Once beer-loving dudes shouted “Wazzup” and frogs chirped “Bud… Weis… Er.” But today we are constantly faced with an insurance-shilling duck quacking “Aflac!”
Whether it’s Jake from State Farm, Flo from Progressive, the GEICO Gecko, or LiMu Emu (and his sidekick Doug) from Liberty Mutual, insurance commercials have become the dominant form of advertising in modern America.
Meanwhile, the beer commercials that once flooded sports programs are almost nonexistent. In 2021, roughly 15,560 beer commercials aired on television, compared to a staggering 104,270 insurance ads. Across the big four broadcast networks, as well as ESPN, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, insurance ads jumped from 71,000 minutes of commercial airings in 2016 to 109,297 minutes in 2021 — a 52.3 percent increase, according to iSpot, a company that measures the brand impact of TV advertising. Meanwhile, ad minutes for beer brands (including hard seltzer) have remained at around 7,000 airing minutes per year since 2016, according to iSpot.
“Both GEICO and Liberty Mutual grew their respective footprints by leaps and bounds on major networks,” said iSpot analyst Sammi Scharninghausen. “The insurance industry as a whole started buying more spots against sports programming, especially the NFL.”
The tone of beer commercials has also dramatically shifted. In the ’80s and ’90s, beer commercials were dominated by talking frogs, Spuds MacKenzie, animated beer bottles playing football, and the “Wazzup” guys. But, in recent years, the spots have become increasingly somber, like Anheuser-Busch’s “Let’s Grab a Beer” campaign from last year.
This is at least partly due to the pandemic. Anheuser-Busch, the brewery that produces brands like Budweiser and Michelob, opted against running commercials during last year’s Super Bowl — which took in 96.4 million viewers — and instead donated their marketing money to COVID vaccination awareness efforts.
They’re returning this year with a commercial featuring a Clydesdale horse overcoming an injury, a heavy-handed metaphor that “recognizes American resilience,” according to a statement.
“We felt the time was right to return with a message of hope, positivity, and inspiration,” Benoit Garbe, Anheuser-Busch’s chief marketing officer, told The Post.
Insurance ads, meanwhile, which have historically been stoic and melodramatic — think Prudential’s “Rock of Gibraltar” spots from the ’70s and ’80s — have taken up the comedy mantle where beer companies left off.
And TV viewers have noticed. On one sports online message board, a football fan recently complained, “I feel like Liberty Mutual and GEICO are the only ones even trying anymore. Beer commercials are no longer existent. ESPN hasn’t had a good commercial in like 20 years.”
Not everyone is so generous. “The insurance ads, all of them, are terrible,” Robert Kolt, a longtime advertising professor at Michigan State University, tells The Post. “No consumer really cares about insurance companies, or their ducks or emus or geckos.”
But if nobody cares, why do insurance companies keep churning out these ads?
‘Dan told us that if we could do that, he wouldn’t care if we showed a naked man tap-dancing on a roof.’
Ad exec Linda Thaler on how Aflac CEO Dan Amos told her to make his company name memorable
In 1999, Aflac — an anagram for American Family Life Assurance Company — a Columbus, Ga.-based insurance firm, had a problem. Despite spending over $100 million in advertising during the ’90s, they had only two percent market awareness. Customers just didn’t know or care that they existed.
So CEO Dan Amos reached out to Linda Thaler, a legend in advertising — she created some of the industry’s most iconic taglines like “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us Kid” and “Kodak Moments” — with one request: Come up with a commercial that’ll make people remember the name.
“Dan told us that if we could do that, he wouldn’t care if we showed a naked man tap-dancing on a roof,” Thaler told The Post.
The agency struggled to find the right concept, until one day when Thaler was storming through the office, shouting at the copywriters, “The name is Aflac! Aflac! Aflac!!” One of the writers reached out and pinched Thaler’s nose, remarking that she sounded like a duck quacking. A tagline was born.
Just a few years after the first Aflac duck commercial aired in 2000, public awareness of the company jumped “by 96 percent,” Thaler says. “Aflac became a household name.” Over the past two decades, the company’s stock jumped by 325 percent, compared to 124 percent gains for the S&P 500 during that same period.
It opened the floodgates for other insurance providers. “Insurance is a dry, serious business,” says Ryan Raab, the Creative Director for The Martin Agency, the firm that created the GEICO gecko. “It’s not something consumers think about often, and if they’re thinking about it, it’s because something bad has happened. Instead of scaring or lecturing consumers, why not bring them some joy? Why not make them laugh?”
The success of the Aflac duck and GEICO gecko, which both premiered in 1999, launched what Kirk Luo, a Strategy Director at the Martin Agency, calls an “advertising arms race to become one of those top-of-mind insurers.”
Name recognition is the ultimate goal of these ads. In some cases, they’re not even something that home viewers can purchase.
