Here’s Confused.com’s latest steaming pile of dung, by far its worst yet, featuring an awful scribbly thing singing Queen’s Somebody To Love.
This is clearly Confused.com’s most recent attempt to come up with a ‘character’ for its adverts that can rival Geo Compario from Go Compare and Aleksandr Orlov from Compare the Market (Confused.com makes all its adverts in-house, perhaps explaining why they’re all so unutterably dire).
Previous Confused.com (s)hits include the baffling Confucius Yoda thing; a load of commoners talking about how incredible their experience of using a particular price-comparison website is; the weirdy two-dimensional set ones with a load of people acting like twats; and the original with Nicky Campbell kicking things off by going AAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Watching Confused.com desperately trying to locate some kind of brand strategy, thrashing back and forth with a succession of appalling advert, has been vaguely pitiful.
The latest gives some sort of life to the original wavy-haired screaming thing that has appeared on the Confused.com logo for some time. Now it’s called Cara and just want to find somebody to love. Or something. Or maybe it’a saying that customers have found something to love, in the shape of Confused.com.
To suggest that people love using a price-comparison website is to fundamentally misunderstand why people use things like price-comparison websites, to my mind. I have to go to work every day, shave my face from time to time and occasionally suffer going to the weddings of people I’ve never met. It doesn’t mean I like doing them.
In giving life to Cara Confused, or whatever she’s called, Confused.com has – perhaps – created one of the most unlovely characters on television. Arguably one of the more disturbing too. The wavy hair makes her look like a crazy cat lady; the maniacal stare makes her look like a killer; the painted smiles on the billions of twitching cartoons remind me of the kool-aid drinking visages of a load of dim, doomed cult members.
Just what the fuck is all of this about? What’s with the song? How does a song about Fredddie Mercury’s love life translate to car insurance? I don’t like Queen, but Somebody To Love is actually rather bittersweet – a defiant rallying cry against the drudgery and loneliness of modern life. To co-opt it for your latest abysmal advert shilling your stupid website is actually pretty obnoxious.
And the ad itself? Cara actually appears to pull a microphone stand out of her minge. What the fuck is up with that? Confused.com is ’18 million strong’ we’re told at the end. By what standards? In what way? In the sense that that’s how many people have used your service? Somehow I doubt that 0.1 per cent of them would be prepared to say that they ‘loved’ Confused.com. By those standards Anusol is probably 50 million strong.
I find this advert utterly hateful. Far worse than Geo, far worse than Omid Djalili’s ads for MoneySupermarket.com and, obviously, a country mile away from the entertaining meerkat adverts. And it’s yet another bizarre change in direction away from the previous efforts.
The only solace I can find is in imagining every single one of the people in the cartoon dead from imbibing some poison straight from Cara’s vagina itself.