What Happened To All The Beer Commercials On TV?

Beer commercials that once flooded sports programs are almost nonexistent, reports The NY Post.

In 2021, roughly 15,560 beer commercials aired on television, compared to a staggering 104,270 insurance ads. Across the big four broadcast networks, as well as ESPN, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News, insurance ads jumped from 71,000 minutes of commercial airings in 2016 to 109,297 minutes in 2021 — a 52.3 percent increase, according to iSpot, a company that measures the brand impact of TV advertising. Meanwhile, ad minutes for beer brands (including hard seltzer) have remained at around 7,000 airing minutes per year since 2016, according to iSpot.

“Both GEICO and Liberty Mutual grew their respective footprints by leaps and bounds on major networks,” said iSpot analyst Sammi Scharninghausen. “The insurance industry as a whole started buying more spots against sports programming, especially the NFL.”

The tone of beer commercials has also dramatically shifted. In the ’80s and ’90s, beer commercials were dominated by talking frogs, Spuds MacKenzie, animated beer bottles playing football, and the “Wazzup” guys. But, in recent years, the spots have become increasingly somber, like Anheuser-Busch’s “Let’s Grab a Beer” campaign from last year.

This is at least partly due to the pandemic, according to The Post.

Insurance ads, meanwhile, which have historically been stoic and melodramatic — think Prudential’s “Rock of Gibraltar” spots from the ’70s and ’80s — have taken up the comedy mantle where beer companies left off.

And TV viewers have noticed. On one sports online message board, a football fan recently complained, “I feel like Liberty Mutual and GEICO are the only ones even trying anymore. Beer commercials are no longer existent. ESPN hasn’t had a good commercial in like 20 years.”

In 1999, Aflac — an anagram for American Family Life Assurance Company — a Columbus, Ga.-based insurance firm, had a problem. Despite spending over $100 million in advertising during the ’90s, they had only two percent market awareness. Customers just didn’t know or care that they existed. 

So CEO Dan Amos reached out to Linda Thaler, a legend in advertising — she created some of the industry’s most iconic taglines like “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, I’m a Toys ‘R’ Us Kid” and “Kodak Moments” — with one request: Come up with a commercial that’ll make people remember the name.

“Dan told us that if we could do that, he wouldn’t care if we showed a naked man tap-dancing on a roof,” Thaler told The Post.

The agency struggled to find the right concept, until one day when Thaler was storming through the office, shouting at the copywriters, “The name is Aflac! Aflac! Aflac!!” One of the writers reached out and pinched Thaler’s nose, remarking that she sounded like a duck quacking. A tagline was born.

Just a few years after the first Aflac duck commercial aired in 2000, public awareness of the company jumped “by 96 percent,” Thaler says. “Aflac became a household name.” Over the past two decades, the company’s stock jumped by 325 percent, compared to 124 percent gains for the S&P 500 during that same period. 

The success of the Aflac duck and GEICO gecko, which both premiered in 1999, launched what Kirk Luo, a Strategy Director at the Martin Agency, calls an “advertising arms race to become one of those top-of-mind insurers.”

Name recognition is the ultimate goal of these ads. In some cases, they’re not even something that home viewers can purchase.

‘Advertising is about recruiting the young and impressionable. You have to try to be cool and make friends for the brand.’

Despite the sheer volume of ads, people know less than ever about how insurance actually works. According to a 2021 study from Bend Financial, 56 percent of Americans feel “completely lost” when it comes to understanding how to pick health insurance. And in a recent survey from The Zebra, just 21 percent of drivers would get a passing grade (D+ or higher) when it comes to auto insurance comprehension. 

According to Kolt, that’s exactly how insurance companies prefer it. “They think their customers are stupid,” he says. “And stupid customers are easier to deceive when it comes to reading the fine print of insurance contracts.”