The Gecko’s Still Got It: GEICO Wins on Consistency

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

Fluent Devices – recurring creative elements that drive the narrative of ads – don’t come much more famous than the GEICO Gecko. The cheeky but helpful lizard has been starring in GEICO ads for decades, and pioneered a more creative, humorous approach to insurance advertising that competitors across the sector have taken on board.

But they still can’t beat the Gecko, who’s back in a new GEICO ad this month. The great advantage of having such a recognisable character is that the Gecko is flexible enough to fit almost any situation and deliver any specific product message. In this case, it’s about savings on home insurance with GEICO saving a couple 25%.

The Gecko has been so helpful with that, the husband of the home-owning couple has let him take on the rest of the plumbing jobs, and the ad finds him hard at work in the bath. Can the couple understand his plumbing jargon? No, but they trust him to get the job done.

Before we look at the excellent scores the ad gets, it’s worth a quick reminder of why Fluent Device characters like the Gecko are so important. They provide creative consistency, which our Compound Creativity report proves is a major contributor to long-term business success.

Consistency takes many forms, from agency-brand relationships to long-term assets like logos and jingles. Characters are particularly effective because they hit two targets at once. They entertain, creating positive emotion in the audience, and they’re familiar at the same time. When viewers see the Gecko, they know exactly who the ad is for and they’re primed for laughter as well as insurance information.

In this case, the ad gets a good long-term effectiveness score (a 3.4-Star Rating) and exceptional short-term Spike Rating and Brand Fluency scores. But what’s most impressive is how well these scores stack up against the Home Insurance category as a whole. Across all three metrics, GEICO are landing in the top 7% of all US insurance ads. The Gecko remains a market-beater.

That’s partly down to his charm as a character, and partly down to the magic of consistency, the way the Gecko has made himself familiar and entertaining over the years. While rival insurance brands invest in their own characters and situations, GEICO and the Gecko’s decades of consistency mean they’re still the brand to beat.