Watch the full ad here:

Darren's thoughts:

"ITV invented commercial TV - so basically they invented my job. Thanks for that! When they asked me to write about a TV campaign I helped create to celebrate 70 years of TV advertising I accepted with pleasure. Here goes... a few words on a certain Meerkat who was launched via the medium of ITV.

I spend most days creative directing - asking teams to simplify their ideas. Attention spans are at a minimum now, but even in 2009 price comparison website's weren't of much interest. 

At meerkat launch I did not practise what I preach. A suave and sophisticated self obsessed meerkat, who was billionaire-rich and ran a website that compared meerkats. He was sick of people coming to his comparethemeerkat.com website looking for cheap car insurance. Anyone who did was upping his server costs, and increasing the workload of IT grunt Sergei. 

Are you still with me?  It's a novel not an ad.

I'm proudest of the fact that Clem and Rich the creative team managed to tell this bonkers narrative with absolute clarity in a 30 second launch spot. The nation gave a collective WTF? And there were so many questions. Why that accent? Why the smoking jacket? Why the big mansion?... that people kept watching. So we kept making spots, delving into backstory, putting the meerkats in peril, developing relationships and widening the lens to meet other meerkats from the local village, then the biggest movie stars on earth. It just grew and grew.

We didn't just write scripts - we had 'story arc sessions'.... the most fun I ever had in advertising. The more complex our narrative became, the more car insurance was sold.

In the summer after launch one story grabbed the headlines of every paper - the press had discovered that Simon Greenall was the voice of Aleksandr. Double-page-spread news. British bonkersness. 

We want our TV shows to be complex, multi-layered and emotional... and advertising can work that way too. We proved it. Simples."