ClearScore: 'Wat Doing?'

(Agency: 18 Feet & Rising; Air date: 15/07/15 to present; Length: 10-35 seconds)

The ClearScore ads aren’t new and have been on our TV screens since 2015, when the start-up company launched. The ads for this credit-checking agency caught my eye back in 2016 with probably the most well-known of their ads, ‘Wat Doing?’, which features a Boxer dog named Moose. ClearScore have recently started running these ads again so I thought I’d write about them. When doing my research for this review, I was surprised by just how many adverts there are for the company. Excluding a few duplicates and truncated versions of longer ads, there are 23 different adverts on ClearScore’s YouTube channel. OK, many of these are variations on a theme, which feature the same characters only in different situations, but that is still a huge number of different ads to produce in the four years since the first one debuted. I had never even seen a lot of them, so I wonder how many were shown on television at all. Perhaps most were only uploaded to YouTube for online viewing. 

Checking your credit score online is not the most exciting activity to talk about so ClearScore have used humour to make their message memorable. The ads feature various characters but the main theme is funny talking animals. There’s a pair of turtles, a cat named Flearoy, and the aforementioned dog called Moose. The couple of ads that feature the turtles provide the opportunity for cheesy puns about ClearScore helping users to take ‘turtle control’ of their money and ensuring they don’t have to ‘shell out’ for their credit score. Flearoy the cat speaks in a creepy, unplaceable accent and thinks he (not the humans he lives with) is the rightful owner of the family credit card and even the house. The cat leaves me feeling cold and the ad agency was right to ditch him after a couple of ads. The funniest ads feature Moose and the agency knows this because Moose is the animal that appears most frequently. He is cuter and more loveable than Flearoy. He has a comical voice, both gruff and innocent at the same time. And his many interactions with his owner Charlie – unexpectedly sticking his head between Charlie’s legs, trying to jump in the bath with Charlie, or wrapped in a blanket seeking comfort from Charlie during a storm – are funny to watch. Although after viewing all the adverts back-to-back, you do start to wonder why Charlie needs to check his credit score quite so often.   

The large quantity of ads made me ask myself how a start-up company has got so much money to throw at advertising. More research revealed the company was founded by former UK managing director of Google Dan Cobley and ‘company builder’ Blenheim Chalcot who invested plenty of money into the business. ClearScore has gone on to become a big success in the four years since it launched; so much of a success, in fact, that it is now the second largest credit checking service in the UK, while rival Experian is the largest. Experian saw ClearScore as a big enough threat that in March 2018 they announced plans to buy the smaller rival for £275m. However, Experian recently pulled out because they feared the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority would not approve the acquisition due to the CMA's concerns it would reduce competition in the credit-checking market too much. 

So for now, ClearScore remains a separate entity and the familiar ads looks set to continue to run. The adverts seem to divide opinion online but I like them. ClearScore know they’ve got a boring product to sell so have had some fun with the adverts. Judging by the company’s success, their advertising strategy seems to have worked.