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Seriously Funny

How two companies’ use of humor changed an industry

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By Todd Wilkinson Illustration by Alex Nabaum

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ANA: When you think gener-ally 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,

Over the years, Dieste’s creative teams have earned distinc-tion for their mastery of employing humor to effectively drive their clients’ multicultural marketing, particularly with His-panic 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 Dir ector Ciro Sarmiento can tell you, when navigat-ing different idioms of language and culture, sometimes the mean ing in comedy can get lost in translation.

For Dieste’s Ciro Sarmiento, Good Humor Connects on Emotion

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 in-feriority 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; Max-well 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. Some-times GEICO ads make no mention of its products and appear to be only about de-liv er ing 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 in-deed, comedy has enabled GEICO to cata pult 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 pro-vides cathartic relief for audience mem-bers and thus is a means for engendering brand appeal, trust, and ultimately better-ing the bottom line. Nowhere is the humor arms race in advertising more visible than in the highly competitive market-place of home, auto, and casualty insur-ance. 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 mind-space of how two such companies court humor, we reached out to GEICO’s Ward

and Michael Linton, chief marketing offi-cer at Farmers Insurance.

T hree decades ago GEICO went rogue in terms of defying con-vention, and Ward doesn’t deny

it. For much of the 20th century, insur-ance advertising was dominated by reas-suring visions of changelessness — think The Hartford’s regal stag and Prudential’s “Own a Piece of the Rock.” Market re-search 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 home-work, presenting a compelling case for

why humor could quickly differentiate the company from its competitors. “From the moment of that meet-ing 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 get-ting discounted rate quotes directly from

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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 recogniz-ing the growth potential of solid under-valued 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 owner-ship. 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.

“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 in-clusion in the hall of shame.” But the lessons have proved invaluable. “The ones that failed tended to be overly com-plex 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- in-force 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 analy-sis, 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 re-cent years have brought a lot of insights derived from social monitoring.

Listening to Ward describe the ori-gins of content is itself hilarious, though shrewdly it all ties together with an un-wavering strategy of broadening the presence of the brand in ways that tran-scend 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 Insur-

ance 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 previ-

ously held down the chief marketing offi-cer posts at eBay and Best Buy, is taking

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

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 His-panics are now living between their Latino roots and their U.S. American reality.

ANA: Is there a single thing that represents the key to be-ing funny?

C.S.: I think the key to being funny is finding your own voice.

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.

ANA: How has Dieste been able to harness humor so well, on so many campaigns?

C.S.: Data, analytics, and re-search 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 come-dian 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.

Get an additional Q&A with Old Navy's CMO Ivan Wicksteed at ana.net/aprmag15.

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the sophistication of Farmers’ humorous marketing to the next level.

When he arrived three years ago, Linton inherited the company’s commit-ment to humor and, he notes, its power-house 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.

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 sur-rounding insurance coverage.

The ongoing series of spots, rolled out across all me-dia, 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 insur-ance 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 enter-taining stories of what can go wrong but in a way intended to elicit a guffaw. Tor-nados, 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 momen tum 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 sometimes- confusing array of insurance options? It’s Farmers’ Professor Burke, the author-ity 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 be-cause 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 Market-ing, 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 fun-damentals of marketing: It can never be just about getting a rise. Humorous cre-ative 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.

Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One

1If humor doesn’t support the brand, then the joke’s on you.

No matter how funny the pitch-person 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 lam-

poon, but humor that creates vic-tims 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.

4Don’t take your humor too seri-ously. Approaches that obvi-

ously 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 be-come funny than vice versa.

5Just 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.