Someone else who seems to be everywhere now is Go Compare’s Gio Compario. Every channel, every single advert break, there he is; I doubt there’s a single soul in the cold universe who hasn’t at least heard of him. But is Gio Compario really as bad as everyone seems to think? Public opinion is often terribly misguided—it has to be or else One Direction would be dead by now—and if Compare the Meerkat was horribly over-rated then I think it’s fair to say that Go Compare is unfairly over-hated. At the end of it, I kind of felt sorry for Gio Compario and the rest of Go Compare’s marketing department. Not only was Gio repetitively tortured in this most-recent series of ads, but it started off with so much potential and fell so disappointingly flat. Embarrassingly so. It was like when someone says something that was probably intended to be funny but no-one laughs except the person telling the joke. Awkward and like they tried too hard, that was the whole thing came across. Sure, we’d all like to avenge Gio for the endlessly annoying ‘GOO COMPAAARE!’ that was reinforced in our decreasingly small minds every five minute advert break, but Sue Barker blowing him up with a bazooka? Tragically un-funny. They’d stuck with Gio for too long to eventually listen to public opinion and decided that they, too, hated him. Disloyal and faithless, swayed by the public, that’s the main impression I got of the company after they ditched their piteous—if still annoying—mascot. That’s if they didn’t plan to kill him off all along, the timing may have been terrible but a plan would have made this whole new series of averts slightly redeemable. Slightly. I still hold hope that there is a similar destruction fated for Aleksandr Orlov.
But enough about poor old Gio. Yeah, we got it: everyone hates him, now let’s move on. What about Confused.com getting by, mostly unnoticed by the majority of critics, despite loud, off-key karaoke to what-used-to-be-great songs. Just because it’s not the worst of the bunch and doesn’t have a fluffy world-dominating mascot to present to us does, by no means, make Confused.com a decent advert. Not even relatively. In my opinion, this is the worst of the lot. Confused.com? How about Gender Confused.com. I honestly believed—along with just about everybody—that the confused logo was male; at least until she jumped out of the logo to star in a new series of irrating adverts, by which point the fact of her femininity was hard to miss. Now, I’m a girl and I have absolutely no interest in other, cartoon-ised, woman, but even I had problems trying not to look at her over-sized bouncing breasts. Seriously. If Cara’s going to be going around selling car insurance so enthusiastically then she really ought to consider a boob-reduction job or at least a more supportive bra. The adverts, primarily the bikini one, received numerous complaints that it was “overly-sexual” and “inappropriate for children to see”, unfortunately though, no action was taken. Only showing that, not only do the advertising company hate us, innocently simplez-minded TV viewer, but the Advertising Standard Agency, the very people who should protect us from this sort of thing, does too.
So, is it possible to have a decent, non-annoying—if not particularly amusing, interesting or entertaining—adverts for price-comparison website? I guess we’ll never know. At least not until someone sees the sense to fire the current idiots in charge of this sort of thing and recruit some new blood for this tragically un-funny advertisement industry. Or, hopefully, they’ll just stop trying.
