Brexit: David Cameron’s ‘Remain’ pitch an epic fail

Who knew meerkats would pop their inquisitive little noses into the Brexit debate? Not just any meerkats, of course, but the stars of the UK advertising campaign for price comparison website comparethemarket.com.

In an opinion piece in the influential UK advertising industry magazine Campaign, British prime minister David Cameron urged those in the creative industries to vote Remain.

“Britain’s advertising and marketing industries are renowned as a hub of creativity, a magnet for talent and as having an ability to export their services the world over,” he said. “I want to ensure that they continue to prosper.”

Aside from the meerkat campaign, he went on to mention two other campaigns as examples of British world-class creativity – “ingenious ideas dreamed up by British advertising agencies” – the John Lewis Christmas 2015 tear-jerker “man on the moon” and, most curiously, given the vast range of campaigns he could have mentioned, the “epic strut” ad for Moneysupermarket.

Whoever researched the piece must not have spotted that the weirdly repulsive ad, which features a man strutting down a street in high heels and hot pants, twerking and generally making an idiot of himself, was the TV ad most complained about in the UK last year. The UK Advertising Standards Authority received 1,513 complaints about the ad from the public on the grounds that it was offensive – although none of the complaints was upheld by the industry watchdog.

Staying on message in terms of the Remain campaign’s key points, he said remaining in the European Union does not just give access to the single market “We have a huge say over its rules” – although the piece did not give specific examples of what rules in relation to the highly globalised advertising communications industry he was referring to.

Acknowledging that global advertising groups such as Dentsu, Havas Omnicom, Publicis Groupe and WPP have expanded in the UK in recent years, he said “35 per cent of the revenues of the top 20 UK ad agencies are generated by overseas business”.