But you came in again to name call for a reason I can’t discern. And I didn’t know you had erased the message.
Why are you name calling in such a short thread of no consequence to you? Why are you accusing me of pedantry anyway? I’m curious. What is a good citation of me doing that so I can do better.
Auto insurance is a mature market, and so if you’re going to grow, you’re going to have to prise people away from another carrier. And to do that, you’re going to need to get them to shop around.
For a long time insurance advertising was your typical State Farm/Allstate ad during Saturday/Sunday football, but a while after Berkshire Hathaway (read: Warren Buffet) upped his stake in GEICO in the mid-90s, he began pushing hard for growth, and GEICO began advertising like crazy. That’s still going on - GEICO is has been pushing the spend on insurance for about two decades, and other insurers have never caught up (it’s expensive, but a low-operating-expense company like GEICO has that advantage).
I’ve tried to find a good chart of ad spend in those decades, the closest I could find was this one, showing GEICO’s growth since 2009. Unfortunately it doesn’t have all the other carriers, but whatever chart you look at, GEICO is pushing an ad arms race as insurers now try to raise their visibility in a market where customers are shopping WAY more than they used to.
Here’s another crazy thing they’re swimming against - the more ads that get run, the harder the individual ones are to remember.
I’ve heard it’s because there is no target demographic. “Everyone” needs insurance, so hopefully at least one of the campaigns appeals to you (the serious one, the jokey one, the irreverent one, the “clever” one, something), whoever you are, they have an insurance commercial for you.
I’ve heard that a big point of the advertising is that there’s so many options, you just really want people to remember your name when they ever bother to compare companies. Most people aren’t going to compare dozens of options so you want to be part of the 4-5 they do compare.
in the late 90s and 2000s tv guide used to run a column about advertising trends and they’d show the top 10 advertisers and the top 20 of one year were insurance companies and the next were beer companies then fast food places …
Unless you’re an auto insurer.
That doesn’t sound right to me. I couldn’t find data that far back, but looking at 2006, there wasn’t a single insurer in the top 25. And certainly car manufacturers have been in the top 20 for a long, long time.
https://www.ana.net/blogs/show/id/33233
This says it’s about the diversity of car ins customers and their media habit changes. IOW the ads are supposed to appeal to a rainbow of people, solemn to wacky, and they’re not responding to the same stuff or maybe even the same ads, because they are not reliably watching at the same times like in earlier TV eras.
It still doesn’t explain why insurance cos need to do this, above other industry sectors.
Per Google search:
Why are there so many insurance commercials on TV?
The frequency of ads you see for any industry or individual advertiser is directly related to how much the advertiser spends on the station and networks you watch. The insurance industry is a big spender, so you see a lot of their ads . The advertiser deciders how much they want to run, and when/where they want to run.
Gee thanks googs
They don’t need to, but as noted above, Geico started spending a lot behind TV ads about 20 years ago, and at some point, they figured out that this model works well for them.
They throw a lot of ideas and ad campaigns against the wall, some of which spark interest among viewers, and stick around for a while (or get revived from time to time), and others only run for a relatively short time.
An eternal question: Who doesn’t need to and who does need to just to keep up?
Anyway maybe it’s that auto ins is a big ticket investment for a young person, as these things go, who is newly in the market and a little naive, and well worth fighting for as a customer.
I do see the position of the ceo: the auto ins market is “total diversity” across all societal lines, and an ad campaign towards anyone is not going to cover the diversity.
As with the numerous debates about health insurance on these boards, this thread makes me appreciate the way I get car insurance in my province - I pay for it with my plates, through the Crown corp that runs plates and car insurance. Since the basic package is the same for all, there’s no need to shop around for it.
They don’t. There are only two insurers in the top 25, assuming most of Berkshire Hathaway’s spending is for GEICO.
https://s3-prod.adage.com/s3fs-public/2020-07/lnafp_aa_20200713_locked.pdf
What names are you calling insurers on the list?
If they don’t have to do something and do it it just leaves me wondering.
Geico and Progressive are two and Liberty Mutual is a third strong presence. There is allstate and others. Could it be that the presence of these ads is very strong even though they are out of the top 25? I mean I have no sense of what top 25 means for my tv watching experience. The other top25ers might go under the radar and not be as noticable.
The “others” who also spend heavily, on a national basis:
Plus a lot of smaller companies, whose spend may be more regional, like American Family.
USAA spends very little relatively, it relies mostly on mail and email, military print ads, relationships through existing customers, and occasional, carefully placed tv spots. The rest are definitely spending a lot.
Even with them on the cheap I can’t avoid or stop their jingle from going through my head. I hope they’re not carefully stalking me? It’s Martin, that bald guy, isn’t it? He needs a good hailstorm.
I feel like I see a fair number of USAA TV ads (though certainly not nearly as many as for Geico, Progressive, etc.); it may be that I just watch the right television programs – as I think about it, I think that a lot of their ads that I see are on NFL games.
For comparison, GEICO spent $1.94B in 2019, USAA spent around $300M (all financial services, not just insurance). But they’re good at picking their spots, and sports are a good match for their demographic.