The Geico-ification of Everything
The Geico-ification of Everything
How did the ethos behind car insurance commercials get everywhere all at once?
You seen this stuff?
Okay how about this one:
Sure, hating car insurance commercials feels nearly as banal as loving them at this point, but the situation has grown quite dire. What began as an innocent napkin pitch among marketers hoping to make their company name easily pronounceable to the public (Guy-co, not gecko) has since swallowed an entire industry's worth of annoying ads and prestige TV careers. An NPR segment from earlier this year detailed how GEICO’s annual ad budget ballooned from $40 million to $1.5 billion in the past 30 years, forcing other car insurance companies to keep up with the arms race (Progressive and State Farm join them in the top six overall ad spenders). But no matter the variance in mascot or jingle, all of these companies strike roughly the same tone to further the epic humor epidemic.
You know it when you see it. LiMu Emu…and Doug, Progressive’s sitcom-sized cast of characters, We Are Farmers, bum ba dum ba dum bum bum, a banged-up Dennis from 30 Rock, the rebooted Jake from State Farm — in NBA 2K — and so many more I’m not interested in trying to remember. There’s even that one company whose gimmick is proudly not having jingles or mascots, a Deadpoolian twist on the form. It’s all enough to long for the quaint days of Dennis Haysbert. And while these are all outgrowths of the trend GEICO set into motion in the early Aughts, they’re distinct in their own annoying way from that company’s innovations.
Between that napkin pitch and our current moment of saturation, GEICO honed a repeatable, if distinct formula from its imitators. The gecko gave way to the cavemen, which gave way to ABC’s short-lived sitcom Cavemen — and Nick Kroll’s career. (Go figure, this decade’s most prominent commercial-turned-series can’t stop racking up Emmys.) Along the way, it blended surrealist non-sequiturs (think Family Guy cutaways for people who laugh a little too loud at the movie theater when recognizing someone onscreen) and its own expanded universe of mascots, recurring gags, and bygone C-lister cameos. It’s easy enough to question if people actually like this stuff, since almost everyone I know seems physically allergic to it…but that’s the same bubbled dismay to realizing a lot of people watch three hours of the Chicago Cinematic Universe on NBC every week. They’re out there, and it isn’t just reflected in lowbrow spaces either.
It certainly extends far beyond the car insurance industry — just fire up the Super Bowl any given year — but Jon Hamm, whose signature character once mined his tortured past in an attempt to sell Hershey chocolate, now yukking it up with Progressive Flo marks a grim full-circle moment. Popular culture has never more fully embraced the GEICO formula (twee cutaways + recognizing a guy + an expanded universe of mascots), from the year’s big A24 sleeper hit to most superhero movies. From an artistic standpoint, I think this is bad and bereft of ideas and a clear decline from decades past. From the standpoint of insurance premiums necessarily increasing to bankroll the billion-plus ad budget for these companies…it’s also all of those things and a bit worse. But I’m not going to work backward into ethical grounding for my aesthetic hangups: it’s bad for society, but above all just so grating.
After leaving Spider-Man: No Way Home’s marathon of quips and callbacks nearly a year ago, I thought the Geico-ification of the modern blockbuster was finally complete. This felt correct in its own way if imprecise, since the true car insurance commercial movie would arrive just months later with Everything Everywhere All At Once. Lauded for its maximalist approach to narrative and genre conventions — with impressive lead performances and fight choreography, but hampered by a too-mushy, moralizing interior — the Daniels’ breakout feature relies on a revolving door of Geico-grade jokes across the multiverse. In one reality, Michelle Yeoh’s Evelyn and Jamie Lee Curtis’s crotchety IRS inspector are lovers with floppy, hot dog-shaped fingers; in another, she manages a restaurant where the chef isn’t puppeteered by a rat, as in Ratatouille, but a raccoon. Even the film’s would-be poignant core, when Evelyn and her daughter unpack their fraught relationship in the bodies of googly-eyed rocks, is undercut by the Daniels’ sheer delight at their own randomness. (For their part, this is still an upgrade over the rancid Swiss Army Man, which shoved all its chips onto one belabored gag, instead of spreading the bets around with a greater chance of nailing a few.)
The success of both movies, and more broadly the smug, snappy heroes populating blockbusters of all stripes right now, usher in much debate about who’s responsible for all this. Is it Joss Whedon, whose signature rapid-fire dialogue directly wormed its way into the first two Avengers films, the MCU writ large, and the unwanted first draft of Justice League? Is it the entire website of Reddit, which becomes a derogatory, if unfair shorthand for self-satisfied, hyper-online epic bacon appreciators who aren’t on Twitter as much (even if one now happens to own the platform)? Or maybe it’s the insurance commercials.
Not to romanticize the cinematic potential of advertising, but there used to be a time when some of the best directors brought their talents to a big TV spot. (A version of this can still happen, but it’s received as a little more degrading now.) Instead we get the downstream effects from the dullest sort of humor subconsciously working its way into the pop culture people are paying to see. The quirked-up tenor of insurance ads that used to be a pesky novelty is now seemingly everything, everywhere, and it’s unclear what could swing the pendulum back. Even if Marvel’s grittier, uneven archrival DC releases the stray movie without well THAT happened barbs, they’re still outliers.
If there’s cause for measured hope, the year’s biggest film, Top Gun: Maverick, turned out infrequent moviegoers — yes, on the back of generation-spanning nostalgia — but also through an earnest commitment to thrills and the material without an apologetic cheeky detachment. Taking the streaming companies at their word, the year’s two biggest new shows (House of the Dragon, Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power) are fairly straight-faced fantasy behemoths. There’s still an appetite for crowd-pleasing work that genuinely believes in itself without the irritating hedging if the audience isn’t willing to meet it halfway. And if you’re fine with the latter being all that’s left on our cultural menu? Well that’s caveman shit.