The hard sell: confused.com

[embed]The hard sell: Car insurance Martin Horsfield on being confused.comwww.theguardian.com

Confusing business, insuring your motor. We know this because there’s currently an improbably tawdry commercial imploring us to log on to something called confused.com.

A bunch of out-of-work actors roam around a set comprised solely of badly coloured-in 2-D scenery scratching their heads to work out how best to save money insuring their child’s drawing of a car, before an omniscient voice points them in the direction of confused.com (though, frankly, if I was them, I’d be lifting the lid on my oddly flat laptop to ask Yahoo Answers: “What do you do when you’re trapped in a garishly felt-tipped Roobarb & Custard world?”).

Confused.com is, apparently, a price-comparison website, listing quotes from various companies keen to undercut one another in the quest for your motor insurance shilling. Armed with this info, presumably, you can then go and challenge Churchill and his ilk to get a bit knocked off the cost of your next policy.

The logical endgame of all this, of course, is that you feed your new price back into confused.com and other users can quote that to, say, Admiral, until all car insurance is eventually FREE! It’s not like the insurance companies can’t afford it: look how much they’ve saved with the charity-shop budgets of these ads.

Speaking of Admiral, no one is more befuddled than its advert’s hapless star: a man dressed in 18th-century naval attire (admiral, geddit?), topped off with a squawking parrot on one shoulder (no, us neither). Admiral: that’s mixing up your seafaring military heroes with, well, pirates. You should log on to confused.com.

First published in the Guardian Guide, 11 October 2008

[embed]Go compare … Live-action Roobard & Custard or confused.com advert?

Footnote

We interrupt this trip down memory lane with a commercial break and an explainer. The Hard Sell was a regular column on page 3 of your super soaraway Saturday supplement The Guide (other selling points: Charlie Brooker, Grace Dent and a lot of listings. The point of The Hard Sell was for our writers to give what Dennis Norden might call a “sideways look” at adverts of the day. Most weeks it was pretty funny. I’ll let you decide whether my addition to the canon still holds up.