Striking while the iron is oxidized

I really just have one question about this GEICO ad.

 

Angry Birds.  ANGRY BIRDS!  In 2021!  To be fair, this is the same company that dragged out Ickey Woods some 25 years after his brief relevance and then built an entire ad campaign around his famous love of cold cuts, something that was, to be clear, 100% not actually famous.  Even in the past year or so, GEICO ads have been centered around such famous people as Tag Team (peak fame: 1993) and Billy Blanks (peak fame: 1999).  By that standard, this ad seems entirely reasonable - you can still download Angry Birds games, and there was an Angry Birds movie (the second one they made!) in theaters as recently as 2019.

But even with that in mind, this shit just drives me up the wall.  It's not just that Angry Birds is roughly a decade past peak relevance, although that is certainly a component.  But the GEICO ads in this vein are just so ungodly lazy.  The gecko has been a spokescharacter since 1999, if you can believe that (hang on, gotta pop my hip back in), and those ads remain far fresher.  Why?  Because he's just a character, and then you actually have to figure out something to do with him!  Meanwhile, ads like this, or the "It's what you do" series, tend to rely on that most eyeroll-inducing of ad tropes, "Hey!  That's a thing I've seen before!"

Now, this certainly isn't new.  I was just reading Gastro Obscura, the new food-themed book from the Atlas Obscura people*, and there are multiple references to circa-1900 ads that used, of all people, Pope Leo XIII as a spokesman.  But this isn't "famous celebrity uses our product."  It's not even "famous fictional character uses our product!"  It's literally "fictional character that has been famous, sufficiently so that you'd recognize them but long enough ago that they probably came fairly cheap, is onscreen while our product is being mentioned."  This isn't an especially new tactic either, especially not from GEICO, but it still sucks.

And GEICO barely even tries to integrate the Angry Birds with the actual pitch.  Sure, they're seen knocking over a few planters, but is that the sort of thing people are usually calling their insurance company over?  This could have been done more smoothly, perhaps by showing an agent visiting to assess the bird damage, but I guess that wouldn't leave time for the neighbor character to show up to deliver the hilarious line, "Why are these birds so angry?", thus implying that GEICO does not trust the audience to actually recognize, without assistance, the ostensibly well-known characters around which it has constructed an entire ad.

Which leads to my final complaint, something I could probably keep in standing type for this blog: this is an ad that is written as though it is supposed to be funny but contains no actual jokes.  The closest thing is "Why are these birds so angry?"  That's not a fucking joke.  The "punchline" of the ad is... the husband running outside to grab a flowerpot.  My sides!  GEICO isn't entirely incapable of making ads with okay punchlines, so what happens with something like this?  Am I to believe they weren't actually trying?  Maybe just take the one person at your agency who knows how to write a joke (perhaps the person responsible for this ad, a substantially better take on the same basic concept for about eight different reasons) and have them do a punch-up pass on all of them.

*This wasn't a plug, by the way. I was gifted the book recently and literally was reading it last night, which caused the Pope Leo ads to pop to mind when I was thinking about past celebrity endorsements. But it's a fun book if you like that sort of thing.