Progressive Commercials Make Me Laugh

I don’t know how many people watch TV for the commercials, but I am a huge fan and critic when it comes to watching commercials. I thoroughly enjoy watching commercials and scrutinizing them for the idiosyncrisies, but that is just me.

The latest commercial from Progressive makes me laugh as they advertise a “real” quote in just 8 minutes. 8 MINUTES! HA! At Central we can produce a “real” quote sent by an XML stream in less than 10 seconds. Now lets compare, 8 minutes vs 10 seconds. I can go to a fast food restraunt and be served my order before 8 minutes pass by. The Progressive Commercial only lasts at max 30 seconds, and they are advertising something that takes 8 minutes. I can print 30 pages per minute, or roughly 240 pages of documents in 8 minutes versus having 1-2 pages stating my quote details from progressive. I can have 48 different quotes from Central in 8 minutes.

8 minutes is a long time. In fact, I would consider it too long. How do you entertain a web visitor for 8 minutes?! The average web user likely only spends 1-5 minutes on a website, although, if they are shopping for insurance they are likely to stay until they are finished purchasing it. 8 minutes is a lot to ask for “real-time”. Did you know I can run a File System Check on my computer and it takes less than 8 minutes and I have nearly 1.2 TB of storage?

Finally, the big trump, is I can compile my kernel in about 9.5 minutes. Think about it, I can compile my primary operating system in just a minute and a half more than it takes to get a “real” quote from Progressive. Progressive is a pretty large company and they can only quote in 8 minutes? I find that hard to believe. I admit, I do not work for a large company, but we are relatively good size, and we can quote in 10 seconds and it is a “real” quote.

Progressive, seriously, 8 minutes? Do you really see that as an improvement over your competition?