Have you seen those online mortgage ads with silhouettes of a pair of dancing cowboys? Or of a man and woman cavorting on a rooftop – she tossing her braids around and he doing a dance that’s a little too, um, suggestive?
If you haven’t, you’re one of the few. “They’re everywhere,” said Brian Morrissey, a reporter for AdWeek. The dancing silhouette ads – irritating or mesmerizing, depending on your viewpoint – are plastered all over the Internet by LowerMyBills.com, a Santa Monica financial services company that was the Web’s fourth-largest advertiser in the third quarter of 2006, spending an estimated $29.8 million, according to TNS Media Intelligence.
And the dancing silhouettes appear to be the latest ad campaign that Internet users love to hate (remember those popup ads for the X10 camera). The silhouettes have prompted people to rant (and occasionally rave) about them in blog posts and to LowerMyBills.com, which is owned by credit-reporting agency Experian.
On a blog called MyOpenWallet, visitor “J.D.” added his comments to a post about the ads: “I hate these ads. I intentionally avert my eyes so that I do not know who runs them.”
Meanwhile, on the site AdBlock.org, an online conversation about the ads began in March and stretched into December. Comments range from “Am I the only one that finds the dancing couple to be strangely hypnotic? I could stare at that gyrating ad all day!” to “The lowermybills dancing ads are the most ANNOYING ads ever made. Yes, I now know the company but I HATE them – would never, EVER think of using them.”
With their clip-art aesthetics and cursive-writing headlines (better suited to a high school graduation announcement than a mortgage solicitation?) the ads have a low-budget look, despite the animated figures.
“I won’t comment on their creative acumen,” said Morrissey, who covers interactive advertising for AdWeek. “But those dancing silhouettes probably work.”
Ads can be effective even when they’re irritating, said Lilly Buchwitz, an assistant professor of advertising at San Jose State University, because consumers talk about and remember the ads. And interactive ads are a good choice for LowerMyBills, she said, because consumers can start to request a mortgage quote within the ad itself.
“I’d betcha my lunch money that these LMB ads have a higher than average response rate,” she wrote in an e-mail.
The campaign is not the most successful one LowerMyBills.com has ever launched, said company president and founder Matt Coffin, “but it’s serving its purpose for now.”
Coffin said the ads were done in-house, not by an ad firm. As for the many blog-posters that don’t see a connection between boot-scooting cowboys and mortgage quotes, “All the dancing you see is really a celebration of saving money,” Coffin said. “At least that’s how we see it.”
Contact Sue McAllister at smcallister@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5833.
