How often does an ad for car insurance get so popular that it gets its own range of merchandise, including one hilarious and oh so cute biography? Not often, that’s for sure.
It all started with an ad campaign for comparethemarket.com, a British website that enables you to find the cheapest car insurance to suit your own personal pickle. The brilliant people behind this website also created the character of Aleksandr Orlov, a prestigious Russian meerkat and founder of comparethemeerkat.com, a website where you can compare meerkats. As you do. Sadly, he is frustrated that that people often mix the two up.
The ads in which he vents his frustration, quickly became an immense success due to this colorful and cute main character with his charming Borat-esque accent and his nerdy assistant Sergei. Seriously, they crack me up and apparently I’m not the only one who’s meerkat mad.
These fluffy friends actually started an entire meerkat craze in the UK, with A Simples Life, My Life and Times by Aleksandr Orlov as the icing on the cake. It’s a beautiful book filled with gorgeous pseudo-historical drawings, tongue in cheek photographs and of course the history of the Orlov clan (ranging from the Meerkat–Mongoose war of 1728 until the Furry Terror of 1921) told by Aleksandr in his own characteristic crazy way.
I actually laughed out loud more times than I care to admit and I know, it’s commercialism is its purest and most evil form but come on, who can resist an autobiography by a meerkat?
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