Yesterday night at the movies, I saw a commercial from one of the Belgian health insurance funds, namely Het Neutraal Ziekenfonds. In Belgium the basic health insurance (which covers quite a lot) is free (as paid by the government) and offered by all funds. So you pretty much chose between the funds depending on all the other services they offer.
So last night I saw this new cinema commercial they made and it just made wonder what some people are doing in advertising. This is probably the silliest ad I’ve seen this year. I don’t regularly blog about bad advertising and rather focus on the good stuff, but this is just …
I have a link to the commercial a bit further but read through this first. Since the commercial is in Dutch, you might want some additional info. The slogan of Het Neutraal Ziekenfonds is ‘the essential, in all simplicity’ and that’s what this commercial is about, that’s what the voice-over is saying: losing ballast, going to the essential, …
Now go see the commercial for yourself and try to look at it with ‘essential’ in mind and like you have no idea what it’s about ;) Go to this page, ‘skip intro’ and click on the link in the down right corner called ‘de bioscoopspot’. That should do it.
Now I’m a happy client of them, but this ad is just ridiculous.
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'Cross The Breeze 
Kris,
this is funny…. I was at metropolis last night too, finally going to see Ben X, and so I had exactly the same experience as you…
I don’t know who came up with it… but it’s a really really sad, stupid ad.
What was the “new, fresh & exciting” consumer insight for this one?
I wonder how many people will remember there was a game communicated in the spot…. SAD!
I also saw it in a movie theater about two weeks ago, and it surprised me as much as you. Most of the audience that was present that night started talking about it immediately afterwards. That’s probably the strategy behind it, as cheap as it may be. The website is made by The Parking Lot, I suppose the clip is their work too.
The Parking Lot develops concepts from the bigger ad agencies in Belgium so I doubt they came up with this idea.
Thanks for the comments guys, I was pretty I wasn’t the only one who though it was a silly ad.
@peter: good point about the competition that is announced in the commercial, I’m pretty sure nobody will recall seeing that. I only did after watching it again before writing this post.