When you're Geico, you beat jokes into the ground. It's what you do.

Geico has always been somewhat unusual among advertisers in that they tend to run multiple campaigns at once. Even today, you can see Geico spots that still feature the gecko, the "everybody knows that" spots, the weirdly earnest animated ones that seem aimed at the Esurance crowd, and the "it's what you do" ads. Like this one:



Even by the standards of marketers whose idea of brilliance is "We thought of four things you can push, and Salt-N-Pepa are on line two," this is stupendously lazy. I don't really know who was the chicken and who was the egg here, but remember the Super Bowl? Remember how there were not one but TWO spots featuring beloved (?) Internet sensation (??) "goats that scream like humans?" Yeah. There were TWO. Sprint did one that might not even feature a goat (looks more like a sheep). And then Discover also did one. It's like every time two movie studios release nearly identical movies within six months of each other and you're like "Did we even need ONE movie about Steve Prefontaine?"

In some ways, Geico's ad is the best of these three, since the other two really have no jokes other than the screams themselves, which I hasten to add are not jokes. Geico, God bless 'em, actually kind of tried. But come on. All that setup, this complicated factory set, for a joke about how the word "scapegoat" has the word "goat" in it? Hey, what if a scapegoat were a REAL goat? I mean, there's literally no actual joke there, because that's where the word scapegoat FUCKING COMES FROM. I don't expect the Geico ad people to be Biblical scholars - or scholars of anything, really, up to and including ads - but Googling "scapegoat" and finding out that it's not a coincidence takes two seconds. The alternative is that they knew that "scapegoat" had something to do with actual goats in the first place and didn't care because it was such a "great" setup to get that goat scream in there. In which case, fuck them.

It doesn't help matters that this is at least the fourth ad in the "it's what you do" series. Geico is known for draining every last drop of life and humor from their campaigns, and this is no exception. I think the horror movie spot was the first in this series, and it wasn't terrible, as these things go. The Salt-N-Pepa one is okay, I guess. Then you got the camel one, which...



I mean, holy shit, right? It's bad enough that Geico can't stop reusing concepts - now they have to (a) reference their own old ads and (b) editorialize that everyone remembers and loves them? (I suppose I might buy that a few yahoos have screamed "Guess what day it is" at zoo camels in the years since that ad first aired, but literally everyone at the zoo? Also, no one is so intimately familiar with that ad that they're referencing throwaway lines like "Mike Mike Mike!") But then, when most of the purpose behind running five hundred different ads at one time is to see what sticks with people, and then reusing that over and over again, I guess I can't be surprised that anything that had any kind of legs was ridden to death. Like this:



I'm glad for Ickey Woods that he's getting a few paychecks after playing his last NFL game in 1991, but it's kind of amazing that Geico went with this reference at all. I guess when you run as many ads as Geico, you can afford to have one of your five simultaneous campaigns focus on a 25-year-old athletic footnote. And then make all your ads in that campaign about his legendary (???) love of cold cuts. (Woods' Wikipedia page claims that he has been a sales representative for a meat company during his post-NFL career, so maybe this is the weirdest kind of cross-promotion?) I mean, the initial Woods ad, like many initial Geico ads, was mildly amusing. But seriously, go on YouTube and look at all the shit they've got him in. There are literally four different "What's Cooking" videos like the one above, ALL OF WHICH ARE JUST COLD CUTS JOKES. For real. Or there are EIGHT "Ickey Reflections" videos. The main 30-second one, again, isn't awful. I would probably have chuckled to see it on TV:



That's a reasonable follow-up to the initial Ickey ad. This, however, is not:



ERROR 404: JOKE NOT FOUND

Geico has had some funny ads over the years. But given how many they put out, it tends to make them look more like a blind squirrel than a squad of hilarious jokesters. I'm sure we're all excited to see what quarter-century-old reference they can exhume next, though! Here are some suggestions:

"When you're Wilson Phillips, you tell people to hold on. It's what you do."

"When you're Dan Quayle, you add letters to the end of words. It's what you do."

"When you're Macaulay Culkin, you booby-trap your house against burglars. It's what you do."

"When you're the Berlin Wall, you get torn down. It's what you do."

Mo' tacos, mo' problems

Someone please explain to me how this sells burritos.



Back Seat Douche: "You ready?"
Front Seat Douche: "Yeah."

They sound oddly nervous. Although if I were about to humiliate myself utterly, I might be a bit nervous too. This is like the conversation two high school seniors have before yanking off their robes and streaking the graduation stage.

PA Girl: "Can I take your order, please?"

Please note, for the record, that she does not give her name.

Front Seat Douche: "Give me the beat!"
Back Seat Douche: [starts beatboxing like a dipshit]
Front Seat Douche: "Yo - what's up Stephanie, how you doin' today / 89 cents, it's what we're gonna pay / Say hello to Bobby, he's in the back seat - "
Back Seat Douche: "Steph, gimme something big - "
Together: "With a bunch of beef!"

I would love to know why this was necessary. Do you think they're supposed to know the drive-thru clerk and they're playing a joke on her? It would certainly explain how they know her name in spite of the fact that she never says it. Either that or they just made it up to fit their rhyme scheme.

Front Seat Douche: "89 cent Cheesy Double Beef Burrito / Why pay more, that's big and cheap, yo!"

First of all, that barely rhymes. Second of all, I can't be the only one who's utterly sick of ads that pretend to be viral when they're really just shilling exactly the same as any other ads. Taco Bell would love to have you believe that a couple dudes just pulled up outside one of their drive-thrus and busted out this paean to the Cheesy Double Beef Burrito. "Why pay more, indeed, young man?" you'll muse to yourself, making a run for the nearest border forthwith.

Of course, here's the irony - this isn't exactly "thinking outside the bun" on Taco Bell's part. In fact, it's thinking pretty much directly inside the bun, since there have been amateur fast-food video raps all over YouTube for well over a year now. There's one for McDonald's (which appears to be the original), there's one for Wendy's, and - surprise! - there's even one for Taco Bell. Now, these all make me want to die and I can't say I recommend clicking on any of those links, but if you did you would notice that the latest upload date on those three is April 18, 2007; meanwhile, I only noticed Taco Bell's commercials "borrowing" the concept within the past couple weeks. The upload date on the embedded video above is from late February, but that still puts them more than nine months behind (and it's not like it would take more than a couple hours to shit out a commercial like this).

To be fair, it wouldn't have been any better if Taco Bell had gone the Geico route and just outright used the original video. But given that the concept is so obviously unoriginal - and by this point, pretty dated by internet standards - why did they bother to steal it at all? Is this ad really selling burritos? What about it is pointing anyone towards the Taco Bell? Note that in the videos, the people seem to consider what they're doing to be a prank or similar. So the guys who are, in this spot, the pitchmen for Taco Bell are actually pulling a prank on Taco Bell. Well done.

I guess the ad gets across the message - the Cheesy Double Beef Burrito is 89 cents - except that every time this ad starts I lunge for the mute button, so it's not exactly getting rammed home. Yet more proof for the theory that while making obnoxious ads might make people remember you, it's not necessarily true that there's no such thing as bad publicity.