The one that just annoys me to death is the one where this blue-collar looking white guy is bitching that he just bought a car and got in a wreck, and that they’re not even paying out enough to cover the car because of depreciation. And then he goes on to say something cretinous like “How can a car depreciate before its first oil change?”
Uh, because that’s how depreciation works, you dumbfuck. Blame accountants, not the insurance companies for that one; the insurance companies aren’t trying to deliberately screw you there.
The commercial manages to combine ignorance, whininess and an unfounded implication that the insurance companies are conspiring to screw you around, combined with a hint that this guy is some sort of Everyman, and that we should be outraged that this happens.
Well, no, don’t blame accountants. Depreciation, in this respect, isn’t an accounting concept. It reflects the market, where the typical buyer won’t pay the same amount for your three-month-old car with 4,000 miles that he will for a brand new car at the dealer. You might whine that it’s not fair that a car depreciates as soon as you leave the dealership, with only 30 miles on the clock, but, again, it’s worth less as a used car with a previous owner than it is as a new car sitting on the dealer’s lot.
But the point of the commercial is that Liberty Mutual is promising to pay to replace a covered vehicle with a new one, not pay you a depreciated amount. So, the ad makes sense, as the company is promising something that is out of the ordinary. And, no, I don’t work for LM… in fact, I just dropped them and switched insurance to save money. Perhaps they are paying too many people who wreck cars within the first year.
I suspect that the industry name for the type of campaign Liberty Mutual has been clogging the airwaves with, is “appeal to stupidity.”
Again, it may well be that stupid customers are more desirable than intelligent customers, because the intelligent ones are more likely to contest claims-decisions, take the insurance company to court, complain to federal and state regulatory agencies about the insurance company, and so on. So L.M. will gain an profit-making edge by airing commercials that attract a preponderance of low-IQ types.
The other Liberty Mutual ad that makes me stabby is the woman who talks about doing all the research on her car (because we should never buy a car if we don’t know its torque ratio) then drives it into a tree, and concludes that she should have done more research on her insurance company. I’m thinking she should learn to drive without hitting trees.
Celebrating because the owner finally got a customer that wasn’t a relative (note all the other ‘customers’ in the shop have the same red hair). It wouldn’t seem quite so bad, except you know that the shop owner probably had a heart attack shortly afterwards from all the exertion.
Oh, and she hasn’t made the sale yet. I wouldn’'t be too quick to celebrate, after that display.
I believed we’ve already mentioned the Buick commercials about how they’re not nearly as ugly as they used to be.
And now Chevy is doing almost the same campaign. I’m wondering if they share a PR firm. And like the Buick ads, there’s no reference to improvements in function or performance, but just how they look so much nicer than the old Chevys.
The other thing I have about this is that they say, “For Drivers with our New Car Replacement coverage, we’ll pay the whole cost of a replacement car.”
Ah, so you’re actually jacking up the rates BEFORE an accident so they can pay out a bit more IF there’s an accident. You’re selling depreciation insurance.
I must be getting good at ignoring ad content because I have seen all the Liberty Mutual ads numerous times and have yet to be peeved by their content. I find myself more focused on the fact that they’re shot in some park (Battery? ) in Manhattan looking toward Liberty Island and that the most recent one with the cute girl holding the latte cup was shot in the spring because the foliage around her is green (the other ads look like they were shot in the winter because everything is gray). It took a few airings before I noticed she was talking about deductibles.
And just to make it perfectly clear that the customer is not a relative, make him a black guy. (I mean, not counting albinos, who’s whiter than a redhead?)
My first car was a Buick. I got it from my grandmother. Maybe that’s how Buicks got a reputation for “ugly” - kids look at Buicks as “what grandma drives”. But which Buicks were “ugly”, really? Isn’t Buick just a step below Cadillac in GM’s stable of makes?
It sounds like GM is desperately trying to push Buick at younger drivers. I haven’t seen the ads in question, but, as described, this sounds like a rehash of the “This isn’t your father’s Buick” from 20 (?) years ago. I remember reading a rebuttal of those ads back then (in a magazine or newspaper, not online), and it ended with something like, “‘This isn’t your father’s Buick?’ Bummer. 'Cause Dad’s Buick was a damned good car.”
I recently got to drive a Buick Regal for a few days while my Ford Taurus was in the shop (it was my mechanic’s “loaner”). That was a nice car.
Hear, hear.
We had a 1956 Buick–best car we’ve ever had.
It was a Roadmaster, dark blue, with a white top. And there were five holes (a decorative feature) along the wheel well on the front fender on each side. The most any Buick model had at the time.
