Article - Association of National Advertisers

Seriously
Funny
How two companies’ use
of humor changed an industry
4
// ASSOCIATION OF NATIONAL ADVERTISERS
By Todd Wilk
inson
Illustration by
Alex Nabaum
ANA.NET //
5
Oh,
to hear chief marketing officer Ted Ward
riff wryly. The 63-year-old veteran of
many a campaign struggles to keep a
straight face as he describes the cast of
characters that have graced the stage of
GEICO insurance commercials over the
past two decades — the cavemen with inferiority complexes, driven by a heartfelt
yearning to be understood; the flaky guest
star turns by the likes of Little Richard,
Burt Bacharach, and Joan Rivers; Maxwell the Pig; and, of course, the unlikeliest
of mascots selected to put the brand on
the map, the GEICO Gecko.
GEICO has bet the bank and grown
its franchise five-fold on offbeat humor.
Together with longtime collaborator The
Martin Agency, based in Richmond, Va.,
it has amassed a bullpen of court jesters.
“Quirky humor has been the core of
our creative humor and it continues to
work,” Ward says. “We try to press the
envelope without stepping out too far.
Some of the stuff we’ve done has even
been a little bit groundbreaking.”
More than groundbreaking, GEICO
continues to break many of the rules that
govern engagement in marketing. Sometimes GEICO ads make no mention of its
products and appear to be only about delivering shtick (for example, the company’s
recent pre-roll freeze-frame ads). “A joke’s
a very serious thing,” the British poet
Charles Churchill once quipped, and indeed, comedy has enabled GEICO to
catapult its way from also-ran to second
largest auto insurer in the U.S.
Market research is loaded with data
showing that advertising with levity provides cathartic relief for audience members and thus is a means for engendering
brand appeal, trust, and ultimately bettering the bottom line. Nowhere is the humor
arms race in advertising more visible
than in the highly competitive marketplace of home, auto, and casualty insurance. A dozen companies are duking it
out — part of an estimated $6 billion
annual ad spend industrywide in 2014,
according to Kantar Media. Many are
vying to win over customers by employing
sketch pieces that would fit in well on
Saturday Night Live. To get inside the mindspace of how two such companies court
humor, we reached out to GEICO’s Ward
For Dieste’s Ciro Sarmiento,
Good Humor Connects on Emotion
Over the years, Dieste’s creative teams have earned distinction for their mastery of employing humor to effectively drive
their clients’ multicultural marketing, particularly with Hispanic audiences throughout the Americas.
They have also helped to craft campaigns capable of
finding success in general market executions, but it’s not
always an easy task. As the Dallas-based firm’s Executive
Creative Director Ciro Sarmiento can tell you, when navigating different idioms of language and culture, sometimes the
meaning in comedy can get lost in translation.
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// ASSOCIATION OF NATIONAL ADVERTISERS
and Michael Linton, chief marketing officer at Farmers Insurance.
T
hree decades ago GEICO went
rogue in terms of defying convention, and Ward doesn’t deny
it. For much of the 20th century, insurance advertising was dominated by reassuring visions of changelessness — think
The Hartford’s regal stag and Prudential’s
“Own a Piece of the Rock.” Market research indicated that opportunities in the
humor genre were wide open. When
Martin made its initial pitch to GEICO,
Ward says the agency had done its homework, presenting a compelling case for
why humor could quickly
differentiate the company
from its competitors. “From
the moment of that meeting until the first piece hit
the air was just six weeks,”
Ward says. “And we’ve
been on a roll ever since.”
GEICO’s messaging,
meant to establish the
company as a leader in
marketplace disruption, told customers
they were overpaying for premiums and
could keep money in their pockets —
“15 minutes could save you 15 percent or
more” — by bypassing agents and getting discounted rate quotes directly from
ANA: When you think generally about humor, why do you
think it works in advertising?
Ciro Sarmiento: I consider
humor as a way of catharsis. It
is such a simple thing and yet
so hard to write or express. In
advertising, you either are a
natural at creating content
that is funny and relatable, or
you are trying too hard. And
people can tell the difference.
It works when we understand
what makes people laugh,
and in order to get that, we
first need to understand what
drives their emotions and
behavior.
ANA: Some say there can
be a fine line between making
people laugh and making
them mad. How does humor
need to be fine-tuned and
nuanced?
C.S.: In advertising we pull
sensitive strings and dial in to
consumers’ emotions, so of
course humor needs to be
nuanced. Most of the time,
Get an additional Q&A with Old Navy's
CMO Ivan Wicksteed at ana.net/aprmag15.
the company. In short 15- and 30-second
TV and radio spots (this was before the
Internet age), GEICO posted an 800
number and phones rang off the hook.
