1Life insurance: A celebration of life

When you’re young, you don’t often think of the future. Life’s colours are bright, its sounds clear and loud and its tastes sharp. When you start a family, though, life gets very serious.

I was reminded of that recently when I read somewhere that people in their 30s and 40s are the unhappiest people around.

Youngsters and older people seem more content … and perhaps that’s due to the worries occasioned by that part of life where you are responsible for someone other than yourself.

One of the heaviest responsibilities of a parent, especially the breadwinner, is to ensure that your family has all they need, now and in the future, should something happen to you.

Life insurance is the safety net for many families in an increasingly uncertain world and the younger you get involved with it, the better it is.

But selling life insurance is not always easy because it deals, even sometimes in an oblique way, with death, which is something most of us would rather push into the background.

Yet, having life insurance can be something to celebrate, as is life, because it can bring a person peace of mind that their loved ones will be well-cared-for when they’re gone.

That’s why I like the new 1Life campaign TV ad, which was recently nominated for a Loerie advertising award. It starts off solemnly, with a man walking into a hospital.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOTyJjfL4Hg

He has a serious look on his face. This can’t be good. As he moves through the hospital, we follow the conversation in his head and it’s all about “one day I will have to say goodbye”.

A goodbye to faithful companions who have been with him along his life’s journey and as he built his transport business – his friends, his dog, his wife – goodbye to dark and light, to love, to all stories.

As he moves through his life, you are drawn into this universal story; regardless of race, gender or creed, everyone walks this road. And because the man is pondering the really big things in life, you feel the climax will be heartbreaking.

But he says, one day I will have to give up all of these things … but not today. Today is for celebrating life. And as he says that, he picks up a baby, possibly a grandchild, and smiles broadly. Life goes on.

It’s a touching tale and it emphasises that, with 1Life insurance, you can “say hello to today” and celebrate it, secure in the knowledge that tomorrow is taken care of.

It is a simple and stark reminder that life is short, that we don’t stop enough to smell the roses and that we don’t normally have enough insurance.

So, Orchids to 1Life, to agency House of Brave and to director Jono Hall and Darling Film.

Now, into grumpy old-man mode.

Nothing irritates me more than the application of peculiar South Africanisms when it comes to the English language.

These are the sort of things you see nowhere else, even in badly mangled Chinese-to-English assembly instruction or menus.

One that galls me is the habit we have nicked from Afrikaans usage, of wanting to stick apostrophes in before the letter S.

When I went to school, I was told you may use an apostrophe to indicate the possessive, as in: it was Brendan’s grumpiness.

You may also, I’m given to understand, chuck in an apostrophe if there is something deliberately missing from a name … although that is very tricky and my best solution when editing is to write out everything in full.

It is different in Afrikaans, when, it seems to me, that an apostrophe before an S is used to indicate a plural.

That is the only reason I can think of why so many South Africans throw an apostrophe into a word before an S hoping to show it is a plural – in English!

Latest example is a TV ad for Bosch car services. It speaks of billions of euro’s (and the word comes up like that on screen) being spent on setting up services centres around the world.

Even the Europeans, whose currency is the euro, and whose home language is not English, don’t use the apostrophe when speaking about more than one euro.

This is particularly annoying from a marketing perspective, because the Germans (and Bosch is a German brand) take pride in their attention to detail, and accuracy, in everything they do. So an Onion to Bosch in South Africa for allowing this to happen because, ultimately, the language buck has got to stop with you.

Citizen acting deputy editor Brendan Seery.