Moneysupermarket CEO: I’m pleased our twerking adverts were talked about

The ASA's list of most complained about adverts in 2016 featured three of Moneysupermarket's ads

It is near impossible to drum up excitement about a price comparison website. So for Moneysupermarket’s new chief executive Mark Lewis, who left the cosy world of high street darling John Lewis in April, his job is going to involve a lot more attention-seeking than he has ever been used to.

While many wake up in the morning with a desire to go shopping (Lewis has been retail director of John Lewis, the chief executive of Collect+ and the UK managing director of eBay), less enthralling is the prospect of trailing through gas and electricity deals or the prices of different car insurance providers.

Mr Lewis is well aware of this – he admits overcoming this inertia is his biggest challenge as boss of the business, which started life as a mortgage listings site in 1993 and turned co-founder Simon Nixon into a billionaire.

The audacious adverts are aimed at combating this lack of interest. Moneysupermarket has given it a good go, with its range of dance-off commercials featuring a crotch-grabbing bodyguard or a businessman in hot pants causing such a stir that it has been the most complained about advert in Britain for three years in a row after viewers found the moves distasteful. Last year, three of Moneysupermarket’s adverts made the Advertising Standards Authority’s list of top 10 most complained about commercials.

Moneysupermarket is competing against Comparethemarket, which has had huge success off the back of its meerkat adverts

“We’re very aware we’re in a pretty low interest category – we have to find ways to be engaging,” admits Lewis, a former advertising executive himself. “It’s an important part of our business – we must have entertaining advertising to get across a serious message.”

Suggesting that all attention is good attention when it comes to marketing a business in this sector, Lewis insists the complaints over their adverts (2,500 last year) are no big deal. “I’m pleased our strutting and dancing builders are talked-about advertising – many people loved them,” he said. “These complaints haven’t been upheld and in any case we now have [new adverts featuring] Skeletor and He-Man who are catching the eye with the revival of Dirty Dancing.”

But Skeletor and He-Man face tough competition. Even though Moneysupermarket is Britain’s biggest price comparison site by some margin, with a market capitalisation of £1.7bn, its closest rival Comparethemarket has grabbed public attention with its fictional Russian meerkat Aleksandr Orlov – a furry animal so popular that it has been turned into a cuddly toy, had his catchphrase “Simples” put in the Collins English Dictionary and attracted more than 65,000 followers on Twitter. One of the most successful advertising campaigns of all time, it transformed the way price comparison websites market themselves.

Moneysupermarket has sought to catch attention with its advertising

But the UK’s competition watchdog just sounded out a serious message of its own – one that neither Aleksandr Orlov or Skeletor will likely succeed in detracting from. The public’s confidence in price comparison sites has been slipping, with concerns about the industry forcing the Competition and Markets Authority to launch an investigation into the sector last September.

In its conclusion last month, the watchdog said it had launched a probe into one site – understood to be Comparethemarket – over insurance deals that could be leading to higher prices for customers. It also advised that people use more than one website to get the best deal and laid out new rules for the sector to make it easier for people to understand why deals are ordered the way they are, and how their personal data gets used.

“It’s not an area of concern for us actually – we think transparency for the customer on how businesses like ours operate [..] is part of us doing our job,” Lewis says when asked about the watchdog’s conclusions, choosing his words carefully. “There’s no challenge there. They have a list of areas which we’re very supportive of.”

But while the wider message from the CMA was broadly upbeat – it said 90pc of people were satisfied with the service they got – there’s no denying that price comparison websites can get on people’s nerves. TV commercials aside, Moneysupermarket was slammed with an £80,000 fine earlier this year for pumping out seven million emails to people who had opted out of receiving direct marketing, something Lewis admits was a mistake that shouldn’t have happened. With an ambitious goal to save people £2bn on their household bills by the end of the year, up from £1.1bn in June, incidents like this are a reminder the company has to focus on keeping its current customer base on side just as much as it does on brash adverts aimed at raising awareness.

“[In the next few years] you’ll see us try to deepen the relationships we have with the tens of millions of users who use our services,” Lewis adds, though he gives little away in terms of how exactly he plans to do this.

“When you look out over the next few years, we think household incomes have become a little bit stretched, so our services [will] become more relevant.”

If that’s true, then the question for the Cambridge maths graduate is how to make sure people take notice – he claims that two thirds of households could be on a better energy tariff, but don’t realise they can easily make the switch. Coming in a year after the firm’s founder Simon Nixon sold his final £124m stake in the business and 10 years since it listed – shares have risen from 170p to 318p during that time – the time might also be ripe for change, and Lewis hints that M&A deals could be on the cards.

Mark Lewis used to work at high street retailer John Lewis

“We will look at adjacent opportunities,” he said when questioned about potential deals. “This business has a good record for growing through acquisitions – it’s not that long ago that we acquired Moneysavingexpert [in 2012]. We think there are opportunities.”

The opportunities and challenges ahead will be very different to the ones the 48-year-old faced in his former job as the retail guru of John Lewis. Why did he decide to make the switch? He insists his decision was independent to the retailer’s CEO change (some reported that he had left after not getting the role).

“I’ve always been interested in how people spend their money – my mum used to run a market stall and I grew up working on a market stall,” he said.

“You learn there that money’s hard earned.”