Who knew cavemen could sell insurance?

Imagine having a caveman in your living room every Monday night and another billion or two for Warren Buffet who acquired GEICO several years ago. If the executives at ABC have anything to say, both will become a reality very soon.

The quirky commercials of the caveman GEICO series are tops for me. The PC Mac ads would be number one and the GEICO caveman would be a close second, both have a very powerful method at work underlying the psychology that makes people want to buy more of your stuff. That method is the hook. Think of looking at a chocolate cupcake with the letters scrawled in white icing, “Got Milk?” Great stuff! Many ad agencies write great copy and catchy phrases but they forget the most important thing, “Will this sell more product?” It seems as if they are more interested in receiving an award from their advertising peers and securing their careers with their agency than selling more products for their clients.

Not the case with the caveman series, very effective. The writer and creator of the series is Joe Lawson formerly with the Martin Agency, now making his move on Hollywood. I knew I liked the guy when I saw his commercials but I loved the guy when I read a quote from him being brutally honest about the advertising business in general. I quote from Joe as he had a chat with the Banterist shortly after creating the series.

“The most important thing is to avoid big industry functions. That way you're not reminded of the transitory nature of goodness in advertising. Every once in a while, if you are lucky, you catch the tail of an opportunity and put something on TV that doesn't annoy people, but most of the time 99% of us are producing crap.”

Well said, but why a caveman? That’s easy, literally it’s all in the hook presented in a way that does not annoy you. You can get commercials that entertain, but if they do not start with a hook, they will leave their clients with flat revenues while the agency fills up their trophy case with yet another creativity award.

If I asked you what type of beer would you drink at the beach? I bet Corona came to your mind. At the risk of upsetting some beer heretics, I don’t think any beer tastes more “beach like.” I am a non drinker so I could be wrong but I don’t know what the beach tastes like, do you? Anyone could have grabbed that spot but Corona chose to draw a line in the sand and say “This is our real estate, we own the beach.” I love their spots because they create an experience that transcends price and reason. It is difficult not to think of Corona when you have an idyllic summer beach day or if you want to be transported to the paradise while stuck in a dark bar at the end of a strip mall. The hook is the beach scene attached to Corona, like “Got Milk” to the cupcake or a milk mustache to a celebrities lip. “If I drink milk maybe I will look like Cindy Crawford too!”

The hook with the caveman is “It’s so easy even a caveman can do it.” To test the effectiveness of a hook, ask a 10 year old what is the BEST car insurance company and don’t be surprised that the “it’s easy” ads have even spilled over to the “best insurance” in their minds. When you can create generational shifts in buying patterns by using the right hook, it can be the most valuable time you will ever spend before branding what you do.

So what about the pilot for ABC? It sounds like it will be Seinfeld with hair. Cavemen will be filmed dealing with everyday issues living in Atlanta. GEICO, a unit of Berkshire Hathaway Inc., will have no creative control but will receive a royalty payment for the use of the character.

"We sell car insurance; we don't make TV shows," says Ted Ward, GEICO’s vice president of marketing. Ted please!!! Don’t go stuffed shirt on us now, we know you are dancing around in your caveman jammies laughing hysterically that you are the guy that actually approved Lawson’s wacky idea. If the caveman makes it past a pilot and actually gets picked up for 13 weeks we will have GEICO on the brain for the next 20 years. Good bye Aflac, I hated that duck anyway, what was the hook, Gilbert Gottfried in feathers? He is hard to take as a human, as a duck it just makes me want to eat more chicken, not call the 800 number.

What’s your hook? Before you start off down the long branding road, decide what differentiates you from your competition. What is the competitive advantage you bring that nobody else does? If you cannot think of one, maybe you should consider a different path in life. If you can come up with a few, how do you convey that edge to the market? Start with a hook. A hook promotes your franchise while you sleep, what could be better than that?

Why most advertising and investment ideas are wrong

Most of the senior marketing executives cut their teeth in broadcast media systems. It was the golden age of media, when you had three stations and the entire country tuning in together as a family. The “big brand” era was born with “plop plop fizz fizz” advertising, and the only thing you needed was a catchy phrase and repetition. Advertising rates were so low on the big three a fortune could be made with this very simple formula.

Times have changed but the mentality has not. For the most part we are still applying broadcast methods to a new narrowcast audience. I can look no further then my kitchen table. My 12 and 10 year old boys were cleaning the garage with me last Saturday and they saw an old yellow book in the corner that I told them to toss out. I explained it was the yellow pages and what you did with it. The look on their face made me feel like I just pulled up in a model T! It is uncomfortable to explain when I was their age we did not have cell phones, the internet, a PC and I can still remember our first TV was black and white! I need to stop, the keyboard is aging me with every click. Anyway you would have thought we found an old world war two field manual. They actually laughed! What is more shocking is the mass market tricks most advertisers have been taught from the veterans and media departments at universities don’t apply today. Wake up call, my kids say “Old People” watch the big three. With the exception of Heroes until they screwed it up in the 2^nd season. They are tough critics. They like the Disney channel and Wii. The radio is also old school. “Why would I want to listen to what everyone else listens to?” They like XM and their iPods.

Chris Anderson illustrated the difference in the book The Long Tail when he compared the budget of the Abrams Report. They get 200,000 eyeballs a day to sell ads who watch the show. It takes dozens of crew members and a big studio budget to pull it off, and then broadcast away. Rocket boom is a daily show, Jon Stewart like comedy news channel over the web. They also get 200,000 viewers, the difference; they have two people running the $2,000 cameras, lights and shoot the three and a half minute news in front of a crappy cardboard map. Yikes! Formula (Broadcasters = Revenue Junky) (Narrowcasters = Margin Junky) size matters in a perverse paradoxical, Alice in Wonderland business world we call 2007. Small has now become more powerful then big! It is the reason why big venture capital firms need to invest in hundreds of lame companies in hopes of one big winner is the same reason that big media must invest in hundreds of lame programs in hopes of a few winners. When you have a big nut, you need to make big investments on a mass scale and hope the law of averages will work in your favor. Small investment bankers can “Afford” to make a few small investments in great small companies because they need to be right, not lucky. Can small actually be more powerful then big? Can being big cloud our judgment in business because we have too much to lose if we “Change our ways”.

I have watched this first hand where perfectly capable executives that came from Fortune 100 backgrounds, became CEO’s of small promising startups and quickly ran them right into the sandbar. Entrepreneurs need to be keenly aware they need to choose their Advertising, Investment and Executive teams that understand narrowcasting realities if they want their Franchise to flourish.

If you do not believe we have entered into a new unchartered exciting world of opportunity where David gets to clean Goliath’s clock on a continual basis. Please ask your teenager what they think of the yellow pages.