IIRC Geico is owned by Berkshire Hathaway (& of course, Warren Buffet)
Buffet is well known to hire very competent managers to run the businesses they control, and Buffet speaks highly of Geico’s team/ results.
Remember when every other radio ad was for Gold Bond Medicated Powder?
I can tolerate the gecko, and even the caveman and the stack of bills with the eyeballs, much more easily than the singing twerp in the Free Credit Report dot Com ads.
How’s that business model work? If it’s free, where do they get the money for all those ads?
If you sign up for their paid service, you get a credit report without having to pay more on top of that.
Are we really starting to do this with “[sic]”? I know there was a thread about whether it could be used humorously, but I was hoping it wasn’t because of trend starting. 
Is Britain becoming the new Japan for American movie actors to do commercials?
I like the gecko and the cavemen. I also have a crush on Erin Esurance.
At least they don’t make me want to break things, like car commercials do.
Serves you right for listening to commercial radio.
I think he’s cute. ::blush
So their name “Freecreditreport.com” is in and of itself deceptive advertising. Or it ought to be.
Geico couldn’t save me any money…:rolleyes:
In fact, there is a real, free, government-mandated, credit report Web site at annualcreditreport.com
I wasn’t aware of the thread nor that it was a “trend”. It was just a small joke.
I’m not sure how many, if any, of these sorts of commercials also appear in the States. George Clooney has been pushing those horrible Nescafe machines and some sort of alcohol (Martini?). Ben Affleck appeared in a Lynx ad a while back (I think the product is called Axe in the US - stinky stuff for men). Various famous women are selling cosmetics and perfume (Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Charlize Theron, Hilary Swank, Vanessa Hudgens (sp?), Andie MacHorseface, etc). Do these not appear on US television?
OK, that’s good, but irrelevant. Explain to me how the fact that there is a free, government mandated credit report website at annualcreditreport.com does (or doesn’t) mean that “freecreditreport.com” constitutes deceptive advertising? It seems to me that freecreditreport.com is trying to misrepresent to people that its service is free, when in fact it isn’t.
It doesn’t. My point was that it seems to add to the odor of deception.
Not in advertisements, no. Except for Andie MacDowell, I think.
Then the answer to your question is “yes”.
I agree. Not about the killing her part, but she is cute.
Because you aren’t a government employee, are you? GEICO=Government Employee Insurance Company. That’s what it started as before it began to offer insurance to the general public. If you are active or retired military or many other government carreers you get a discount. It’s one of the questions you are asked.
Everybody else subsidises those government employees.
IIRC, it is “free” like everything else in advertising is free. You pay $X to sign up for their credit monitoring service, and a credit report is included with this service. If you cancel within 30 days (and answer the 4 million questions about why you “weren’t happy with their service”) then you get your money refunded. So, in the end, your credit report was “free”.
Now, I’ve always hated the use of this word in advertising. IMO, if you say that something is free, then hand it over. If I have to take any steps to get what you say is “free”, then it is no longer free.
Same way with “buy widget x and get widget Y absolutely FREE!” Please buy a dictionary. If I must buy something, then it isn’t free.
I worked at a grocery store for a little over a year in the mid 90’s. It was in Shorewood, Wisconsin, which has a very large Russian Jewish immigrant population.
They thought they knew what the word “free” meant. As a matter of fact, from what I could tell the only words of English they knew were “please”, “thank you”, and “free”. So, they’d come up to the register with a bottle of “Tide Free” and I would get to explain to some nice little old woman who spoke pretty much no English that “free” didn’t mean “free”.
What a shitty job…
-Joe