Watchdog: Can you get insurance in under two minutes?

22 June 2015
 

As featured in AdNews magazine, Watchdog is that mighty defender of consumers against BS marketing and advertising claims.

If a sky diving monkey and magician's assistant can all get a Bingle car insurance quote in under two minutes, god damn it, so can an ad watching Watchdog.

Step one, log onto computer. This would have been easier with opposable thumbs, but if jungle animals can do it, so can Watchdog.

The stopwatch starts and instantly hit the “get a quick quote button”. It's hard to tell which is more nerve wracking, trying to race the clock or finding out how much it will be to get car insurance for driving dog.

There's four steps, and approximately five questions per step, and a lot of the steps have drop-down options or simple buttons to select, so it's easier than expected to get through a usually complex form.

In the name of transparency - there was a tiny bit of user error when trying to work out the make an model of Watchdog's motor vehicle, however the site's loading time is extremely speedy and after a few simple questions the exact model is found.

We've made it through four steps and a decent amount of questions , Bingle now knows where Watchdog lives, the fully-sick car he drives and his age, and according to his trusty stopwatch the whole thing was completed in two minutes and 17 seconds. Pretty good.

The only problem that we can see with this claim is that while we managed to get a quote in just over two minutes, the monkey is still kind of a liar; the fact that the average skydive lasts around 8 minutes. The jig is up chimpy.

Final reckoning: It's easy for an ad to make a sexy claim about a boring form taking under two minutes. It is even easier for an over zealous creative to depict this with s sky diving monkey and a girl getting sawn in half. Luckily for Bingle, not only were no monkeys harmed in the making of this television commercials, the claim is actually true and the site is really quick and easy to use. With the final time coming in just over what was promised, Watchdog can see no problem with this claim, other than the fact magic isn't real and we're 89% sure chimps can't skydive.

A version of this story originally appeared in the latest version of AdNews Magazine (12 June). Want more? You can subscribe both in Print and on your iPad here.

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