GEICO | Crushed | 2017
Wait, how does an ad "shrink"? / GEICO "Crushed"
In the frozen food aisle, the walls slowly close in, squashing both the people and the products. The idea here is to physically "shrink" a pre-roll ad.
The problem
YouTube pre-roll ads are the thing everyone loves to hate, since viewers can skip them after five seconds. GEICO and The Martin Agency won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2015 with "Unskippable," followed it up with "Fast Forward" in 2016, and arrived at this campaign, "Crushed."
The insight
Instead of hiding the fact that nobody wants to watch ads, this campaign openly admits it. It opens with a narrator confessing, "This ad has been compressed for your convenience." It's also built around a visual punchline that works even with the sound off.
The idea
A 15-second spot set in a frozen food section, where the walls slowly close in and crush the store employees, while a rapid-fire voiceover rattles off the benefits of the insurance. In the same series, a massage parlor, a pottery class, and a racquetball court all meet the same fate. The director is Terri Timely, who also directed "Unskippable."
What happened
CMO Ted Wardell stated that the approach "is working for us" and confirmed continued investment, and Kantar Media reported that GEICO spent 1.1 billion dollars on advertising overall from month 1 to month 9 (January through September) of 2016.
Afterthought
At this point, pre-roll gags are practically GEICO's signature move. I think what makes these ads work is the whole style of it: entertainment and the message they want to deliver are forced to coexist without ever really blending together. The accumulating sense of "wait, what?" from the premise of an ad literally shrinking ends up being, surprisingly, the most memorable part.
