The Unlikely Titan Of Advertising

Laughing at a TV commercial for car insurance was once inconceivable, but now millions of Americans are doing just that thanks to a talking lizard, a group of disgruntled Neanderthal Cavemen, and fading celebrities such as Little Richard.

In his commercial, singer Little Richard sits next to a woman who hit a deer on Thanksgiving night.

"I called GEICO expecting a recording but someone was there to help me," she said on the commercial.

"Help me! Somebody help me!" Little Richard screamed next to her.

"GEICO got my claim in the works right away and I was able to enjoy my Thanksgiving," she said.

"Mashed potatoes! Gravy! And cranberry sauce! Whoooo, hoooo!" Little Richard wailed.

As Sunday Morning correspondent Martha Teichner explains, the three commercials for car insurance company GEICO have become a part of American pop culture.

These ads are not the product of a fancy Madison Avenue or Los Angeles ad agency, but are all the creation of the Martin Agency in Richmond, Va., which prides itself on being the anti-Madison Avenue agency. In fact, one company president used to have a sign on the door saying:" To hell with New York."

"People do not come to Richmond, Va. For the restaurants," said Mike Hughes, president and creative director of the Martin Agency. "We have to give advertisers a reason to come to Richmond, Va. and if it's not the creative, we're nothing."

Only about 380 people work at the Martin Agency, but the company is having a gigantic impact on advertising.

"We are doing things that are likeable and approachable," Hughes said.

Hughes said the agency came up with the idea of a talking gecko because through their research, they learned that people had trouble remembering the name GEICO, which stands for the Government Employees Insurance Corporation. The agency's creative people thought GEICO sounded like gecko and went from there. It has worked. GEICO's revenue is soaring.

"One of the art directors, I think, he said, 'You know what if we put a character like, I don't know, something like a gecko or something,'" said Steve Bassett who is in charge of the GEICO account

In 1999, the gecko made what was supposed to be his one and only television appearance, except that people liked him, and he sold insurance. Since then, he's evolved gone is his posh British accent, he's now a working class cockney.

We purposefully wanted to do more of sort of everyman," Bassett said. "We shortened, shortened his torso here and just the hint of shoulders that he could shrug, some eyelids here and things like that."

Women tend to like the gecko, whose message is all about name recognition while young men seem to prefer the caveman.

"The caveman started with a really simple creative brief GEICO.com is easy to use," he said.

The loony celebrity testimonials about service were aimed at an older audience. It's almost unheard of for an agency to run three different sets of ads simultaneously.

"I think, I think if you did just one campaign, one story line, one sort of joke set-up, it would get old pretty quickly," Bassett said.

But the ads that are out there seem to have taken on a life of their own in pop culture, which is really hitting the jackpot for an advertiser in the age of Tivo.

"When GEICO started with us, they were spending probably just 1 or 2 million and now they've had 3 million new customers last year, they're the fastest growing car insurance, and now I don't think it's revealing too much to say they spend in the hundreds of millions of dollars…because it pays like crazy," Hughes said.

Stuart Elliott covers the advertising industry for the New York Times and says that other companies have now had to try to counter the effects of GEICO's advertising and it has turned into something of an arms race.

"The effect of that on the Madison Avenue agencies has been that they're trying no to be more creative and more innovative,' he said.

"I just hope these commercials raise the level of advertising — make it a more pleasant experience," Hughes said. "I hope our commercials are having a cleansing effect on commercials. There is often too much cynicism."

The Martin Agency is also responsible for the UPS commercials — "What can brown do for you?" — as well the army of scissors chopping up credit cards in the Discover card commercials.

Andy Azula is in charge of the UPS account, but he's also the guy standing at the white board, drawing in the commercials. Needless to say, it's extremely rare for an advertising executive to wind up in the ad.

"I think this climate lets your inner goofball out quite a bit…in fact I think it's highly encouraged....I think that's where a lot of the best ideas come from," he said.

The Martin Agency has just landed the biggest retail account of them all: Wal-Mart.

"When you find you've won something like Wal-Mart, this huge, huge goliath and there is this 15-minute period where you say, 'Now what? What do we do now?'"