Pop-Culture Evolution

Published: April 15, 2007

The Geico Cavemen

The recent news that ABC was willing to entertain the possibility of a sitcom starring the Geico cavemen seemed a sort of watershed. Here were characters dreamed up as part of an advertising campaign, potentially crossing over into a venerable form of mainstream, pop-culture entertainment. While that sounds momentous, it misses a larger point. As characters in a successful advertising campaign, the cavemen are already part of mainstream pop culture. More so, in fact, than the characters in most current sitcoms.

If you’ve somehow managed to avoid them, here’s a primer. Since 2004, Geico, the car-insurance company, has been running spots that involve cavemen. In the first, a Geico spokesman brightly tells the camera that the company’s Web site is so easy to use, “a caveman could do it.” At which point the camera pulls back and we realize that the boom-microphone handler is, in fact, a caveman. He stalks off the set, offended. Since then, Geico cavemen have returned in various commercials — and a Web site and carefully strategized public appearances — invariably expressing frustration and disgust at the ignorance and bigotry they face.

The campaign is strange. And this probably is largely responsible for the pop-culture status it has achieved. The Martin Agency, which has handled Geico’s advertising for 13 years, has always wrapped the basic easy-way-to-save-money pitch in humor on the theory that laughter is almost as universal as lack of interest in car insurance. In this instance, the ads turn the difficulty of establishing a simpleton benchmark into an advantage. The gag was originally meant to play out over three ads. The angry-boom-mike installment was followed by a spot in which “we discover that there are cavemen out in the world,” Steve Bassett, a creative director at the firm, explains, “not just working in the entertainment industry.” Specifically, three well-dressed cavemen hang around their sleek, urban apartment. “Obviously, they’re with today’s technology,” he says matter-of-factly, “so they’re on their laptops.” They see a Geico ad — and they’re insulted. The third spot was at a nice restaurant, where a Geico spokesman apologizes to two urbane and plainly appalled cavemen. Funny.

“We didn’t intend to do more,” Bassett continues, and for two years, those spots were it. But on a variety of blogs, and later on YouTube, “hundreds and hundreds of people” were discussing them. Aside from the usual love-or-hate-it chatter, people debated whether the cavemen were gay, or asserted that the ads “cleverly play with race issues.” In 2006, the cavemen returned, to be insulted not just by Geico but also by news-channel pundits and an unsympathetic therapist. In one newer ad, a caveman is shunned by his peers for becoming a Geico customer. In the mainstream press, the campaign has been described as mocking political correctness, but the online deconstructions have been more varied, more subtle and, in some cases, so obsessive it makes you wonder about the routine claims that nobody pays attention to advertising anymore.

In fact, what the caveman ads really reveal is just how potent a form advertising can be — not just as a selling tool but also as cultural communication (or as a “text,” if you like). Partly this is because Geico advertises a lot, spending more than $600 million last year on ads and commercial time. (Martin currently has three Geico campaigns going, the others involving a gecko with a British accent and spots in which people like Little Richard paraphrase the stories of satisfied customers.) Meanwhile, it’s exactly because we’ve seen only brief glimpses of the cavemen that their stories are so open to interpretation. In the comparatively limiting and formulaic context of a sitcom, characters have back stories (and usually a defined sexual orientation), and plots are linear; there’s less room for ambiguity and thus for engaging speculation. And of course, sitcoms are generally on just once a week, on one channel.

If a caveman sitcom materializes, its great challenge will be figuring out how to make an already-popular concept work in such a staid, predictable context. After all, pretty much every late-night monologuist and morning-show host has riffed on Geico advertising; what new sitcom in the past five years has achieved such status as a universally understood reference point? But it’s not hard to see why ABC would be willing to give Martin Agency writers a shot at it. Finding an audience willing to accept advertising characters as entertainment is hardly a hurdle; clearly, an audience has already accepted, and embraced, the cavemen. As Bassett notes, “There’s already a built-in fan base.”