Geico
The Martin Agency
The tag line, "Real service. Real savings," is used along with a real customer's experience and a celebrity's version to pitch car insurance.
July 18, 2006
Geico's commercials have always gone for the consumer who appreciates humor. This series of commercials plays right along those lines.
A real Geico customer shares his/her experience while a celebrity sits alongside and creates a flashier version of the testimonial.
Various versions are airing featuring celebrities like Little Richard, Charo, Burt Bacharach and Don LaFontaine. Each commercial pairs an actual Geico customer with a celebrity.
The customer recaps his/her experience and the celebrity puts his/her spin on the story. The Geico gecko doesn't make an appearance in these ads.
• As always, Geico has done a good job of capturing your attention with its commercials.
• Perhaps the best commercial of the series features Don LaFontaine, a name you may not know but a voice you most certainly do. LaFontaine is the voice you hear behind a lot of movie trailers. This particular ad is the most appealing, effective and entertaining of them all.
• Deviates from the gecko commercials and the other types of humor Geico uses in its ads. A nice way to keep the campaign fresh.
• Buzz across the Internet has shown people are missing the gecko in these commercials, even though Geico has created other types of commercials before without the use of the gecko.
• Younger consumers watching these commercials may wonder who some of these celebrities are. Charo's height of popularity, for example, came in the early 80s before some potential Geico consumers were even born.
• A really odd assortment of celebrities that many are labeling as "old" and "has-beens."
• A company spokesperson says the Geico gecko was created around 1998.
• The Geico gecko was named the top advertising icon along with Colombian Coffee's Juan Valdez in 2005 at Advertising Week in New York.
• When the gecko was first created for Geico, he had an English accent.
• The first Geico commercial featuring the animated gecko took 3 1/2 months to create, a long amount of time by ad industry standards.
• Geico and The Martin Agency refused to release the actor's name behind the gecko's voice. However, the man behind the voice was outed in April 2006 as Jake Wood, an English actor and comedian.
• Geico uses Framestore, New York, to create the gecko animations. Framestore is the same company that creates the special effects used in Harry Potter movies.
• Kelsey Grammer provided the voice of the gecko in the very first Geico commercial featuring the little lizard.
• Geico has no outside sales staff and relies heavily on advertising to sell the company's services.
• The Martin Agency has had the Geico account since 1994.
• Geico's advertising budget is worth $300 million.
• In November 2007, Geico continued the ad campaign with a fresh batch of celebrities. Peter Frampton, James Lipton, Michael Winslow and Gladys Knight's Pips are all featured in the newest versions.