Why Do Insurance Companies Use Funny Commercials?
Insurance is not funny. It’s not entertaining in any way, actually, and yet insurance companies are well-known for having some of the funniest commercials in the advertising market. This is because humor has been proven to be one of the most effective ways of pushing a brand in the modern-day.
One of the most famous examples of a funny insurance ad is the “Jake from State Farm” commercial. This ad originally aired almost ten years ago, and yet it was so effective in advertising State Farm that reruns of it are still used today.
The reason humor is used so often in commercials is that one of the most important things a commercial can do is grab the audience’s attention, and there’s almost no better way to do that then to make your audience laugh. Funny commercials also have the added effect of getting people to share your ad if they think it’s funny enough.
How Much Do They Spend?
According to a report released by Statista, just this past July (2020) here are the Top 5 Big Spenders in the insurance marketplace. This is what they spent making us laugh in 2019
- Geico $1.6 Billion
- Progressive $1.1 Billion
- State Farm $802 Million
- Allstate $437 Million
- Liberty Mutal $435 Million.
These companies are very serious about being funny.
There are a couple of reasons that not all commercials use comedy, however. First off, comedy is hard, and if the joke flops, or worse, is considered offensive, it can completely tank a company’s revenue. There’s also something called the Vampire Effect in advertising, which basically means that if a joke is funny. but not related to the brand it can actually distract the audience from the product and hurt sales.
Insurance companies have learned that good comedy is undoubtedly the best way to push their brands, and so it seems inevitable that we’ll continue to see new funny insurance commercials in the years to come.
