[Orchids & Onions] Keeping it real drives message home

This is what is behind the latest Discovery Insure ad for its policy, which includes a system that alerts emergency services if you have a crash. This one features Liesl Laurie, Miss South Africa 2015, who is a Discovery Insure member.

She had the system fitted and was involved in a serious crash, in which her car was forced beneath a bus. She recounts in chilling detail the sort of thing that could happen to any of us at any time on our death-tainted roads.

As with many crash survivors, she was disorientated and couldn’t do much. But, because the car’s crash alert device had been triggered, paramedics were soon on the scene. The last thing she recalls is passing out as a paramedic grabbed her arm.

It’s a great story, not only because it is true but because it shows one of the most worrying aspects of what happens on our roads: when you may be so badly injured, you can’t help yourself. And that is the catch line of the ad: “Calls for help when you can’t.”

It’s powerful and it certainly makes one think of that specific benefit of having Discovery Insure looking after you. Automatic candidate for an Orchid. Watch the ad below.

The opposite is true for what I think is one of the tackiest and most unprofessional pieces of sponsorship or product placement I have seen.

On Morning Live on SABC 2 this week, the news announcer, as he handed over to the Gupta-sponsored Business Briefing slot, gushed about Garden Master “stepping up” to decorate the set. Then followed a shot of the sloppiest, most unappealing “decoration” it has been my misfortune to see on a TV screen: plastic grass (rumpled, too), plastic buckets holding plastic “plants” and an assortment of tools, hosepipes and sprinklers.

Rubbish! What on earth has that to do with anything that came up on the show? And why was it done in such a slapdash, amateur fashion? Orders from the in-again, out-again chief operating officer, perhaps?

I don’t have a problem with product placement in itself – and it’s done quite well on SABC 3 in Morning Live’s opposite number show, Expresso – but this just devalues what could be a useful marketing tool. For the whole pointless exercise, Garden Master, you get a plastic Onion. For playing the silly game of money at whatever cost, you get one too, SABC.

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