Confused.com

Ahhhh does listening to this advert drive you crazy! Yes it bloody does thanks to the original “make it look cheap advertising” from confused.com.

Now just in case you live in a cave or outside the UK, confused.com is a price comparison web site (like insurance.com) originally started to give people the ability to get the lowest quotes on car insurance. It now compares the prices of a myriad of services from insurance to credit cards.

What if their ads are rubbish, I hear you cry, why surely this online service has only our greatest needs at heart, to save us money. Well sorry to burst your bubble so soon but confused.com is not run by friendly nerd gnomes eager to help you get one over on the man. To explain lets have a little history lesson.

In 2000 Sara Murray launched www.inspop.com an insurance comparison web site, and it was rubbish. Despite lots of hoo har the site nearly crashed and most of its services had to be removed after the first twenty four hours. All visitors were obliged to fill in endless amounts of personal data before they could even receive a sniff of a quote and it promptly logged out anybody it didn’t like the look of with no explanation. So not the best beginning in the world but hey, it was a new millennium, we were experimenting man. Despite this it was still a great idea and they made good money via the commissions from the insurers they sent customers to. Inspop fiddled about for eighteen months trying to get the formula right and then promptly sold the company to……Admiral Insurance [insert da da darrrr]

Sara Murray is an interesting character, she was either born under the North Star or she can just sell ice to Eskimos. She started her first business Ninah consulting in 1992 and sold it to a Publicis Groupe company in 2002. In 2000 she started Inspop which as we know she sold to Admiral just 18 months later. Her latest venture is buddi a GPS tracking and personal locater (like enemy of the state for kids). No doubt this will also be sold shortly when the right buyer can be mesmerised. She does invent some terrible company names though.

Admiral took all the best bits from inspop and created www.confused.com which surprisingly did work fairly well and sank some money into those terrible ads. Strangely they left Inspop up and running though it is distinctly in the “here be dragons” section of the web, but they did use the company name to acquire other companies.

So confused.com is in fact owned by an insurance company, Admiral and they in turn own:

www.bell.co.uk – Insurance for drivers with zero claim bonus

www.diamond.co.uk – For the ladies, you knowthe ad, the singing woman with all the teeth.

www.elephant.co.uk – Online only car insurance, though how it can be totally online when is has a phone line and is in the same building as Admiral I don’t know. I presume if you get stuck you can ring Admiral and then ask for the phone to be passed across to the next desk where the elephant man is.

www.gladiator.co.uk - commercial vehicle insurance

So if Admiral fails to mop you up via confused.com they still make a bundle from passing you on to one of their insurance chums. They of course still retain your personal details which insurer you went with and why, and if they then used that info to undercut the competition then so much the better. It’s a win win situation for them.

Strangely Admiral did consider selling confused.com this year, not so surprisingly quite a few companies were interested. It was estimated to be worth 700 million pounds, not bad for just a price comparison site.

 

Now if you think you might try another friendly website just take a look of the list of who owns who below.

www.tescocompare.com - Well as Tesco offer their own insurance which is run by RBS who in turn own Direct Line, Churchill, and Privilege you have to wonder just how independent it is.

www.gocompare.com - One of the few sites whose advert didn’t look like a set from lets pretend. The money for the ads came from Esure who are own by Halifax.

www.comparethemarket.com – Owned by Budget who also make terrible adverts.

Now call me cynical but it does seem rather odd that the UK’s biggest and most popular car insurance comparison sites happen to be owned by insurance companies. But what really, really bothers me, is that these multi million pound corporations make such cheap ads. The reason of course is that cheap adverts make you think their products are cheap. They masquerade as one man companies operating out of a garage in some depressed area, working hard to get you a cheap deal and making it cheaper by not laying out money on lavish ads. Don’t take the bait, make them work for your money, you did after all.

Welcome to Someone Got Paid For This

Hi,

have you ever watched an advert and thought, why? Why the hell did anyone make that? Who in their right mind would have paid more than most of us will earn in a year for that piece of advertising crap?

Well as you may have guessed I have. I decided to find out more about not only advertising but the companies and corporations that pay for them. Who is controlling this constant stream into our lives and what they hope to get out of it.

We will be asking the age old question “Cui Bono – In whose benefit” are these things done.

The results may often be funny, sometimes sinister but above all informative. Please feel free to leave comments and point out any information I may miss or think we need to know.

Now just to get us started with a smile, here is my favourite fake advert courtesy of the multi talented genius at famil guy. We have all seen adverts like this. In the UK you may remember Safestyle ads….