The Martin Agency Asks Salt-N-Pepa to Spice Up Geico

The Martin Agency makes sacreligious use of Salt-N-Pepa’s iconic 90s hit “Push It” — as well as the group itself — in its latest spot for Geico.

The 30-second ad opens on a man trying to pull open a door that says “Push” on it. Soon Salt-N-Pepa show up behind him and break into “Push It” and the man walks in. Next we see the pair in an elevator (with Spinderella in the background), a Lamaze class, and at a football practice while performing the song. “If you’re salt and pepper, you tell people to push it. It’s what you do,” says a voiceover, in the campaign’s familiar formula. “If you want to save 15 percent or more on car insurance, you switch to Geico. It’s what you do.” The Martin Agency then manages to slip in a quick gag after the tagline.

The campaign, whose tagline feels like a response to Esurance’s “Insurance for the modern world” (with that company directly taking on Geico’s “15 percent or more “selling point in its advertising), seems like its running out of steam as its joke runs a bit thin, so bringing in an act nostalgic viewers will be pleased to see make sense. And Salt-N-Pepa’s presence certainly makes the ad more memorable, even if it can’t quite save the tired premise.  (more…)

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Geico Adds More ‘Work’ to Their Weird Digital Art Museum

The Geico Museum of Modern Insurance may not be the Louvre, but you can find the Mona Lisa in both places. In August, the Martin Agency teamed with Geico to launch a digital art museum, which is really another way of saying 15- and 30-second ads that run before videos on Hulu, Netflix, etc. Six weeks later, the museum’s collection has been updated with new videos that continue to embrace the quirky side of art. In most of the clips, people and animals in paintings talk to each other about insurance. The original press release even comes with a cutesy G-MOMI abbreviation, which sounds more like a bad rapper name than a neighbor to the Modern Museum of Art. However, MOMA does not have Napoleon Bonaparte singing a duet of “She’ll Be Coming ‘Round the Mountain.” G-MOMI does.

Other clips, a few of which you can watch after the jump, include George Washington talking to a cat and Mona Lisa talking to a baby. They’re short, strange, and potentially funny if you like the absurd. Credits below.

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