Geiko Home Car Insurance

So, what's with all those car-insurance commercials?

When Regis Philbin stepped away from “Live With Regis and Kelly” last year, it was widely assumed that his record of 17,000 hours of airtime amassed over a career was unassailable.

Instead it’s being pecked away at innumerable 30-second increments by a perky lady in white overalls and a little walking, talking lizard.

You’re not imagining it – commercials for car insurance, many of them featuring the aforementioned Flo or the Gecko, have overrun TV.

Why the tsunami?

Geico changed the landscape when it began spending unprecedented amounts on TV about a decade ago. (The Gecko was introduced in 2000.)

The company bypassed agents, selling policies directly to consumers. That kind of direct appeal necessitated advertising. It also meant lower overhead and thus more money available for TV buys.

Watching Geico take big bites out of their business, the other major personal insurance companies had no choice but to ante up.

“Geico is a huge TV spender,” says Brian Steinberg, TV editor at Advertising Age. “It spurred all the others to keep up. You have a number of competitors all trying to get market share.”

You’ll notice you’re not getting bombarded with life-insurance ads. Auto gets the big push because it’s mandatory. You have to be covered to get behind the wheel. And everybody in this country drives.

So it’s required. And it’s expensive. That makes it a tougher sell than, say, beer. Or tortilla chips.

“Insurance is not something we wake up in the morning and want to think about,” says Lisa Cochran, Allstate’s vice president of marketing. “It’s not fun to buy and it’s a big chunk of your disposable income. So we need to make it as engaging as we can for people.”

To do that, companies build campaigns around personalities. Geico, of course, has the evergreen Gecko, and now the squealing piggy. The caveman still shows up once in a while.

unconditioned response: Geico and This Little Piggy (“Wee, Wee ...

We’ve all seen it (whether we like it or not): Geico’s ad with the “this little piggy (who) went ‘wee, wee, wee’ all the way home”. Right? Actually, now there’s three of them: one in the car, another doing street luge, and another on some ski-lift cable thingy. Only on the cable ride, he’s not going home, so it’s an inaccurate representation! Piggies only go “wee, wee, wee” on the way home, so this is clearly false advertising! I’m outraged! And to think I get my car insurance from these liars who grossly misrepresent fictional characters’ attributes and stereotypical behavior! Well, I never! Actually, while annoying, it’s kind of cute, and my mom likes these ads, so I can’t bash them too much. But oddly, because she said she liked the pig going “wee, wee, wee”, because it’s from that children’s poem counting down the toes, which was popular when she was a child, it reminded me of the other pigs in the poem, and that some of the other ones might make even better spots for Geico to hawk their car insurance. I mean, I knew about the piggy being a reference from that poem, but I didn’t think any further into that idea because I found the ad kind of obnoxious and unrelated to Geico’s products and services, and I really don’t like ads that completely ignore the whole reason they’re running an ad in the first place: to sell a product (in this case, car insurance). So many ads do this: show something funny or stupid or annoying or obnoxious, and then just say the company’s name at the end, which we all promptly forget (if we don’t block it out from sheer spite or trauma), and then we ask ourselves: “What was the point of that?” (We remember this one is Geico because they repeat the ad so many times, we can’t help it after awhile.

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