When you think of car insurance TV adverts what springs to mind? I’m sure we are not alone in thinking pretty dreary, cheap and nasty adverts which do not do much to stop us changing the channel.

When we first saw the latest series of adverts from car insurance comparison website CompareTheMarket.com which feature a spoof creation Aleksandr_Orlov, owner of CompareThe Meerkat.com a “dating site” for meerkats, we didn’t see the genius immediately. Our initial thought was “not another car insurance comparison advert, ugh!”

We must admit, it wasn’t our favourite advert ever and it did irritate us a wee bit. Although as our kids were singing the jingle “Compare the meercat dot com” which did spark our curiosity about the supposed meerkat comparison website. We stopped ourselves from checking the site out as we thought that would be a bit sad. But when our curiosity got the better of us we were amazed by the genius of the social media campaign behind the commercial.

Not only does the site exist, but you can actually compare meerkats LOL! How impressed were we that Meerkat Owner Aleksandr_Orlov is a social media superstar. Aleksandr is very active on Twitter with  10,091 followers right now and tweets daily. He has 317,939 fans on Facebook and about 100,000 video views on his official YouTube page since the beginning of the campaign in January.

Look at the comparison of the two sites on Alexa to see the impact of their creative marketing. When the spoof site launched in January the daily traffic to both sites increased dramatically. SEO is hightened with links from the meerkat site to the original site and the conversational style of social media, ie blog posts, comments twitter links, facebook groups etc.

It is important to realise that the success of this campaign is not simply by using social media, anyone can create these accounts. But engaging in conversations with their fan base and bringing fun and personality to their brand has brought them visibility that you cannot compare which can easily convert to loyal customers.

Check the site to see for yourself, it’s hilarious. We love how funny this is and such an ingenious marketing idea. What a creative way to embrace Social Media, create a cult following and it is so ‘un-pitchy’ and fresh that makes it fabulous!