Questionmark: Traveler's insurance dog commercial

"This dog deserves an Oscar!" "How cute..." "Love this commercial." The great thing about YouTube is that you get unfiltered, direct feedback from your audience. Having scanned through the first ten pages of comments, one may assume Traveler's insurance scored a big hit with the audience. After all, 625,000 hits on YouTube cannot be ignored.

I am not a dog lover myself, so the emotional "how-cute-effect" is completely lost on me. I do, however, see the emotional appeal and the brilliant storytelling in Traveler's commercial. Is that enough though? Does an entertaining commercial mean it's a good commercial; in our world: an effective commercial?

Let's take a closer look. What is the marketer's goal? In this case: Create awareness for your brand, and subsequently sell more insurance policies. I am not fully convinced this commercial actually does that. Yes, it is cute. Yes, it has been watched more than half a million times here. Many of those views seem to come from the same dog lovers who watch it over and over again. Non dog-lovers like me don't care very much. Let's check off the 'creating awareness' box however. But will it help sell more insurance policies?

I dare to say that the analogy drawn between a dog and his bone and the implied benefit for us humans seem a bit far fetched and very vague. The message is just a little bit too abstract, and the takeaway not very clear. Granted, the implied meaning is "Traveler's takes care of things. You need not worry." But what insurance does not do that? That's exactly the one thing they all have in common - they insure things. That is the whole premise for their business model. Where is the differentiation from the competition? The dog?

Geico has the Gekko. Aflac has the duck. Highly successful brand mascots. Will Traveler's stick to the dog for years to come? Or is this just one story being told. If so - what's next? Where is the cohesive thread that builds brand equity for the future? Is it perhaps in the way the story is being told? Will we see a similar analogy next, featuring a cat? I am afraid that the follow-up we'll get to see from Traveler's will be a completely different story, only tied to the above by the end credits and the Traveler's name vs. building on a clearly defined brand identity platform.

Furthermore, there is another issue with story-telling approaches like this one. Assume an audience that does not pay full attention to the commercial when it's running on TV, and quite frankly only a few people ever do. They checking their smartphone, have a conversation, do x, y, and z..., which leaves you as a marketer with only the audio part of your commercial that potentially reaches the audience. In this case, 95% of the time the consumer hears nothing but music, and just at the very end the words "Traveler's insurance" spoken only once! That's a lot of visual and audio space you paid for that's wasted.

The challenge with all this is that as a marketer (the ad agency's client) you need to combine your business needs with an artistic approach (which is what you pay the ad people for) by applying knowledge that is built from past experiences (ideally yours) and tons of research results available to everyone these days (Journal of Consumer Research etc.).

Too often though, the ad people don't care about research very much. They want to win a creative award to bolster their portfolio. The marketer however should be interested in winning an Effie, not a golden pencil. After all: do you want to have just a well-known brand (think: Camel) or do you want to have a successful brand?