AXA presents a grim 'Family portrait'

Produced and launched on short-film platform Viddsee, this is a five-minute movie about a Singapore family facing financial difficulties due to a cancer diagnosis.

If that sounds like something you'd rather not watch, Ad Nut can't argue.

AXA wants more young people to invest in critical-illness coverage earlier on in their careers. This explains why the climax of the film comes when the young graduate—despite her grief over the impending death of her grandmother and her stress over the impending financial ruin of her parents—reaches an epiphany about her need for supplemental insurance products.

Directed by Tariq Mansor, part of the Viddsee Storyteller Network, the film is relatively well made, and the actors do a decent job with the painfully obvious material. All in all, it's about as watchable as a manipulative and transparent ploy like this could possibly be.

In other words, it's not very watchable. And AXA seems to grasp that—ergo the decision to place it amongst non-commercial films on Viddsee. However, Ad Nut questions that strategy. Luring people into what looks like a legitimate family drama only to hammer them with the hardest of hard sells that ever did hardsell seems unlikely to create warm feelings.

That said, Ad Nut has empathy for the brand's predicament; in order to motivate people to buy insurance you pretty much have to show the downsides of not doing so, and that's difficult to pull off. And of course, Ad Nut could be totally wrong about this film. We'll see. The video has 40,000 views on Facebook since its launch late last week (the Viddsee page doesn't display a view count, but has seven likes). The campaign will run through the first quarter, with cutdowns in place to drive traffic to the movie. 

In any case, this new effort is an infinitely better approach than this unforgettably bizarre street drama that the brand tried way back in 2013:

Ad Nut is a surprisingly literate woodland creature that for unknown reasons has an unhealthy obsession with advertising. Ad Nut gathers ads from all over Asia and the world for your viewing pleasure, because Ad Nut loves you. You can also check out Ad Nut's Advertising Hall of Fame, or read about Ad Nut's strange obsession with 'murderous beasts'.