...and everything else is the noise" - Dan Shewan
Price comparison site Compare The Market's meerkats were at the heart of one of modern marketing's most effective amplification stories
When fictional Russian meerkat Aleksandr Orlov hit UK television screens in 2009 as the hero of Compare The Market's advertising campaign, nobody cared about what was a dry, overpopulated and homogenous industry.
Before too long, Aleksandr's adventures had made Compare The Market the fourth most visited insurance website in the UK and helped double its sales in the first year alone.
There were two propellers behind the runaway success of that ad campaign. The first was great creative - the ads featuring Aleksandr were repeatedly voted the best-loved and most-memorable by consumers.
The second was a 'bring it on' approach to amplification.
As journalist and web content analyst Dan Shewan explains, “content amplification is the process of helping your content reach a significantly wider audience - hence, ‘amplifying’ the signal of your content”.
“Another way to think of it is in the classic signal vs. noise metaphor often used in content marketing,” he adds. “Your content is the signal, and everything else is the noise. When you put it in these terms, the concept of content amplification becomes a lot clearer.”
Compare The Market’s ‘Compare The Meerkat’ campaign is a perfect example of brand amplification's power.
The seed of the content - the story - is based around a single joke. As the founder of comparethemeerkat.com, Orlov is frustrated over consumers
getting confused between his website and comparethemarket.com.
The campaign was distributed through television, social media and web content. Orlov has his own Twitter account with more than 64,000 followers and Comparethemeerkat.com is a real website with brilliant and constantly updated content.
A decade after it was first distributed, Compare The Market continues to use the meerkats as the face of its new promotions across channels, always with the same message playing on the humorous similarities between the pronunciation of market and meerkat.
And it works. The campaign is a global commercial success from the UK to Australia.
As for Aleksandr, there’s unconfirmed rumours he’s in talks with a record label.