4.29.2009

Clever Aflac Duck Spills The Ink In Space Ad Spread

Aflac is to accident and hospital indemnity insurance what GEICO is to auto insurance. They both have catchy, odd names that are very untraditional - not your typical "American National Life & Home" type of thing. And both are highly advertised national brands with a strong "mascot" strategy to generate awareness and recall for their products (GEICO has the animated gecko, and Aflac has the white duck).

Recently, Aflac took out a bunch of space in USA Today to run a series of ads, each promoting various benefits of having Aflac's protection and reasons to go to the Aflac web site. The ads were numbered #1 through #5, each with the heading "get the Aflacts" on a white piece of paper held up by the familiar Aflac duck (does he or she have a name, I wonder?). The first ad said, "Aflac is different from health insurance; it's insurance for daily living." Aflac does sell life, dental, vision and other types of insurance, but these ads are focused on the company's accident and hospital indemnity products. Nevertheless, while their 4-color ads were very eye-catching, simple to read and quickly communicated key benefits, what was truly outstanding was a bit of clever creativity ...

Ink splashes! 

Next to the 4th ad in the lower right corner of the spread, Aflac media buyers bought the lower left quadrant and filed it with benign, fake newspaper text (at the very top of the copy you can see the word "Advertisement") - and over the type, they splayed some blue ink, as if it dripped from the duck's pen in the ad above it. 

Nice creative touch that helps make these strong copy and graphic ads stand out even more!

4 comments:

Ryan Lou said...

Nice analysis.

That was a lot of advertising space though. It was interesting but I hope they got some ROI out of it.

I'm not sure if I saw a Call to Action on their Ad. I do like Geico's "the money you could be saving" Ads.

Honeygo Beasley said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Cynthia said...

Thanks! Ryan, the call to action was weak- but it was at the bottom of each ad to go to the web site url. I didn't show the last ad, #5, which appeared on the next page, after the full spread. Yes, that sure was a lot of space they bought - and I, like you, agree there should be a good return on the investment to make it worthwhile, otherwise it's just wasted space. The "money you could be saving" Geico ads are very catchy - they were a little obscure at first, competing with the cavemen campaign but since the demise of the cavemen, the ads are really getting a lot of attention.

Ryan Lou said...

Yup... I thought the cavemen ads were good too. but they were on for a long time!

Funny thing is I always remembered Geico provided insurance and I love their ads! But I never switched. Hah!

Thanks for stopping by