Compare the Meerkat is an advertising campaign on British and Australian commercial television for comparethemarket.com, a price comparison website, part of BGL Group.

The adverts feature Aleksandr Orlov, an animated anthropomorphic Russian meerkat (voiced by Simon Greenall, uncredited), and his family and friends.

Orlov is portrayed as being of aristocratic stock and the founder of comparethemeerkat.com: the campaign originally centred on his frustration over the confusion between his website and comparethemarket.com, playing on the similarity between the words market and meerkat.

[2][3] The campaign, designed by ad-agency VCCP, was launched on 5 January 2009 involving a TV spot, companion website and social media links.

[2][3] On 26 November 2012, Compare the Market began sponsoring the ITV1's long-running soap opera Coronation Street as part of a three-year deal with producers of the series.

[12] In May 2018, Aleksandr and Sergei performed a rendition of Barbra Streisand's "Don't Rain on My Parade", from the film Funny Girl, to promote the Meerkat Movies campaign.

[13] In July 2019, in an advert for Meerkat Meals and Meerkat Movies, Aleksandr and Sergei are in San Francisco where they reunite with Oleg, who along with his friend Ayana, travelled from Africa to look for them after several bulldozers destroyed their home..[citation needed] After Oleg and Ayana's return in 2019, a new advert series was shown called Endless Adventures, where the meerkats would walk into a door and find themselves in a movie (which are usually made up ones except for Farmageddon, which was animated by Aardman, and also features Alexander's voice actor Simon Greenall).

But, like all good things it has to come to an end... As we approach the 60th birthday of a British institution we are looking for an ambitious brand to connect with the cultural phenomena that is Coronation Street“.

The advert ends with a worried Aleksandr watching Sergei being taken away in an ambulance whilst Carl reads his recipe book and realises his mistake.

[citation needed] In February 2022 the company withdrew adverts from being shown during news broadcasts following the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine[15] stating that it had reviewed its media plan and wanted to avoid the adverts appearing near news on the invasion to ensure that the company was being sensitive to the current situation.

He is described as living in Moscow, while owning a large mansion in South London, and spends his time on vanity projects such as his website, numerous self-portraits, petitions and film production.

[17] Sergei has also starred in his own adverts without Orlov.l[citation needed] The 2011 campaign focused on a fictional Russian village named Meerkovo, which was actually filmed in the British county of Suffolk.

They hitchhiked across the world looking for Aleksandr and Sergei, and finally found them in San Francisco, where they reassumed care of both Oleg and Ayana.

[citation needed] Since the launch of Meerkat Movies, only Aleksandr and Sergei regularly appeared in the main television advertisements, though the Meerkovo characters continued to feature in the Coronation Street sponsorship bumpers after 2018.

[citation needed] In December 2018, Auto Sergei, an animatronic meerkat, was introduced, to make life "simples" and then was upgraded for credit card use.

Following the campaign, comparethemarket.com was ranked as the fourth most visited insurance website in the UK, up from 16th in January 2008, and the site's overall sales doubled.

[21] According to entrepreneur David Soskin, the wordplay of "meerkat" vs. "market" overcomes the high cost of the latter keyword in sponsored search engine listings.

[23] The comparethemeerkat campaign forced rival GoCompare to launch its adverts starring opera singer Wynne Evans, in an attempt to recapture market share.

[24] On 11 August 2009, an opinion piece in The Guardian newspaper accused the advert series of racism for mocking Eastern European accents.

The British website hosts downloads such as wallpapers, ringtones, text alerts, voicemail messages and some commercial videos.

There is also an iPhone application containing background information, a database of English phrases in "meerkat" pronunciation (created from audio clips from the TV adverts), a mongoose "detector", and some videos.

[citation needed] In December 2016, two more toys were released as limited editions featuring Oleg as Olaf and a new character Ayana as Elsa from Disney's Frozen.