![]() To stand apart, says Craig Miller, who leads creative on the State Farm account for its agency, The Marketing Arm, the company wanted to focus on developing a figure who would have special appeal to younger consumers.Īrmed with the knowledge that viewers responded to the first Jake commercial, State Farm set about trying to build something larger. That’s far less than the $1.68 billion spent by Geico or the $1.09 billion unloaded by Progressive (though the figure does outmaneuver Allstate, Liberty Mutual and Farmers). The company put approximately $668.6 million into traditional advertising in 2020, according to Kantar. State Farm isn’t the industry’s biggest spender. Geico finds new ways every year to tell potential customers it can get them better prices after just a 15-minute call. Simmons and a jingle for its motto that is hard to get out of one’s head. Farmers Insurance relies on the talents of J.K. Progressive has spent years building up a team of off-kilter agents led by “Flo.” Liberty Mutual boasts a “LiMu Emu.” Allstate has burnished actor Dennis Haysbert as well as “Mayhem,” a personification of difficult life conditions portrayed by Dean Winters. The average consumer likely can’t tell you the ins-and-outs of a current insurance policy, but chances are they can rattle off the details from any number of costly ad campaigns for insurance products. Meanwhile, some of the industry’s biggest names continue to pour millions into overwhelming ad efforts. And yet, the business is growing quite competitive: upstarts in the field, like Lemonade and SoFi, try to tempt consumers with the suggestion of better better rates obtained with digital techniques. “Nobody wants to shop for insurance,” says Ari Lightman, a professor of digital media and marketing at Carnegie Mellon University. Insurance is an intangible product that few consumers crave, like an Apple smartphone or shoes from Nike. Indeed, advertising insurance poses a heady challenge. “But it’s hard to go with a consistent campaign when every single ad features a different agent.” Certainly, our brand is tied to State Farm agents,” says the executive. “We had featured our real agents in our commercials and that served us very well over time. “People asked us, ‘How many of these ads did you run?’ It was really just the one commercial,” explains Rand Harbert, the company’s chief agency, sales and marketing officer, in an interview.Īs 2020 beckoned, Harbert and his team decided they needed to do more with Jake. The commercial proved so popular that State Farm kept putting it on the air. “What are you wearing, ‘Jake From State Farm?”” she asks. The potential customer’s wife hears the call and assumes her husband is conversing with someone more illicit. ![]() State Farm, the insurance giant that has for nearly a century been selling the stuff to consumers, in 2011 started running a funny ad featuring one of its actual call-center employees playing “Jake,” sitting in an office cubicle taking a call at about 3:10 a.m. ![]() ![]() Clean and the Kool-Aid Man - even though the floor-polish icon is owned by a rival consumer-products manufacturer.Ĭhances are Jake would not have gotten to where he is today without working that overnight shift. These figures, which can range from the Pillsbury Doughboy to “Lily,” a store clerk who turns up in ads featuring AT&T stores, still have some allure, and can even serve as the base of a storytelling “universe.” During the 2020 broadcast of Super Bowl LIV, for example, Planters ran a spot that featured not only Mr. Though the advertising world is moving away from the elements that have made TV commercials successful for decades, it still likes to build Jakes - and others like him. Jake fans have an opportunity now to watch an advertising icon in its earliest days, at a moment when he’s likely not bound by pages of rules or corporate “bibles” mandating how he can and can’t be used and the exact shade of red that needs to be employed for his shirt.
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