Who let the dogs out? Insurance advertising's gone to the dogs (and pigs, cats and mice and wolves)

Never work with children or animals, so the old adage goes. Clearly something that's passed the chaps tasked with creating insurance ads by. What is it with this animal obsession? Swiftcover's dodgy dogs and Gocompare's homage to loony tunes to name two of the worse offenders. Actually it's pretty easy to see why. It's all down to a meerkat called Aleksandr Orlov. Advertising can be a pretty me too arena and I think since compare the market's meerkat first hit our screens (and subsequently our vernacular and high street, entering our public consciousness in a way that only truly big advertising ideas can) the competition have been scrabbling round desperate to recreate even a tenth of the magic of that phenomenon, with little success. John Heggarty said at a recent IPA lecture that around 95% of all advertising was shit (he did fail to tell our esteemed MD Jo Moffatt when she innocently enquired at the same lecture what proportion of his own body of work he deemed shit, but that's another story). It's true to say that it's once in a blue moon we are treated to something as big, magnificent and truly mind blowing as the meerkat. It's anything but simples.