State Farm’s Football Season Ad is Powered by a Pun

State Farm’s March Madness campaign – called “Bateman vs Batman” – introduced a new play for the insurance brand: puns. They’ve followed it up with a new spot from agency TMA, timed for football season, and called “Trainor vs Trainer”. That’s pop star Meghan Trainor, and a personal trainer.

In the ad, Meghan Trainor gets to step into the role of Patrick Mahomes’ personal trainer, and she doesn’t do a good job of it. She forgets who Mahomes is, offers him some very dubious fitness equipment and ends up going off for a singalong. What does all that have to do with insurance, you ask? The idea is that the difference between the treatment you get from State Farm and the treatment you get from other insurers is as stark as the gap between an actual trainer and Meghan Trainor.

The ad doesn’t really try to back up that idea with persuasion though. The emphasis is firmly on the pun, the guest stars, and entertaining the audience. State Farm has decades of strong brand assets and equity to trade on – we see mascot Jake From State Farm in the opening seconds of the ad – and this is a relaxed, feelgood commercial to entertain fans settling down for a game, not a hard sell.

Humor is the perfect vehicle to do this – in our Test Your Ad platform amusement is one of the most effective ways of producing the positive responses that build long-term effectiveness for brands. The Trainor/trainer pun may be a bit corny but it lets the brand set up a surreal and silly encounter between two famous faces.

At System1 we’re all about that FaceTrace – the method which lets us measure emotional response to an ad and predict its potential to impact both short- and long term business effects. It won’t shock you to learn that consumer insurance isn’t the most entertaining of categories on average. In fact it only scores a 2.1-Star Rating on average (the maximum is 5.9-Stars). State Farm’s 3.3-Stars lands it well above that average score, in the top 15% of ads in its category. That predicts a good potential effect on long-term market share gain given the right investment. It’s also an effective short-term ad too, with a Strong Spike Rating, again well above the norm.

With this ad State Farm is avoiding the pitfalls most financial services and insurance ads fall into – not meeting the audience where they are. Football is one of the TV sport events that brings people together, but a game night audience aren’t in the mood or mindset to have features and complex products explained to them. Two celebrities making a silly joke that reminds them “State Farm is there” though – that’s effective. Or at least a lot more than Meghan Trainor is here.