Back in the late-mid 90s, UK insurance company Eagle Star Direct (who didn't have much longer to go before their acquisition by Zurich Financial Services) unleashed a series of ads designed to exploit the common wisdom that insurance is something of an inherently boring product, and any marketer has their work cut out in making it look sexy and exotic to the masses. The point of this campaign - on the surface, anyway - was that it always showed you boring and non-eventful imagery, as a reflection of consumer expectations for the experience of browsing through insurance policies. These were ads consisting of dead, empty spaces, momentary plunges into the abyss of the prosaic, accompanied by Eagle Star's textual admissions that dealing with insurance was typically about as riveting was what you were currently seeing on screen. But if you followed their instructions and gave them a call, then you were (supposedly) going to love what you would hear.
Here's the peculiar thing, though - the ads themselves weren't actually boring. To the contrary, they fell squarely on the side of the curiously confounding. At a time when it was becoming increasingly fashionable for brands to equate themselves with the surreal, overblown and often downright deranged, there was something uniquely charming about Eagle Star Direct's approach, by fixating on the banal to the unabating extent that it too became borderline surreal. Like the inorganic object that appears to move, if you stare at it for long enough (you've heard those legends about the clown in Test Card F), so too did perturbing little auras start revealing themselves in these ostensibly humdrum snapshots. The most authentically, miserably insipid of the bunch focused on a washing machine in motion, its insipidness arising not from the visuals of the machine itself but from the irksomely unimaginative choice of pop accompaniment (what else but "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive?). The others, though, made much more offbeat choices. A key feature across the campaign, and central to its somewhat remote vibe was the near-total lack of any human presence. The focus was largely on everyday inanimate objects, and the ads remained pure in their beguiling fascination with the ordinary and the inert. On the rare occasions humans did appear, they were typically quite muted - for example, we see a human hand (albeit concealed by a glove) operating a mop in one ad, and the torsos of supermarket patrons hovering the backdrop of another. Nothing so intimate or familiar as a human face, however. Animals sometimes showed up, often as visual punchlines. The aforementioned mop ad, for example, concluded with a dog wandering in and tracking mud across the freshly-wiped floor. If you stayed with another ad, this one centred on a roadside kerb and the ambiance of passing traffic, you were rewarded with the sight of a hedgehog making it safely to the other side (revealing that a scenario of seriously stomach-churning tension had been playing out all along - the camera just happened to be largely pointed away from it).
My first encounter with the campaign was via a purpose-made Halloween ad in October 1996, and I remember being genuinely thrown by it. The visuals presented nothing more ostentatious than a stack of pumpkins on display in a supermarket, but the audio did not correspond. Instead, we heard an array of tracks from what I can only assume to be an album of haunted house sound effects - creaking floorboards, ear-splitting screams, malevolent laughter. The visuals and audio alike had a distinctly, purposely frugal flavour, and yet the conspicuous mismatch of the innocuous and the spookhouse had a remarkably unsettling effect, giving off the queasy impression of a hidden grisliness manifesting in the everyday. The innocent shoppers were going about their business unaware that there was something terribly wrong about this picture - in visual terms, it was difficult to pinpoint what, but those sounds made it plain that it was there.
Even more vexing than that pumpkin ad, though, was a spot featuring a blue and gold macaw, who was unusually front and centre for something so blatantly non-prosaic. We had the beguiling juxtaposition of the exotic with the conspicuously non-exotic, a striking bird seated on a perch in a blandly wallpapered living room. Our immediate expectation - that the bird might talk - is deliberately frustrated. Instead, it sits there in total silence for the duration; the only sound heard, early on, is background noise from a ticking clock. Some semblance of a narrative surfaces when this domestic inertia is finally ruptured by the sounds of a doorbell ringing, repeatedly, followed by evidence that our offscreen caller is becoming increasingly irate; the ringing gives way to knocking, and the ad closes with neither the external caller or the internal limbo showing any signs of backing down.
It would be wrong to suggest that the Eagle Star Direct ads in general were devoid of conflict (despite the impression they strove to give) - the mop ad pivoted on the classic battle between cleanliness and chaos, and the road ad with the plucky hedgehog said something of nature's plight in an increasingly human-modified world, although it was within the macaw ad that the conflict was the most salient. We never find out who the caller is or what they were calling about, but they were clearly pretty danged desperate to meet with those vacant occupants. The conflict is so pronounced, in fact, that it feels like an outlier to the rest of the campaign - though the Eagle Star Direct ads had their own unique tone and aesthetic, this one in particular feels like an escapee from a contemporary line of KitKat ads (the "Have a Break" campaign was still going strong, but had graduated from roller-skating pandas to similarly static situations that were not likely to be resolved any time soon). The nature of the conflict is mundane, but this is counterbalanced by the strange visual of the parrot, whose presence is basically superfluous - Eagle Star Direct might have made their point just as efficiently by focusing on a less unusual domestic item, after all. And yet, the parrot significantly alters the entire tone of the ad. The futility of the caller's struggle seems all the more absurd for that it does not, technically, go unacknowledged - the parrot gazes in its direction with the same indifference as it had regarded whatever was holding its interest (quite possibly nothing) before the disturbance came, a non-human passively observing the ludicrousness of a human going to war with absolutely nothing.
All of the Eagle Star Direct ads purported to be about nothing - or, more accurately, about staring into a vacuum of unrelenting monotony - but it is here that the vacuum seems to be most markedly regarding us back and smirking at our impotence, the ticking clock in background accentuating each and every precious moment being drained away in the process. Perhaps that sense of silence indifference is best embodied by a parrot, a creature from which entertainment has long conditioned us to expect loquaciousness.
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