Eleven years ago, actress Stephanie Courtney sat down for an interview with Atlanta’s WSB-TV. Fresh off a stint with the Groundlings improvisational troupe in L.A., she had recently been cast as Flo, the ever-smiling, retro-bobbed customer service rep for Progressive insurance.
When the station asked her what she made of fans who considered Flo to be desirable, Courtney was flummoxed. “I don’t know what it is,” she said. “The way I play her, she’s pretty much the most asexual thing on TV right now. I think the Geico lizard puts out more sexual vibes than Flo does.”
Leaving aside the Geico gecko’s concupiscence, if there’s one thing more surprising that Flo’s romantic allure, it’s her longevity. The character’s been going strong for well over a decade now, ranking with Planters’ Mr. Peanut and the Pillsbury Doughboy as an instantly recognizable brand mascot.
Much of Flo’s tenure has to do with Courtney’s indelible performance, of course. But just as much has to do with Jeff Charney, the Progressive CMO who championed the character, assembled a literal ensemble of cohorts for her and, in the process, gave the 84-year-old carrier a near-constant media profile.
Progressive announced last week that Charney, hired in 2010, would be stepping down early next year. And he has much to do before handing over the reins to his eventual successor, too. But Charney—an Adweek Brand Genius Award alum from 2011—found a few minutes to talk about championing Flo and why he assembled the unlikely family of spokespeople she’s now a part of.
“Characters can come into people’s living rooms very differently than a company logo,” Charney said. “People believe in those characters—and, thereby, they believe in the company.”
Flo was the brainchild of agency Arnold Worldwide. She made her debut in 2008, some two years before Charney joined Progressive as its CMO. But once Charney saw Flo’s potential, he shifted the bulk of Progressive’s messaging to her shoulders. “I didn’t invent Flo,” Charney explained, “but I made her and kept her relevant.”
The power of ensemble casting
He might easily have stopped there, too. After all, Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes has been relying on Tony the Tiger since 1952, and apparently nobody’s gotten tired of him.
But Charney always saw himself as more of a showrunner than a traditional marketing executive. An L.A. transplant and lifelong fan of Saturday Night Live, he understood the power of ensemble casts. And he didn’t want to run campaigns, he said—he wanted to create a world of real-life characters.
Prior to joining Progressive, Charney ran marketing for Aflac where, as his LinkedIn profile puts it, “he was in charge of the ‘duck.’” And while that quacking mascot was amusing enough, Charney believed customers couldn’t relate to them as personally as they do to their own species. Casting a feathered, furry or scaly creature to speak for a brand is “just not authentic,” he said. “It’s not as relatable.”
Shortly after putting Flo in the limelight, he began building a cast of some 14 other oddballs whose fictitious and partly improvised lives cycle in and out of Progressive spots like canceled episodes of a sitcom. There’s Dr. Rick, a “parenta-life coach” whose sotto-voiced sessions evoke a new age version of Dr. Phil. There’s Jamie, the well-meaning coworker who shares too much personal information on Zoom calls. And there’s Motaur, the fabled insurance creature who’s half man, half motorcycle.
Seizing attention
Some of the spots have little to do with insurance. Most exist for the sole purpose of seizing attention with their halting awkwardness just before doing a reverse dismount into a pitch for Progressive. In the case of Cleveland Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield and wife Emily Wilkinson, Charney took a real-life couple and cast them in At Home With Baker Mayfield, a reality TV-like series in which the couple’s “home” is the 68,000-seat FirstEnergy Stadium—which requires a special kind of insurance policy, of course.
While obviously laying it on thick, Progressive’s characters manage to be real and human enough to identify with. This, Charney said, is the essence of the work they do for the company.
“Running these characters—versus campaigns—is something that nobody had really cracked the code on,” Charney said. “We’ve been doing it for 10 years. We did it before it was cool.”
Light on sales, heavy on character
As for why he gives his actors the breathing room to develop their characters organically instead of just making them hawk the brand and be done with it, Charney believes that consumers stand a better chance of becoming customers when you don’t beat them over the head with sales pitches.
“You don’t have to jackhammer [the] messaging when people just want to relate to your brand,” he said.
When Charney moves on early next year, he’ll be leaving his carefully assembled cast in the hands of Progressive’s next CMO, a person he’s helping to look for at present. As to Charney’s own plans, he preferred not to discuss them.
“I don’t really think about the vacation until that airplane door closes,” he explained. “[But] I’ll always be a marketer.”
