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If you’ve watched any late-night television over the past decade, you’ve no doubt seen the cheesy ads from insurance provider The General. Peppered by overacting, low production quality and mediocre graphics, and appealing to the difficult-to-insure with a boisterous animated general, the omnipresent ads were hard to miss but easy to ignore.
The General tackles its fuzzy optics issue head-on in a new campaign at the center of a brand refresh by agency Highdive. It features The General’s long-standing spokesperson Shaquille O’Neal and some of his famous friends.
To be fair, The General’s old ads weren’t hindering its success. The nearly 60-year-old company had its biggest year to date in 2020. “We exceeded our growth goals. And as we think about 2021, we’re poised for greater growth,” Tony DeSantis, the company’s chief executive officer, told Adweek.
Despite the growth, the brand felt it needed to evolve to tackle the misperceptions of people who think The General isn’t an insurance company that is right for them.
Chief operating officer Tiku Raval noted that the company has over 80% national brand awareness, but that “there was this perception that we just weren’t a quality company because of the nature of the advertising.”
The new ads tackle that misperception with blatant honesty. In one spot, O’Neal’s Inside the NBA co-workers Kenny Smith and Ernie Johnson Jr. come to Shaq in the lunchroom to apologize to him for not believing that The General was a quality insurance company and not letting him sit with them at lunch.
In another, a heavily bearded Shaq is cooking some skunk over a campfire in the woods when hiker Craig Robinson comes upon him.
“Remember when you were telling us to check out The General for car insurance, but we all thought you were losing it, so we left you deep in the woods?” Robison says. “Turns out you were right.”
The mix of celebrity and humor is a recipe that The General thinks will win over those who ignored it in the past, and Highdive—which was recently named Adweek’s 2020 Breakthrough Agency of the Year—was instrumental in bringing that change about.
“Highdive is really the perfect partner for our brand,” said The General’s chief revenue officer, Elicia Azali. “They provoke their audiences to think differently about brands. We want consumers to think differently about The General and really underscore the fact that we’re a quality insurance company that’s been saving people money for 60 years.”
Shaq is key to that success. Since his college days at LSU, he has been using The General, so he was a natural fit for the brand. While he’s been promoting The General for a few years on TV, the campaign by Highdive lets his sense of humor shine.
“He’s a collaborative partner; he’s always got great ideas on set. He makes the spots better. You know, he’s charismatic, he’s fun, he’s lighthearted. There were plenty of laughs and outtakes and fun moments with Craig, Kenny and Ernie on set,” said Azali.
Raval noted that the campaign addresses the elephant in the room—that previous ads had been low quality, resulting in customers believing that the company was low quality, too. But Raval said that “we have a very loyal customer base, and they told us we actually deliver great quality service.”
With the new positioning and branding, which features a redesigned app that lets people see how much they can save, The General hopes to grab a new audience with trust and credibility.
The campaign is launching 10 films that will roll out on TV, digital and social media platforms this month and beyond.