Instantaneous hits, the ads were so
effective in generating calls that the airing
frequency had to, at one point, take a
breather until its call centers could catch
up to demand.
In the mid-1990s, GEICO’s strategy
had rocket fuel poured onto it when the
Oracle of Omaha Warren Buffett and
his lieutenants at Berkshire Hathaway
acquired full ownership of the company.
Buffett is a vaunted genius in recognizing the growth potential of solid undervalued companies. Sometimes, he has
said, all it takes is some PR leavening to
bolster name recognition and visibility
to enable underdogs to better compete
for market share.
Founded in 1936, GEICO still wasn’t
on the tip of anyone’s tongue when
Berkshire Hathaway took full ownership. Buffett told Ward: “The one thing
I don’t want you to have stand in your
way is money. That’s what I’ve got.”
For marketers like Ward, it was a
dreamy license to be different. GEICO
and Martin launched a blitzkrieg of
mass media, growing sales as ads seared
the brand deeper into the consumer
consciousness.
comedy that is intended for a
specific audience won’t come
across for other audiences.
ANA: Would you elaborate a bit
on that?
C.S.: There are different types
of humor, obviously, as there
are different types of people.
Some may think that the show
Portlandia is funny and some
may find it dull. Humor can be
a point of view on the world
and rooted distinctly in cultural
identity. In the multicultural
“We typically don’t pre-test. We test
in market,” Ward says. “Sure, we’ve
made some miscalculations and there
are probably some pieces worthy of inclusion in the hall of shame.” But the
lessons have proved invaluable. “The
ones that failed tended to be overly complex and it made us realize we were
working too hard,” he says. “Far more
reliably effective are sight gags and little
nuggets of fun as opposed to spots where
you, as the viewer, have to watch closely
to figure it out.”
There’s a question that Ward likes to
ask his in-house colleagues and associates
at Martin before a piece appears, and it
serves as a bellwether: If the advertising
were watched without sound, would it
still be any good?
Humor, when it works, is a force that
unites people rather than divides them,
and it never insults the consumer. “You
want to have viewers laughing along with
you,” Ward says. GEICO’s caveman
campaign, for instance, was devised to
tell consumers it’s not difficult to bypass
agents to get quotes.
With the web today being native space
for Millennials, those caveman ads caused
business in the 25–49 target demographic
to soar. Double-digit increases in Internet
inquires were recorded and policies-inforce jumped nearly 11 percent.
The biggest spender in its category at
more than $1 billion annually, GEICO
believes in volume rather than investing in
fewer expensive productions. In an analysis, SNL Financial reported that GEICO
in 2013 spent 6.3 percent of its premiums
on advertising. Amid the comic madness,
there is dead seriousness when it comes to
achieving results, the kind that has made
GEICO the fastest growing car insurance
provider during the past 10 years. Every
piece is measured across channels and recent years have brought a lot of insights
derived from social monitoring.
Listening to Ward describe the origins of content is itself hilarious, though
shrewdly it all ties together with an unwavering strategy of broadening the
presence of the brand in ways that transcend generations. He takes pride in the
body of work that’s been compiled over
his 31 years with the company, watching
market share grow from 2 to 10 percent.
According to the trade publication Insurance Journal, GEICO has never reported
a negative year-over-year growth rate in
any quarter in the past 10 years.
F
armers Insurance, meanwhile,
may be less adventurous than
GEICO, but Linton, who previously held down the chief marketing officer posts at eBay and Best Buy, is taking
market, we always encounter
the challenge of selling our
point of view for what Latino
humor means and how it is
so different sometimes from a
“general market” humor. But
this is starting to change as
younger generations of Hispanics are now living between
their Latino roots and their U.S.
American reality.
C.S.: I think the key to being
funny is finding your own
voice.
ANA: Is there a single thing
that represents the key to being funny?
ANA: How has Dieste been
able to harness humor so well,
on so many campaigns?
ANA: How can humor be used
to transcend boundaries?
C.S.: It’s hard to break barriers
through humor alone. Although
if comedy uses and speaks
universal truths, it can really
transcend borders.
C.S.: Data, analytics, and research help. But when creating
humor you are tapping into the
uncertainty of what makes us
human. Beyond that, it’s about
the Holy Grail that every comedian pursues. What makes for a
good joke? Many believe it’s
timing and intuition. We’re not
trying to be too clever. I think
that at the end of the day, we
just want to create content that
we would find funny if we saw it
on Netflix, Twitter, or HBO.
