possibly in the wake of Compare The Meerkat, possibly as just another phase of their strategy, to be going “creative” with a fairly cringeworthy series of ads. That’s not to judge the ads on effectiveness of course but it does leave me wondering about follow-me marketing (you knew I’d get around to that eventually didn’t you?)
If Go Compare is reacting to the success of Compare The Meerkat then it is succumbing to follow-me marketing. And the danger of this approach is that people attempting to reach for the moon rarely make it out of the atmosphere. And it’s because they don’t aim high enough. If it wants to be on a level with Compare The Meerkat, Go Compare should be looking to the work which inspired that.
Find your own moon or reach for something even higher.
