Insurance is an industry that is not only cutthroat, but also so remarkably boring. With that in mind, it is no surprise that companies that deal in it would feel an obligation to lighten their image with a spot of family-friendly humor.
What might be a surprise is how successful these efforts can often be. Take GEICO for instance. If one were to see a woodchuck chucking your beloved wood, one might proclaim, “Hey, you woodchucks, quit chucking my wood!” If you have ever wondered what a camel’s favorite day of the week is, GEICO provides you an answer. Or perhaps you wonder what goes through a racoon’s racoon brain as it ransacks your garbage. And my personal favorite includes a humorous twist involving the rapper Ice-T relaxing in a yard with two boys as they begin their careers in entrepreneurship.
These have it all. Not just humor, but relatability and popular appeal, at times dipping into the sports crowd. They so well encompass everything that a commercial should be that it’s almost enough to make you forget that their customers regularly flood them with one-star reviews over poor customer service and a slowness to fix their mistakes. When you can make it so someone genuinely enjoys watching your commercials for its own sake, it unlocks a level of branding that no amount of money can buy for a boring commercial.
GEICO is one of many insurance companies that attempt this, being joined by Aflac’s strategy of having their mascot say their name over and over again in order to cement it into our brains and the ever-classic 2011 Jake from State Farm.
Roughly since 2020, I’ve seen a decline in the quality of the insurance industry’s advertising. GEICO has in recent times elected to rely more on their significantly less funny British gecko instead of their previous creative variation in stories and humor. Progressive is nearing two decades of trying and failing to convince us that the adventures of Flo and her gang are in fact funny.
Most tragically, State Farm passed up their khakis-donning working class Jake in favor of an incredibly generically handsome younger package in order to milk the nostalgia that said khakis-donning working class everyman gave us all those years ago. If that is not a perfect allegory for the modern western class struggle, I don’t know what is.
And don’t even get me started on LiMu Emu.
What message does this send if this drop in quality is allowed to stand? When I see ads pop up everywhere in increasingly annoying ways in their quest to grab my attention, it makes me feel like I’m just a walking pair of eyeballs for corporations to advertise to. There was a time where insurance ads set an example for the world, an example that quality advertisements make for authentic enjoyment. It seems now that these companies increasingly believe that their investments into ads would pay off more by hammering slop into our brains than they would by writing something actually enjoyable. In order for the slop to end, they have to learn that this is not true.
Perhaps I am spoiled, I do admit that. Perhaps I have been pampered and have grown accustomed to a more prestigious grade cut, to insurance ads that satiate my high standards. Perhaps I should not expect such a caliber of humor from an industry that inherently thrives off of getting people to make regular payments to them over the course of many years and then finds any possible way to avoid letting their customers finally benefit from their faithful payments during their time of desperate need.
However, I would suggest, in this case, that you place your crown of blame not upon the brow of the spoiled but upon the brow of the ones who spoiled me. It is downright cruel for insurance to accustom me throughout my developing years to the caviar of Ice-T at the lemonade stand only to switch it out for the daily dose of garbage that is LiMu Emu on every channel.
As I stated before, it is not just for the laughs that the older classic ads give the world, but it unlocks a level of branding that you cannot buy with any currency other than genuine creativity.
It’s about time we made a push for the kind of advertising that unlocks this higher level of branding. It’s about time we let the industry know in any way we can that we don’t want the same unfunny slop and that they would serve their business interests much better with genuinely enjoyable ads that we don’t hit the skip ad button for and willingly watch to the end. It’s about time that insurance masqueraded its industry’s ugly face with a dash of humor again.
