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My Passion is Puppetry
Campaign |
Company |
Launch Date |
|
 |
“Flo” | Progressive Insurance | 2008 |
 |
“Rhetorical Question” “Happier Than A … ” “Did You Know?” “It’s What You Do” |
GEICO | 2009 2012 2013 2014 |
 |
“Mayhem” | Allstate | 2010 |
 |
“University of Farmers” | Farmers Insurance | 2010 |
 |
“Magic Jingle” | State Farm | 2011 2011 |
 |
“That’s Not How It Works” | Esurance | 2014 |
 |
“Chicken Parm You Taste So Good” | Nationwide | 2014 |
We are supposedly living in the Golden Age of television. Maybe yes, maybe no (my view: every decade is a Golden Age of television!), but there’s no doubt that today we’re living in the Golden Age of insurance commercials. Sure, you had the GEICO gecko back in 1999 and the caveman in 2004, and the Aflac duck has been around almost as long, but it’s really the Flo campaign for Progressive Insurance in 2008 that marks a sea change in how financial risk products are marketed by property and casualty insurers. Today every major P&C carrier spends big bucks (about $7 billion per year in the aggregate) on these little theatrical gems.
This will strike some as a silly argument, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the modern focus on entertainment marketing for financial risk products began in the Great Recession and its aftermath. When the financial ground isn’t steady underneath your feet, fundamentals don’t matter nearly as much as a fresh narrative. Why? Because the fundamentals are scary. Because you don’t buy when you’re scared. So you need a new perspective from the puppet masters to get you to buy, a new “conversation”, to use Don Draper’s words of advertising wisdom from Mad Men. Maybe that’s describing the price quote process as a “name your price tool” if you’re Flo, and maybe that’s describing Lucky Strikes tobacco as “toasted!” if you’re Don Draper. Maybe that’s a chuckle at the Mayhem guy or the Hump Day Camel if you’re Allstate or GEICO.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The Inevitable Failure of Mechanistic Monetary Policy
The Inevitable Failure of Mechanistic Monetary Policy
Our current faith in central banks’ ability to “make the economy all better, all the time” is horrendously misplaced.
We are living in the Cargo Cult Era of Central Bankers. The era began in earnest on December 5, 1996, when Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan cautiously wondered aloud if the stock market was exhibiting “irrational exuberance.”
The stock market promptly tanked. In this era, the utterances of central bankers exert more influence over markets than fundamentals.
Documentary film maker Adam Curtis explored the inherent limits of mechanistic monetary models in Episode 3 of his 6-part series, Pandora’s Box (1992).This simplistic faith in the Cargo Cult magic of central banks is based on the absurd notion that two levers–interest rates and buying debt–can control and guide an immensely complex economy. Central bankers are well-versed in arcane incantations such as Operation Twist and aggregate demand, but if we strip away the mumbo-jumbo we find only two levers: interest rates and the purchase of debt.
The wizards of monetary policy make the implicit assumption that monetary policy is the most important factor in an economy’s expansion or contraction. But an economy is far more than interest rates, inflation and the purchase of bonds and other assets.
An economy is also the education or mis-education of the next generation of workers, the creative destruction wrought by technologies, the cultural appetite for risk and what I call the infrastructure of opportunity–the complex mix of attributes that either encourage social mobility or preclude it.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
