My friend Michael Rhodes just pointed out that a piece in Management Today suggests the reason for the blatant greed and lack of apology from the procession of bank bosses questioned by parliament. It sems that, like Stalin and Hitler, they may be a bunch of psychopaths – http://www.managementtoday.co.uk/newsalerts/article/883246/mtsweek/were-big-banks-run-psychopaths/?DCMP=EMC-Daily%20News
But do you recall that the first firm to crash was AIG, the insurance giant? This occurred to me a couple of weeks back when saw a flood of posters all over the place featuring Iggy Pop – or Druggy Pop as I have always thought of him – selling Swift Cover insurance.
It seems this brilliant “concept” is costing £25 million. So I asked myself a few questions.
1. Is Iggy – an American musician with an appeal as limited as his talent – a credible adviser on insurance in Britain
2. How much testing did they do before rolling out the campaign? Or did they just say, “Screw it, let’s just piss away the money”?
3. Do they insure musicians? (I have a couple in my family and they always find it hard to get insured)
I bet the answers to 1 and 2 are “no” and ”testing? What’s that?” And Michael sent me a New Musical Express piece giving the answer to 3 – see http://www.nme.com/news/iggy-pop/42968. Check out the moronic commercial.
Wankers!
Agree about the Iggy campaign. It’s almost as dumb as the bollocks Aviva posters that have littered billboards for the past few months. (Their product ads are even worse than the ones promoting a dubious re-branding. The one with the bobsleigh team designed to get people to buy their unit trusts is astonishingly dumb.)
The Swiftcover concept (saving time) seems unrelated to any Iggy or Stooges song I can recall. And Iggy just looks like the ultimate sell-out for doing it.
Unlike you, I love Iggy and the Stooges – what’s not to like about proto-punk classics such as “I wanna be your dog”, “1969” and “No fun”? But this was a lose-lose-lose idea – for him, for them and for us. The marketing trifecta!
I dunno…
John Lydon (aka Johnny Rotten) was recently used in butter commercials and that seemed a very strange choice – and the ads were pretty dumb – yet reports say sales are up 85%:
http://www.marketingweek.co.uk/cgi-bin/item.cgi?id=64153&u=pg_dtl_art_news&m=pg_hdr_art
I suspect these things are basically just a crapshoot.
There's no logic to them, but sometimes they get lucky and hit a nerve and work. Most of the time they don't.
The Iggy campaign is dreadful, I’ll give you that. It’s embarrassing. And the John Lydon one is mind-bogglingly awful. I cringe every time it comes on.
But dissing Iggy’s talents? Nonononono!
Drayton, it was bad enough when you slagged off Lily Allen. I held my tongue then (or my fingers, depending on how you look at it).
But questioning Iggy’s talent? Drayton, that’s just wrong… shame on you! 😀
Debs x
Yes Drayton, you’re right about insurance companies. The Slobbering Cyclops has failed to note that the toxic debts of the banks are insured which is why the Arseholes Into Greed company is only the first to go tits up. If you have shares in insurance companies, SELL now, because their values are going to drop faster than a grand piano falling out of a Hercules. The CDS (credit default swaps) are landing thick and fast.
The Slob actually believes everything that his compatriots at the banks tell him. For example, here is a quote from the RBS June 2007 trading statement by Fred Goodwin, “The mix or the quality of the credit within our book as you have heard me saying probably ad nauseam, we don’t do sub-prime so we have not perhaps been exposed to some of the more boisterous elements of that market that others have.”
So, the £24 billion loss announced by RBS today must have come as a bit of a surprise.
I watched the commercial. Wow… what a piece of crap.
Just like Iggy’s “music”. He never had an original bone in his body… jamming on two chords, writhing on broken glass, and pretending to be someone he’s not takes no talent.