After surviving the past month’s Disney Lucasfilm NFL Christmasgiving marketing onslaught, we enjoyed a moment of relative silence before opening our email and realizing that nothing could represent the holiday season’s in(s)anities more completely than a series of barely-believable insurance claims.
When last we heard from Farmers Insurance and its AOR RPA, the company had enlisted J. Jonah Jameson to lecture us about potential “blind spots” in our coverage.
This time, the pair organized a contest in which Farmers’ own agents nominated the oddest claims they’ve received throughout their storied insurance careers. The company and agency then whittled more than 200 submissions down to a few winners…and they are odd birds (or ponies) indeed. These stories provide the opening shot in a new campaign called “We Know From Experience.”
First, no animals were harmed in the making of this stag pool party.
The above shindig went down in Colorado when a few deer “inadvertently” got stuck in a homeowner’s pool after (we assume) consuming his/her yearly “crop.” We do believe that it really happened, though our attempts to find photographic evidence via Google search only led us to a bunch of heavily saturated white bros.
Next, here’s one reason why you must always protect your steaks from Stephen Colbert’s least favorite “godless killing machines.”
This one went down in California, of course, when a big brown broke into one dude’s vacation home and unleashed a bit of the old ultra violence. We might ask who buys a vacation spot in the suburbs and stores steaks in a freezer there, but bears don’t know or care much about narrative consistency.
These totally real claims serve a dual purpose in reminding us just how important the services of one Farmers Insurance can be over the holidays or, you know, every day.
The full campaign includes an interactive “Hall of Claims” microsite illustrating these and other such are-they-real incidents like the time someone’s car was damaged by a “kangaroo-sized rodent” and the time some presumably drunk high schoolers stole an official mascot which happened to be a chipmunk. (That’s standard teen comedy fare, no?)
We also liked the one about the woman who accidentally drove into her own living room and the one in which a team of divers found a truck at the bottom of a river by using its “door is ajar” chime.
Some others that haven’t yet appeared in ads:
- “Farmers found temporary housing for an entire family when their house burned down, including their 9 pet mini-ponies.”
- “A woman was driving down the road with her pet parrot when she ran out of parrot snacks. The hungry parrot attacked, causing her to drive off the road.”
Several of the shorts will serve as pre-rolls, and they will make paid Facebook appearances in addition to full-page “takeovers” on such properties as Forbes and The New York Times.
Agency: RPA
EVP, Chief Creative Office: Joe Baratelli
SVP, Group Creative Director: Pat Mendelson
Creative Director/Art: Hobart Birmingham
Creative Director/Copy: Perrin Anderson
Associate Creative Director/Copy: Jeff St. Jean
Senior Art Director: Rob Anton
Senior Art Director: Erin Costello
Copywriter: Andrew Hajjar
SVP, Chief Production Officer: Gary Paticoff
VP, Executive Producer: Selena Pizarro
Senior Producer: Kay Lynn Dutcher
Production Company: MJZ
Director: Craig Gillespie
Executive Producer: Emma Wilcockson
Line Producer: Debbie Tietjen
Director of Photography: Masanobu Takayagi
Editorial: Cut+Run
Executive Producer: Carr Schilling
Head of Production: Amburr Farls
Editors: Steve Gandolfi and Lucas Eskin
Telecine: Company 3
Senior Artist: Dave Hussey
VFX/Finish: Method
Executive Producers: Robert Owens and Stephanie Gilgar
Senior Producer: Pip Malone
Sound Design and Mix: Lime Studios
Producer: Susie Boyajan
Engineers: Loren Sibler and Rohan Young