Maxwell the Pig is GEICO’s Comeback King

We all know the GEICO Gecko, but he’s not the only animal mascot GEICO have on their team. With decades of funny ads to draw on, the insurance brand has wound the clock back fifteen years for their March Madness 2025 campaign, and brought back Maxwell the Pig.

If you don’t remember Maxwell, he’s a talking pig, but he’s better known for his signature sound. Maxwell is the pig in the nursery rhyme who cried “wee-wee-wee all the way home”, and his ads heavily feature that delighted squeal. In the classic Maxwell ad from 2010, which is the one GEICO has chosen to repeat, a man asks a rhetorical question about GEICO savings, and follows it with “Did the little pig go ‘wee-wee-wee’ all the way home?” and we cut to Maxwell leaning out of a car window doing exactly that.

The humor in the ad comes from the incongruity of a pig wearing a seatbelt and riding in a car, and from Maxwell’s annoying but funny “wee-wee-wee” squeals. There’s no deeper joke here, and no subtle messaging – but there doesn’t need to be. This is a kind of showmanship that’s all about lodging the brand in people’s heads by giving them something silly and entertaining to look at for thirty seconds.

And the Test Your Ad results show it still works, fifteen years after Maxwell’s debut. The commercial scores 3.9-Stars, which predicts very good long-term brand growth potential given the right level of investment. This is a particularly strong result given that the auto insurance category is historically very dull. GEICO may be famous for entertaining ads, but they’re still very much the exception: the average score in this sector is only 1.9-Stars.

Maxwell also helps GEICO crush the average in short-term Spike Rating (our measure that predicts sales boosts), landing an Exceptional score for this. Spike is driven by emotional intensity, and an attention-grabbing, love-him-or-hate-him component like Maxwell is ideal to dispel dullness and get a high rating.

So does it matter that this ad is a re-release? The answer is no. Audiences still respond positively and intensely to Maxwell, just as they did in 2010. Because it’s based on emotional response, the Test Your Ad method is very good at measuring whether older commercials have retained their effectiveness. Very often, they have – “wear-out” is more a myth designed to justify investment in new work than an actual rule of effective advertising. If audiences liked a commercial back in the day, and it still looks and feels current, they will usually like it again. Just ask Maxwell. Even if he’ll just shout “wee-wee-wee” at you.