Indirect Competitive Advertising

Here’s another current commercial that illustrates another category of advertisement, indirect competitive advertising.  This Progressive commercial focuses on highlighting a product feature – their Home Quote Explorer.  Beyond simply showing commercials like this I often ask the class to dissect the commercial and look at what tactics were used to support the message.  In this case humor is used to grab and maintain the viewer’s attention, the phrase “it’s easy” is used, and the product description is provided very succinctly (less than 4 seconds)  – “you just answer some simple questions online and you get coverage options to choose from”.