What not to do as an ad campaign: overstay your welcome.
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“Cheerio, gov’na! I’m a gecko. If you take out the ‘k’ and squeeze in an ‘i’, you get me company, Geico. Real clever, that! And whereas real geckos be rather disgusting chaps - emitting foul odors and their own shite upon their attackers - I choose to instead annoy the piss out of ya wit’ me stupid fucking cockney accent.” |
Listen up, Geico. This was not a strong campaign to begin with. Just because your company’s name sounds like a fucking lizard doesn’t mean you have to explore all the marketing possibilities of that coincidence. I know - he was voted “America’s Favorite Icon” in 2005. I have two points on that: 1. I looked up how that poll is conducted - online polls and some special booths during one week in Times Square. In other words, completely worthless. Point 2: 2005. You’ve been parading him in front of us for 2 years now (actually, longer than that). I’m not sure I could handle your cavemen that long, and those are at least funny.
But lest you think I’m just one guy ranting, allow me to present my evidence. I did a search on YouTube with the simple search term, “Geico”, ordered by view count. What do you see? I’ll tell you what you don’t see - your beloved gecko. He nabbed a solid 3 spots out of the top 40 most viewed.
To sum things up, I think I’ll pull a random quote from a fellow hater:
hello al there mates.its me mate, the talking geico from geico.I’ll tell ya all you mates a harry potter story.This is how it goes…harry potter woke up in the morning in hogwarts.ron was next to him and said”harry i heard lord voldomord when i was sleeping and he said he was gonna murder you!”"is that true?”yelled harry.”yes,but i have some very good news!”snortd ron”realy, you know da speel to kill him?!?!?!”cried harry”no, i just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to geico,abracadraba!”now mates wasnt that good ol’ harry potter story?
Couldn’t have captured it better meself. Retire the gecko. Oh, and don’t bother with the Cavemen sitcom either. What the hell are you guys thinking?!
