Life Done Right™

Remember the Love Canal, that toxic waste dump located in Niagra Falls, New York, that became an ode to corporate thuggery? After all, white collar crime isn’t always just an accounting error gone bad at the hands of a few greedy souls. The Love Canal, originally, was the dream of William T. Love; he wanted to connect Lake Ontario and Lake Erie. The dream went bust, but his name went on to become associated with one of our nation’s worst environmental disasters.

The Super Bowl is an epic event as well. Advertisers pay big bucks to reach as wide a swath of consumers as they can, hoping they’ll convert couch potatoes into hungry buyers. One of this year’s Super Bowl ads features Fabio, the romance cover model who parlayed fame into a million dollar empire. He’s floating down a canal in Venice, Italy pitching a new shampoo. As he disappears under the canal arch, he suddenly reappears as a 90-year-old man. That’s when we learn this is not an ad for shampoo, but an ad from Nationwide Insurance, with the tagline, “Life Comes at you Fast.”

While it’s true life comes at you fast, sometimes, what’s even more true is how fast the fine print comes at you when you’re reading about whether your insurance covers your loss in the event of a quirky disaster (just ask the folks in New Orleans). It can look pretty on the surface, but make sure you get out your reading glasses to check the details.

The Love Canal once looked pretty too, especially when the sun was shining on its surface, blinding you to the Lochness monster below.

Twenty five years after the Hooker Chemical Company stopped using the Love Canal here as an industrial dump, 82 different compounds, 11 of them suspected carcinogens, have been percolating upward through the soil, their drum containers rotting and leaching their contents into the backyards and basements of 100 homes and a public school built on the banks of the canal. –EPA

Here’s the official blurb from Nationwide Insurance:

In keeping with its unique campaign of the last two years, Nationwide ads use humor to make an important point: Life Comes at You Fast – often before you realize it. Whether it’s getting married, having a child, buying a new home, or saving for college or retirement, advance preparation is key, especially when it comes to insurance and financial planning.

The Super Bowl ad begins with a “misdirect,” typical of other spots in the Life Comes at You Fast campaign, where viewers believe they are seeing an ad for something else entirely before finding out they’re watching a Nationwide ad. Fabio floats on a gondola through the canals of Venice with his love interest. A voice suggests that Fabio is introducing his own line of shampoo. Just as viewers become convinced they are watching an over-the-top shampoo ad, the gondola passes under a bridge and Fabio emerges as a 90 year-old man. Viewers are let off the hook when Nationwide’s Life Comes at You Fast slogan appears on the screen.

“The Life Comes at You Fast concept was created to remind people that they need to think about preparing for the future,” said Steven Schreibman, vice president of advertising and brand management for Nationwide. “We’re using humor and a celebrity to get people’s attention and cut through the clutter with a very serious message: You need to be prepared for life to change, because change is inevitable.”