Copywriting

Why one Paul Whitehouse commercial is funnier than another

There I was, just a few weeks ago, lamenting Aviva's decision to ditch their Norwich Union brand in favour of, well Aviva.

And now here I am again, unintentionally but unavoidably, using their advertising to make a point.

They have a TV campaign running at present which features comedian Paul Whitehouse. 

Paul Whitehouse is a very, very clever and funny writer and performer.

I've seen 2 spots, though I think there are actually 3 to date.

In the first one I saw, Paul plays a middle aged Plymouth Argyle fan who has to do lots of driving because Plymouth is so far away from every other club they play against. At least he can keep his costs down by buying his car insurance from Aviva. That's basically it. Whitehouse makes the character charming, but you can feel nothing other than a bit sad for the guy (or happy for him, because he's just very at one with his lot), but there's no real brunt to the humour and the commercial has an engagement value of about 30%, in my view. 

Commercial 2. This time Whitehouse is Damien, a coiffed middle-aged provincial hairdressing mogul. It's a perfect pastiche of one of those 'let's get a successful small business person to talk about how Aviva has helped them' commercials so beloved of financial services companies. Damien is so pleased with himself, yet trying to be so 'self effacingly self-made'.

Take a look for yourself: Paul Whitehouse as Damien

Now, Whitehouse can't believe his luck. All he has to do is underplay Damien, making him almost realistically into any named hairdresser you can think of. (Clearly, I can't think of any!) and he's got the kind of character with pretensions we can all laugh at.

But there's another layer, which is what makes it truly funny.

Aviva could have made this commercial for real. Real successful provincial hairdresser in his fancypants little salon. They would not be the first financial services company to have done just that.

By having Whitehouse send it up, instead, they immediately cross the floor to the viewer's side. "Here we are", they're saying. "We're not like those financial services companies that would have done this for real and bored you with a real successful provincial hairdresser discussing insurance. We're not like them at all. We know that's just an advertising cliché, and we're imaginative and confident enough to trash it."

2 pieces of communication. Same star.

Communication with average message, done nicely enough: 30%.

Communication with layered, audience-aware message, done impeccably: 99%.

Too beautiful for Word

I type into Google: "customising MS Word for UK".

It helpfully asks, before the first result:

"Did you mean customizing MS Word for UK?".

And you thought Microsoft and Google were philosophically different?

Dear Sir, We need you to do this, but there's nothing in it for you

I've just opened a letter from HM Revenue and Customs. "There are two important changes occurring that affect our VAT customers. This letter provides important information about both."

In a nutshell, it goes on to say that they have changed their supplier of banking services, and so I "may now need to" spend time and effort reconfiguring the details of the electronic banking instructions I use to make VAT payments. What they actually mean is... "please would I" take the trouble do this in order to make sure they continue to receive my payments smoothly.

Did it not occur to whoever wrote this that they might do rather better by presenting this in terms of some kind of benefit to me? Even a vague, "We're doing this to keep down costs and provide a better, more efficient service", would have done. It would have made me feel I was doing this as part of some greater good. 

HMRC are not as guilty, however, as Sagepay. Accounting software brand Sage has now taken over the payment gateway formerly known as Protx. They sent all their newly acquired clients a letter to say that you had to update various templates on their system, via your admin panel, in order to reflect their new branding in your page templates. No 'please would you?' No 'we have made arrangements to do this for you." Just the imposition of a task that a huge number of clients will have to pay a web developer to implement. 

You'd have thought they'd be keen to strike up a good relationship during a rebrand, as rebrands from a chosen supplier to a brand which has acquired you on a customer list, are rarely well received by the public.

Bottom line? Dumb people in charge of comms on both projects: people who have no clue about communicating for the best interests of their brands or operations, and to whom it simply doesn't occur that their own self-important, curt and rather shabby writing styles won't be good enough to do the job.