We’re maybe just a few minutes into the second quarter of Sunday’s Steelers-Jets game when the guy in the Emerson Boozer jersey starts griping about that Meghan Trainor State Farm ad. Flustered and querulous, like the geese that once stalked the grounds of the ESPN campus, No. 32 yells something about how he’s seen the singer’s new collaboration with Patrick Mahomes “at least 5,000 times already,” before speculating that the tally should be in six-digits territory by the time Thanksgiving rolls around.
While the singer’s 30-second insurance pitch hasn’t reached peak ubiquity—per iSpot.tv data, the new ad aired 12 times across the NFL’s full Week 1 slate, well shy of the frequency with which Bud Light trotted out a parachuting Peyton Manning (36x)—that in no way illegitimizes the overexposure beef. Watch enough football and every commercial break becomes an exercise in bleary déjà vu, as the spots that bowed in the first quarter begin repeating on you like so many lager burps.
As a discipline, advertising is beset by all sorts of weird internal contradictions, although that’s probably to be expected, given the thankless job commercials are tasked with carrying out. Interrupting the programming that tens of millions of Americans actively consume each weekend is always going to be a tough sell, but when the disruptive elements themselves start to become overly familiar, the negative implications begin to pile up. On the one hand, frequency is a prerequisite for driving the brand message home; on the other, overexposure to any creative execution is all but assured to breed a sort of lingering discontent in the viewer.
In the case of State Farm’s new NFL spot, the flimsy premise wouldn’t seem to invite multiple viewings. The central conceit is an uninspired homonym (“Trainor”/“trainer”), which somehow leads to a gag about the singer’s unfamiliarity with her co-star, a three-time Super Bowl MVP. And yet, despite the somewhat shaky premise—retaining the services of an insurance company that isn’t State Farm is like hiring the All About the Bass warbler to oversee your star quarterback’s injury prevention and/or rehabilitation regimen—the spot hasn’t worn out its welcome. Per iSpot, the ad over-indexed on brand recognition; subsequent to being exposed to the commercial, 92% of consumers could correctly identify State Farm as the sponsor in the absence of any prompts, a percentage that exceeded the 90-day category average (77%).
In addition to the unaided-recognition score, State Farm’s Trainor/trainer mashup was marginally more likable (6%) than the category norm and delivered an attention rating that was 11% higher than the standard insurance offering. And if the half-minute didn’t exactly tickle the ulnar nerve of the guy in the Weeb Ewbank-era threads, iSpot reported that the primary emotion viewers assigned the creative was “funny.” (Speaking of which, it’s sort of darkly hilarious to watch a gentleman with the word “Boozer” heat-transferred onto the back of his shirt getting frog-marched out of a neighborhood sports bar.)
If the initial response to the State Farm spot has been positive, there are inherent risks associated with using giggles as a delivery vehicle for your brand messaging. As the pioneering adman Claude Hopkins opined in his 1923 book Scientific Advertising, “People do not buy from clowns.” Ronald McDonald would beg to differ, although this assertion was made a full 40 years before the hamburger harlequin would supplant Bozo as America’s most beloved parti-colored jester. (Bonus clownery: The first incarnation of Ronald McDonald was brought to life by future Today show mainstay and centenarian-whisperer Willard Scott.)
Studies have shown that humor can be an effective means toward increasing brand recall and positive emotional associations with a given product, although placing too much of a burden on chuckles may accelerate an extinction of the initial responses. A joke bears only so much repetition until it’s no longer funny, which is why advertisers tend to reduce the frequency of their yuk-it-up creative after an initial bombardment. Which is not to say that a humorous spot won’t go on to enjoy a sort of spectral afterlife; Geico still trots out many of its more moth-eaten gags several years after their initial airdates … although the retreads are largely consigned to off-hours and lesser-trafficked viewing environments.
Incidentally, one of the reasons why the insurance category as a whole tends to go all-in on cracking wise is that there’s little room for the companies to provide specific guidance about their policies. Insurance firms are regulated at the state level, so it’s best to steer clear of making claims about what services/coverage when the laws governing the industry in New York may conflict with those in, say, Massachusetts. Generalist messaging is paramount when you’re tiptoeing around potential legal pitfalls. (Also, 30 seconds isn’t near enough time to get into the particulars, which is why these spots are forever offloading viewers to the corporate web site.)
Thus, if State Farm’s latest Mahomes-centric bid for your attention doesn’t quite light up your dopamine receptors, you can take comfort in the knowledge that the company will be rolling out new spots as the season progresses. While Mahomes will once again be an inescapable presence on NFL Sundays—per iSpot, the QB appeared in more in-game breaks (423) last season than any other athlete, leaving also-ran Manning (318) in the pixelated dust—State Farm’s deep pockets give it the latitude to keep its commercial content in a heightened state of freshness. In 2023, the company’s overall U.S. ad spend was $992 million, putting it among the top three brands in its category.
Of the Week 1 advertisers who may be at greater risk of wearing out their welcome as the season grinds on are Verizon TV, Little Caesars, Wingstop and Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, each of which aired 20 or more in-game ads between NBC’s NFL Kickoff Game and ESPN’s first Monday Night Football telecast. The reward for all this tireless marketing is exposure, as NFL advertisers scared up a staggering 10.6 billion viewers during that five-day interval.
As for the league’s network partners, that unparalleled reach is sure to keep the money rolling right in throughout the fall. According to iSpot’s estimates, the primary TV outlets (NBC, CBS, Fox, ABC, ESPN) generated $357.1 million in Week 1 NFL sales, putting them on a path to record revenue in 2025.