Once upon a time, ads for insurance companies were, well, normal.
If you search "State Farm Commercial 1990" on YouTube, you'll find a whole bunch of ads more or less just like that. You could obviously argue that this kind of ad is broadly out of date - and I don't just mean that woman's car or the hairstyles. The straightforward, aggressively earnest to-camera appeal is part of very few ads these days, more than three decades later. For comparison, here's one of the more recent State Farm ads:
This isn't the zaniest insurance ad going by a long shot, but it's broadly emblematic. State Farm had a long history of using actual employees in its commercials - even the original "Jake from State Farm," from 2011, was a real agent whose name was really Jake. According to a Variety article from a couple years ago, State Farm decided they needed more consistent branding and switched to a single actor who represents all of their agents, rather than having different agents in every commercial. And really, you need an actor if you're going to sell lines like "Jazz bath?"
State Farm was actually one of the last agencies to settle on a single spokescharacter. The GEICO gecko doesn't appear in every GEICO commercial, but he's been a staple of their advertising overall for nearly a quarter century. Allstate is still rolling Dean Winters out as "Mayhem" more than a dozen years after that campaign began in 2010. Flo has been leading the line for Progressive since 2008.
But speaking of Flo, that character helps illuminate the distinction between older ads and newer ads. The first Flo ads aired smack in the middle of our initial Ad Wizards run and we didn't write about them even once until 2011, well into the series (at which point they were starting to head for Crazy Town). After all, there's nothing to go after in an ad like this:
The setup to those ads (depicting Progressive's website as an actual store) was a totally fine concept, Flo herself was a normal and affable character, and they also did a good job focusing on what Progressive wanted to pitch as its distinguishing characteristic (we will show you other companies' rates too so you can compare!). But are those ads silly enough for prime time? Well, here's a 2022 ad also starring Flo:
Aside from the words "home and auto bundle" being spoken in sequence and the actors wearing the Progressive insurance outfits, there's nothing in that ad that is about insurance or has to be. It could be an ad for literally anything. I've never understood how these sorts of ads really make sense. Who is it for? If I don't have insurance, it barely tells me that Progressive is an insurance company unless I already knew that. If I do already have insurance, is it doing anything to get me to switch? Unlike the 2008 spot, it certainly does not tell me anything distinguishing about Progressive (I'm fairly certain virtually every insurance company will sell you bundled home and car insurance at this point), so I'd have to say no. Is it just aimed at existing Progressive customers, making them feel good because their insurance company has a silly little ad on TV? Seems weird, if so. Also, note that we've gone from Flo being normal to Flo playing the straight woman to goofy weirdos to Flo herself being a bit of a weirdo. You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain.
As I find myself saying often, one has to assume that this sort of advertising campaign works. GEICO exploded on the scene around the year 2000 with a single, easy to remember tagline - "15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance" - and a whole bunch of wackiness. And eventually, pretty much everyone followed suit in one form or another. Why have Dennis Haysbert being earnest when you can have Dean Winters impersonating a 12-year-old TikTok addict? That's Allstate's stand now, and theirs are arguably the most focused ads of the bunch. The thinking clearly is, actually talking about insurance bores people to death. We need to distill everything down into a logline like we're trying to sell our screenplay to a producer in the elevator at Universal Pictures in 1973. And once that's out of the way, we just need to be funny. Consider Liberty Mutual:
Doug: [knocks on window] "Hey man! Nice pace. Clearly you're a safe driver. You could save hundreds for safe driving with Liberty Mutual."
Cool, got that message out of the way. Now we just need to show a guy going through a car wash while he yells the rest of our pitch! The audience will fall asleep if we don't have a zany visual gag! Probably need to repeat the "Only pay for what you need" part at the end too... can't expect anyone to follow it while they're too busy busting a gut at the image of a guy getting covered in car soap.
I've been saying this sort of thing for more than 15 years now so maybe I'm just the wrong one, but I have never understood the impulse to have the main character representing your brand in your commercial be a weirdo who is broadly recognized by everyone else in the commercial's universe as a weirdo. Look at the guy driving the car: he looks insanely weirded out and, by the way, he's right to. Liberty Mutual has other ads that don't feature this goofball and get the "only pay for what you need" message across at least as clearly, but I guess those don't get YouTube comments like "make a limo emu and Doug show" [sic]. And that guy's right. A show starring silly characters from an insurance ad? What could go wrong?
Maybe people really don't like talking about insurance. In the 21st century, national branding may well be more important to the up-and-coming generations of new insurance purchasers than local agent relationships. I still feel like insurance commercials could do a little more than say "We might do it cheaper!" and then go right into Wackyland. Or maybe it's just going to keep devolving.
TOP NEW INSURANCE AD CHARACTERS, 2023-2027
2023: Willy the Juggling Walrus for Esurance
2024: "Li'l Flo," the animated dancing baby
2025: LiMu Ostrich and Frank
2026: Jerry the State Farm Farting Goat
2027: The GEICO Gecko's Meth-Addicted Cousin Clarence
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