— T.W.
ANA.NET //
7
Stop Me If
You’ve Heard
This One
1
If humor doesn’t support the
brand, then the joke’s on you.
No matter how funny the pitchperson or the vehicle for delivery,
you want brand identity to sink in.
2
Humor is a uniter, not a divider.
It’s great to spoof and lampoon, but humor that creates victims or results in insults can rub
audiences the wrong way. Make
sure the risk is worth taking.
3
Levity wins over gravity. Getting
customers to laugh lightly is
far more powerful, engaging, and
resonant than loading them down
with emotional weight.
4
Don’t take your humor too seriously. Approaches that obviously are trying too hard, or are
too complicated in delivering a
punch line, almost always fail. It’s
far easier to start with knowing the
message and allowing it to become funny than vice versa.
5
Just as the most likable people
have great senses of humor, so
too do brands. The more that you
can help your customers laugh, as
a cathartic antidote to the stresses
in their lives, the more they’ll be
receptive to what you have to say.
— T.W.
8
// ASSOCIATION OF NATIONAL ADVERTISERS
Along with its agency collaborator,
Santa Monica, Calif.–based RPA, Linton
and Farmers have evolved the construct
of the fictional Professor Nathaniel
Burke (played by Simmons), who teaches
agents at a prestigious campus called the
University of Farmers. The
gag reinforces the principle
aim of driving business by
establishing Farmers as the
go-to provider of wisdom
about everyday questions surrounding insurance coverage.
The ongoing series of
spots, rolled out across all media, seeks to address two focal
areas that factor squarely into
retention and recruitment of
customers. The first is what insurance
policies actually say and the second is
what gaps in coverage might exist for
consumers who aren’t in the know.
It’s obvious, Linton says, that insurance companies offer products that will
indemnify some pretty heavy kinds of
personal misadventure that people don’t
want to think about: car wrecks, house
fires, thefts, and loss of life.
Farmers advertising portrays entertaining stories of what can go wrong but
in a way intended to elicit a guffaw. Tornados, unfocused drivers (including those
distracted by pets), dryer fires caused by
lint tray build up, giant raptor claws
coming out of the sky and smashing
cars, and cat burglars pontificating on
how to theft-proof one’s home have been
well received but, more importantly, have
given Farmers a profile and momentum
it didn’t have before.
“I haven’t seen the outtakes,” Linton
says. “But the spots are funny when done,
when they’re being made, and funny
even when they don’t go right.”
Humor obviously isn’t a vehicle for
making light of tragedy. In Farmers case,
it’s a tool for introducing customers to
the calming presence of a character
whose sense of humor is an expression
of his caring, thoughtful intelligence.
Who’s the guy that you turn to when you
have questions about the sometimesconfusing array of insurance options?
It’s Farmers’ Professor Burke, the authority figure.
Farmers’ TV, radio, and digital spots
are bookended with Simmons delivering
mantras wrapped around humorously
portrayed disaster moments. “At Farmers
we make you smarter about insurance because what you don’t know can hurt you,”
Burke intones and then adds at the end of
the spots: “The more you know, the better
you can plan for what’s ahead.” Linton,
without citing metrics, said Farmers’ ad
campaign is delivering results. Farmers
is the fifth largest auto insurance carrier
with a 5.4 percent total market share,
trailing State Farm, GEICO, Allstate,
and Progressive. Within personal and
casualty, Farmers is the sixth largest.
According to Digital Spark Marketing, the average ratio in the automotive
industry for premiums to advertising is
2.4 percent. Farmers, aggressively vying
to increase market share, spends nearly
twice the average and more than some
higher-ranking competitors.
No matter what the genre or tone,
Linton says, it all comes back to the fundamentals of marketing: It can never be
just about getting a rise. Humorous creative that doesn’t support the brand and
drive business is, at the end of the day,
just amusing — and there isn’t anything
funny about that.
FARMERS INSURANCE
the sophistication of Farmers’ humorous
marketing to the next level.
When he arrived three years ago,
Linton inherited the company’s commitment to humor and, he notes, its powerhouse pitchman, J. K. Simmons. When
he’s not playing a droll professor at the
University of Farmers in ads, Simmons
continues to leave his mark as a stage and
film actor, winning an Oscar at the 2015
Academy Awards for his roll in the movie
Whiplash. “There was no major surgery
needed in advertising strategies, and J. K.
gives you a lot to work with,” Linton says.