Some years ago, ten maybe, Geico had a series of unbelievably funny TV ads. The ones I remember were two. The first featured emergency personnel investigating a bouncing house, only to find that it was caused by a man jumping up and down because he wasn't going to pay too much for insurance anymore. The second one demonstrated that they provided above average customer service with a counter example: a man at a diner tells his waitress that he had asked for his toast with no butter. Without changing her dour expression, she scraped the butter off on the side of the table and put it back on his saucer.
One suspects that Geico noticed faster than I did something important. People loved the commercials, but took away from them that... there's... an insurance company that makes funny TV commercials. They were spending a lot of money and getting practically no returns. Thus was born the Geico gecko. These commercials are sporadically funny. Mostly they're just peculiar in that everyone asks, assuming a gecko could talk, why would he do it with a British accent?
However, the ads are successful in that it's impossible for anyone who has ever seen one (or two or three anyway) ever to forget that there's an insurance company called Geico. The cavemen? Well OK they got a sitcom briefly, but I'm not sure they had the same impact.
Which brings us to Scott's. I don't know if they also have ads on TV, but there's a lawn care products company called Scott's which has recently decided to make infinitely irritating radio ads featuring a fake Scot named (I bet you can guess) Scott. I find myself with the wan hope that the company will abandon this line of promotion, but remembering the gecko's example, I see no possibility. After all, I remember their name and their business now. Next? Exxon Mobil the gerbil!
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