Ed Ranks GEICO Ad Campaigns

Finally I've sold out, because this article is 100% ads!

GEICO is a company that has way too many commercials, and way too many ad campaigns to promote their insurance.  I'd imagine their insurance would actually be four times cheaper if they stopped running multi-million dollar ad campaigns and just used that money for paying out insurance claims.

At any rate, there are about 4 trillion different GEICO ad campaigns, so there is no way I can rank them all. These are 16 of them.  If you think I'm missing one, I probably am.  Either that or the specific commercial you're thinking about falls as a sub-set of one of those campaigns (e.g. the Little Piggy Who Cried "Wee Wee Wee" isn't it's own campaign, it's part of the one of the larger campaigns. You'll see what I mean below.

16 Boring Insurance Salesman - GEICO always has flash commercials with flamboyant characters, as opposed to other insurance companies that have mundane, boring, middle-aged White men try to explain to you rates and quality of service. So GEICO actually had an ad campaign where they purposefully had a boring insurance salesman to make fun of their competition. It should be a funny, self-aware meta joke, right? It wasn't. It was totally forgettable. Do you remember this campaign? The boring guy who would try to be cool and say things like "da bomb?" I bet you do not.


15. So Easy, Even a Caveman Could Do It - These commercials were pretty much making fun of racism and discrimination, right?  I mean they picked a group of people who are, in actuality, no longer around (Cavemen) and then implied that they were super stupid and had Cavemen, who in the narrative of the commercials still exist, get super offended. What is the story here? GEICO: We're Racist! Is that it? Plus this got so overexposed that they tried to make a TV show out of it, which just makes them even more annoying.

14. Testimonial with "Celebrity" Endorsement - AKA the "Real Service, Real Savings" ad campaign that had "real" people give testimonials, followed up by a "celebrity" endorsement of the "real" person. The celebrities typically involved people like Don LaFontaine. Who is that? The voice-over guy who used to do the "In a WORLD...!" movie ads. Yeah, that's the types of celebrities we're talking about here.

13. Googley-Eyed Money (The Money You Could Be Saving) - These were just creepy. Stacks of dollar bills with Cookie Monster eyes would creepily stare at people. Uncomfortable!

12. Expect More - The theme was with GEICO, you can expect more. It typically had two people talking to each other, and every time they cut back to one of the two people, they kept changing more and more. e.g. A guy working out who gets insanely buff over the course of the conversation. 

11. Did You Know? - GEICO asks you if you knew something. And then it's something like "Old MacDonald was a bad speller," followed by Old MacDonald not knowing how to spell anything other than E-I-E-I-O. 

10. Nursery Rhymes - An ad campaign that told the "true story" behind nursery rhymes and how GEICO saved the day. Typical example: The Big Bad Wolf blows away the Little Pig's house made of straw, but he's able to get it replaced thanks to GEICO's homeowner insurance. There were a ton of these ads.

9. Unrelated Product Surprise / This is a GEICO Commercial - These are actually two different ad campaigns, but I'm going to throw them together. They were done years apart, but they sort of had the same theme of "breaking the fourth wall" to reveal that this was a GEICO commercial.  The first versions of the ads made it seem like they were ads for other products (Tide recently copycated this premise, remember?). The more recent simply has people becoming self aware that they are in a GEICO ad. A little different, but I'll lump them together as one because 17 rankings is just weird. 16 is nice and even.

What I think of when I hear banjos.

8. Happier than A... -  I'm sort of torn on this one. On the one hand, this was a pretty funny campaign that ran for a while with some great ads. The "Happier than a Camel on Wednesday" is probably the most famous of them, for the "HUMP DAY!" ad.  But this is also the campaign that had the shitty hipster bluegrass singers after everyone in the damn world was adding banjos to their music because of Mumford and Sons. Ugh. If I didn't remember those banjo boys, this could have easily been ranked #2. 

7. Surprising / Unexpected Coincidence - I'm not sure how to explain this concept better, but this was the ad campaign of "unexpected" coincidental stuff like Ice Tea running a lemonade stand, and Marco Polo playing Marco Polo in a pool.  I suppose they weren't all coincidences. Some of them were contradictions. Like the sumo wrestler who was fantastic at ice-skating.  This is one of those big campaigns that had a TON of different ads for it.

6. It's What You Do - This was another huge one.  This is the one which is like, "If you're an X, you do Y. It's What You Do."  Stuff like "If You're a Mom, you call at the worst time. It's what you do," followed up by her ruining the scene of an action movie by calling her son and revealing his stealthy actions in the middle of his attack.  If you went a movie theatre any time during the huge chunk of years where this campaign ran, you probably heard "If you're at the movie theater, you turn off your phone. It's what you do." 

5. As Long as X, You Can Count of GEICO - This one is basically saying something that always happens, and then saying that as long as that still happens, you can continue to count on GEICO.  The one of these that sticks out the most in my head is "As Long As Soccer Plays Still Celebrate with Slides," followed by a computer graphic-enhanced soccer slide that takes the guy around the field for 30 seconds. It was, you know, funny and stuff. I guess that's what GEICO does.

4.  Easier Way to Save - This is the one with people doing super cheap things to save money, like calling collect and trying to fit in the entire message in the "name" so that the person can decline the charge. Remember this one? Yeah. This one is sort of hard to remember because who the hell even remembers what calling collect is?!

This is just an actual gecko. Don't get too excited.

3. GEICO Gecko - Yeah, this is their most famous ad campaign. The Gecko. He talks with that accent. You immediately think of GEICO. Still. I mean are his ads really #1?  I mean he just stands around and talks about things. And the character was only created (fun fact!) because there was a Screen Actors Guild strike and GEICO wasn't allowed to use actors.  The more you know...

2 Always a Great Answer / "I've Got Great News" - Once again, this is one where I'm taking two seperate ad campaigns from almost two decaded apart and combining them, because it was a bit of a rehash.  The most recent one was the "Always a Great Answer" one.  his is the one where some unrelated situation is happening, someone has to explain themselves, and they simply say "GEICO can save you up to X% on Insurance."  Typical example: A judge is about to find a man guilty and asks if he has anything to say for himself. And he says that GEICO can help you save. The judge then agrees and dismisses all the charges.  Geez, I hope this guy was in court for petty theft rather than murder or something. The "I've Got Great News" version of this was sort of the same joke, but 15 years earlier and a little funnier.  People are having a tense conversation and then the one person is like, "I've Got Great News... GEICO can save you... etc. etc."  The most famous one of these was the "Soap Opera" one. Where the lady things the guy will leave that other bitch for her, but his great news is only that he's saving money. Remember that one? Yeah. "I saved. I thought that meant something to you."

1. Rhetorical question - This was probably one of the longest running ones they have.  It starts off with handsome salesman guy walking in an empty room and asking a rhetorical question (examples: Do Woodchucks Chuck Wood? Was Abe Lincoln Honest? Does Elmer Fudd Have Trouble with the Letter R?)  This was followed by an example of that exact thing showing that, yes, that is a rhetroical question because obviously.  And yes, this was also the one that had "Maxwell the Pig" who cried "wee wee wee" all the way home, to call back to the intro.  So there you go.