Geico’s Stupid Money You Could Be Saving
Advertiser: GEICO (originally Government Employees Insurance Company)
Product: Auto Insurance
Advertisement: Series Theme – The Money You Could Be Saving By Switching Your Insurance to GEICO
Advertising Agency: The Martin Agency
This commercial or rather series of commercials are among the most prominent advertisements on TV today and have been running since 2008. If you haven’t seen them, you’re probably living under a rock or maybe in a cave.
The Premise
The premise is to show, literally, the money you could be saving by switching your auto insurance to Geico. The money is shown as a small stack of bills with a pair of plastic jiggle eyes sitting on top (known as “Kash”). The theme is always punctuated by a Mysto & Pizzi remix of the 80′s song, “Somebody’s Watching Me” originally by Rockwell.
The TIME I Could Be Saving Watching Something Else
Who let this bad idea happen? Did somebody just sit around and say let’s just show them the money? Oooh, no wait let’s put some eyes on it and that will make it better! And then, we’ll call him Kash caue tha’s Katchy. Is this the best the Maritn Agency could come up with? Martin is the brilliant agency that gave us the cave men and the gecko and the 15 minutes could save you 15% concept and helped propel GEICO into a top three insurance company.
Now some might say these spots are memorable, but I can assure that with enough money I could take a lint ball from my belly button, call him Lin T, train him to burp on cue and dispense sagely advice like a rapper. I could take a stupid 80′s song (with freak show Michael Jackson on backup vocals) that had a really bad video and use one line and repeat it over and over and over….until you remember Lin T…always.
The Commercials
“Kash Meeting”
- the first one in the series. Note how the guy says, “What IS that?”. Been wondering the same thing since.
“Kash Looks Tired”
- Is this supposed to be like in National Lampoon’s Vacation movie where Aunt Edna’s dog was accidentally left tied up to the car bumper and dragged for miles until only a leash was left? Except that the guy driving the car is an idiot and the fence-hammering axe murderer guy who secretly wears his dead mother’s clothes doesn’t want to give directions to dorks. Yep, just like it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lxMp8QJVvw
“Kash Date”
- Who’s the third wheel in this spot, her husband or Kash? I think he might get lucky tonight
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jlwjIhHMWLQ
This is a great post. You can activate the “MU Unfiltered” plugin and then embed the youtube video into the post. I like to make one of them autoplay, which simply involves appending the url of the video with &autoplay=1.
Jalali, Thank you very much for the help. I was just searching this morning what plugin I needed to embed a video. You might be psychic!
I was just now looking for information about this when I found your blog post. I’m simply stopping by to say that I definitely enjoyed seeing this post, it is really clear and well written. Are you going to blog more about this? It appears like there’s more material here for more posts.
Thank you for stopping by. Yes, there is much more to come and much more to do because unfortunately, the supply of stupid commercials from advertisers seems to have no end in sight.
I was just now looking for information about this when I came by your post. I’m only visiting to say that I very much enjoyed reading this post, it’s really clear and well written. Are you considering posting more on this? It appears like there’s more depth here for later posts.
Ever notice how the “money”, specifically the eyes with the wrapper, look a bit like a “twig and berries”, if you know what I mean?
I think I do.