before making the ill-fated decision to move into therapy, i was a creative in several ad agencies. i thought that the world would satisfy me, but it did not. it wasn't even the work itself, but the work around it and the people. i suppose most jobs are like this.

a few years ago, before we started streaming from the free channels on roku, i made the stupid comment "i miss tv commercials". i was just lying to myself. here are my critiques of ads.

INSURANCE

Life is short, and everyone apparently needs customized insurance. With high need, few ways to differentiate from the competition, and a captive audience that doesn't primarily use social media for their entertainment, insurance companies now dominate airwaves with elaborate mythologies and storylines.

Geico

In the late 90s, CGI was making major headwinds, most notably with features like The Matrix and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. But the applications for this technology went far beyond entertainment. Originally voiced by Kelsey Grammer, the first Geico Gecko ad was aired during a Screen Actors Guild strike that prevented the use of live actors in television. A kind of wild crossing of the picket line origin story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LwASBkp0vo

The success of the commercial would spawn an endless stream of ads, first built around (what I felt was) an amusing joke, only to become spewed out endlessly ad nauseum until nothing is funny any more. His accent was initially altered to an English cockney accent, but testing revealed that his accent needed to be more "working class" to accompodate to a larger audience base.

There was the caveman for awhile, once again playing on an idea of misconceptions ("so even a caveman can do it" playing on identity perceptions and revealing that the caveman is intelligent or perhaps cultured") Geico's attempts to combine their universe has resulted in a somewhat disjointed messaging scheme - they've created a universe, but with no coherent narrative. The Geico Gecko mainly passes as annoying now. He's appeared in well over 150 ad segments, and was even interviewed by a Miss Hillary Clinton.

The "hump day" ads featuring the Camel played especially well downstate. I think that the Camel has appeared in the crossover ads, but I think that creatives would do well to learn a lesson - discarding old mascots for new ones is okay and acceptable.

Aflac

You don't see much of the Aflac duck anymore. It was a clear response to Geico's advertising scheme of using CGI as a marketing ploy. The genius of both the Aflac duck and the Geico gecko was their universal appeal, but where I felt the Aflac duck transcended was that it spoke a single word (Aflac) and kids picked up on it. When your kid points at a duck and says "Aflac" you've stumbled into marketing gold - having to consider a product even without physical advertising in your proximity. With this in mind, the duck was also a bit of a one-trick pony - it's still the mascot, but has appeared in just over 75 commercials.

Progressive

After Geico's and Aflac's advertising dominance, insurance companies needed a captivating persona to wrest control back from these two players. I have no idea how they settled on Flo or how they thought she would work - but it did. Flo, actress and comedian Stephanie Courtney, was a bubbly and obnoxious insurance agent. I liked her critique that she felt that the Geico Gecko puts out more sexual vibes than Flo does".

Progressive's ads signal a shift in insurance advertising away from intelligibility towards hysteria and annoyance. She's been featured in over 1,000 ads, and has an estimated net worth of $6 million. Outside of her ad work, she has been featured in Mad Men, Tenacious D, Angel, and Fred: The Movie.

I'm not sure which ad agency made the decision to create expanded universes, but Progressive has certainly capitalized on this decision, giving her a family and a cohort of other agents whom she appears to command over. I did not find this successful, but Progressive's pivot towards the "becoming your parents" series of commercials was a stroke of marketing brilliance. As demographics shift and priorities change, this subversion of "shitty ads your parents love" to "now you're watching it too" worked well for me. It also apes the seriousness of Allstate's authoritative, paternalistic function.

Allstate

While other insurance companies opted for humor, Allstate initially chose assurance and trust. I'm not sure about the efficacy of these tactics, but it was a solid differentiator in a field plagued with cheap laughs. Dennis Haysbert's stolid, dependable voice speaks directly to the worries and fears of audiences that want assurance from insurance. You can trust him - he was the president in 24.

These ads had the benefit of not being grating, but I find Allstate's new advertising scheme with Mayhem (Dean Winters, Liz Lemon's horrible ex-boyfriend in 30 Rock) to be way more compelling. These ads do something most insurance providers would never dream of doing - showing accidents in action, but presenting them with Looney Tunes antics. Smart.

Liberty Mutual

Liberty Mutual has decided to torture American consumers with the most vapid commercials imaginable. Taking from the playbook of Progressive and the meme qualities of Geico's "hump day", I feel less intelligent upon every viewing of a Liberty Mutual commercial. There's always like, some guy, an Emu aping the Aflac duck, and dumb antics. One guy wastes the money that he saved on insurance buying a replica of himself that melts in the sun.

The current strategy in marketing seems to fall into a trumpian logic of "all publicity is good publicity" - but I don't think that's the case. I had to look up these commercials to remember their final details - all I was left with was an impression. Contempt. Yet they seem to have landed some really great deal since their ads are the only ones I seem to get anymore. The strategy here isn't intelligibility, memorability, or humor, but simple volume. They chose the postmodern approach of taking every strategy and combining it into a single, horrid mass.

This technique seems to be gaining credibility in the advertising world, so expect things to get worse. Consider this nugget I found in my LinkedIn queue today about how the "American Eagle genes/jeans thing might be about eugenics, but people are talking about it!" Oh, good! Glad that we're normalizing that after 10 awful years of hollow DEI messaging. I was actually thinking of a different idea for an ad: killing Nazis. Like, here me out: there's a Nazi trying to bundle home and auto insurance, and Flo just puts a gun to his head and murders him. That could be it. That's the commercial. Should I post this on my LinkedIn? Honestly, although it would alienate about 51% of American voters, it shows far greater respect for their intelligence than any Liberty Mutual advertisement.