‘Advertising is about recruiting the young and impressionable. You have to try to be cool and make friends for the brand.’
“Wazzup” campaign co-creator Vinny Warren on how beer companies have forgotten their audience
“Aflac is supplemental insurance which your employer buys,” Thaler says. “So why does Aflac advertise on TV? Because they want you to remember who they are, often with a smile, and then ask their employers to offer it at their company.”
Despite the sheer volume of ads, people know less than ever about how insurance actually works. According to a 2021 study from Bend Financial, 56 percent of Americans feel “completely lost” when it comes to understanding how to pick health insurance. And in a recent survey from The Zebra, just 21 percent of drivers would get a passing grade (D+ or higher) when it comes to auto insurance comprehension.
According to Kolt, that’s exactly how insurance companies prefer it. “They think their customers are stupid,” he says. “And stupid customers are easier to deceive when it comes to reading the fine print of insurance contracts.”
A blockbuster campaign like “Wazzup” — which Vinny Warren, 54, a veteran advertising copywriter, co-created in the late ‘90s — wouldn’t stand a chance today, he says. The problem, Warren believes, is that beer companies have forgotten that “advertising is about recruiting the young and impressionable. You have to try to be cool and make friends for the brand. And the easiest way to make friends is to make people laugh.”
Also, “corporate stiffs aren’t comfortable with humor,” Warren said. “It takes brains and confidence to be funny. It’s not easy.”
Recent beer marketing that emphasizes emotional connections and even fitness — like Michelob Ultra’s #ULTRABeerRun challenge last summer, which offered free beer to runners — has the opposite effect, Warren thinks.
“Every beer brand suddenly needing a ‘purpose’ doesn’t bode well for Super Bowl 2022, comedy-wise,” he says. “Michelob Ultra will probably do something with graying cyclists in spandex knocking Mich Ultra back like it’s water.”
Garbe declined to share Michelob Ultra’s plans for the Super Bowl, other than hinting that the spots will be about “finding joy on and off the field.” (And also, according to online teasers, Steve Buscemi.)
“It’s important to find new ways to connect with and reach consumers,” says Sofia Colucci, the global marketing vice-president for Molson Coors, the company that produces brands like Miller Lite and Leinenkugel. “Sometimes that means adding a comedic angle, while other times it might require a different approach.”
A different approach is especially necessary during the Super Bowl, which Molson Coors hasn’t been able to buy commercial time on since 2010, thanks to Anheuser-Busch’s exclusivity deal with the NFL. Last year, their Super Bowl marketing involved an online promotion for “targeted dream incubation” meant to trigger “refreshing dreams” of Coors, according to the company’s YouTube page.
This year, they’ve partnered with virtual world-building platform Decentraland to run their Super Bowl ads in a “virtual bar” in the metaverse. As late night host Stephen Colbert mocked, the new campaign is “perfect for anyone who thought, ‘Man, I love commercials, but I wish I had to work harder to access them while my avatar drinks this imaginary can of carbonated disappointment.’”
Some insurance companies are following Molson Coors’ lead, looking elsewhere to spend their Super Bowl advertising dollars. State Farm debuted their first spot in the Super Bowl last year, but for 2022 they’ve opted to advertise exclusively on TikTok.
GEICO and other insurance companies, however, will be forking over the extravagant rates — a record-setting $6.5 million for a 30-second spot — to connect with the Super Bowl TV audience. While their commercials may not exactly be filling the shoes left by beer advertising — GEICO’s “Scoop, There It Is” spot from last year’s Super Bowl didn’t have the cultural impact of “Wazzup” — it appears that their strategy is paying off.
Before GEICO introduced their first Gecko ad 20 years ago, they were the eighth-largest auto insurer in the US. Today, after over 150 commercials featuring the anthropomorphic lizard, they’re the second largest auto insurer, behind only State Farm.
A 2019 survey by Velocify found that insurance companies which spent more than 15 percent of their total revenues on advertising were much more likely to experience significant growth, at least 20 percent year over year.
As profits grow, so do expectations. Shannon Watkins, the Chief Marketing and Brand Officer for Aflac, said the future of insurance marketing may not be conventional commercials.
“The advertising landscape has changed dramatically,” she said. “Consumers are filtering what they spend their attention on, which requires a pivot from commercials to content.”
That pivot began last month, with the streaming debut of animated short, “The Park Bench,” about a young girl with a sick father who befriends the Aflac duck.
Raab, who runs the campaigns for GEICO, agrees that insurance ads need to evolve. “Our competition isn’t just other insurance brands,” he says. “It’s any entertainment brand. To compete, we must be as captivating as Netflix, Marvel, Fortnite and the millions of endlessly inventive content creators on TikTok.”
But Kolt disagrees with this “self-absorbed” approach.
To be successful, he said, advertisers just need to “tell the truth. Advertising on TV works,” he added. “Sometimes even bad advertising.”
