Insurance giant Geico has co-opted some of art history’s best-known works for a new series of ads in which figures from Leonardo da Vinci’s “La Gioconda” and Jacques-Louis David’s “Napoleon Crossing the Alps” to Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (all embedded below) expound on the advantages of its insurance policies. The campaign, conceived by the Martin Agency, includes 15- and 30-second spots and has been dubbed the “Geico Museum of Modern Insurance.”
The campaign began with riffs on popular memes and generic vintage imagery, including the famous U.S. Army recruitment mascot Uncle Sam. Recently, however, it has gone high art by deploying some of the world’s most famous artworks to do its bidding.
The campaign seems to subscribe to the “Night at the Museum” school of sentient artworks, in which inanimate pieces of art come to life and interact. Which artwork will try to sell us insurance next? “American Gothic”? “Cloud Gate”? “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”? Actually, that last one we’d like to see.
— Benjamin Sutton
(Image: Screenshot from YouTube.)
