Small Cold-Blooded Creatures Express Interest in Your Insurance Premiums

By what path 'online auto insurance sales' became such a prominent genre of TV advertisement I'm not sure, but there's some kind of shared wavelength effect going on -- something like the force that makes 'someone wants to steal the cereal' the almost universal children's cereal ad -- that drives the four or five competitors in this niche field toward very similar campaigns and marketing approaches.

For one there's the creation of grating mascots and a desperate, desperate effort to cling to the illusion that they are gaining popularity and acquiring a name value of their own. These various campaigns are so nakedly begging the audience to please please please like their mascots that I can't help but wonder whether they wouldn't be better off rethinking the whole mascot approach.

They're all just awful: Justin Case and an excruciatingly dull Rocket Scientist for Safe Auto, the bizarre Joan Cusack automaton operating Progressive's store in the Featureless White Void, and (you're not surprised) fanart favorite Erin Esurance. And of course, Geico's theme-park-worthy character pantheon: the Gecko, and The Money You Could Be Saving, and those fucking awful Cavemen, which they're still re-using in new commercials even after their wet fart of an effort to market the damn makeup jobs as a sitcom became a warning that even within the field of quick-sinking network failures, there is ignominy.

(No, really -- I actually saw this disgrace with my own eyes, during the four-second interval in which it was aired. The Cavemen sitcom -- I was going to link to Wikipedia's entry on it, but it's far too favorable and never even mentions excrement -- starts with a narration that tells us that "Cavemen have been with you all along", showing how there were Cavemen in, for instance, ancient Egypt and the American revolution. There is so much wrong with just this opening sequence that I don't think I can really do justice to a full review of Cavemen's atrocities until I save up to buy a larger bullwhip.)

But anyway, there's a particular habit I was intending to write about, way up there when I wrote the clever headline; to wit, openly selling advertising space in the middle of their advertisements. Certainly this kind of cross-marketing is not without precedent, but I think Esurance broke some kind of new ground when they actually ran a ten-second ad for Star Trek in the middle of one of their thirty-second ads for Esurance.

Not to be outdone, Geico has kindly agreed to let Disney promote their new film The Princess in the Frog during one of their own Gecko-based advertisements -- which must be quite some favor, since at least on the channels I watch, it appears that some kind of magical curse has prevented Disney from putting out any direct ads for this release at all; thus far the only promotion I've seen for it on TV has been similarly embedded in other ads or shows. It's a strange approach to advertising, as though Disney's marketing people have the sinking gut feeling that they may be promoting this decade's Song of the South.

In any case, before I came wandering all the way out here into the bog of dreadful online-auto-insurance ads, all I had really intended to post was my initial reaction to the combination Geico Gecko / Princess and the Frog ad: I don't think the association is helping either of them.