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Brian Steinberg
Senior TV Editor
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Courtesy of Aflac It seems as simple as moving a few letters around, but a new collaboration between Aflac, the provider of supplemental insurance and Ben Affleck, the actor and director, has been years in the making.
Pairing Aflac, which has thrived with commercials featuring an anthropomorphic duck squawking out its name, and Affleck. the star of “Good Will Hunting,” “Gone Girl” and “Argo,” is an idea that has been in the ether for some time, acknowledges Garth Knutson, the insurer’s senior vice president and chief marketing officer. “This has probably been tens of thousands of peoples’ idea,” he says during a recent interview. “It’s one of those things that people just make as a joke. Even Ben has been joking about it for a long time — maybe he has been a little bit more annoyed in the past.”
Aflac has struck a partnership with Artists Equity, the production studio founded by Affleck, Matt Damon and financier Gerry Cardinale, and their first new work shows up Saturday during ESPN’s “College GameDay,” and, subsequently, in other types of sports programming, including ESPN’s “Monday Night Football,” and in connected-TV inventory. In the first new ad, Affleck gets a lesson from popular coaches Nick Saban, Deion “Coach Prime” Sanders and Dawn Staley on what Aflac does and how supplemental coverage can help consumers.
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The star power shines a light on the increasingly competitive nature of advertising from top insurance companies. Aflac initially gained a bigger profile after introducing its duck mascot in 1999, in ads crafted by Kaplan Thaler Group, an independent agency that was eventually acquired by Publicis Groupe of France. The duck flew on to Madison Avenue just months after the debut of the Geico Gecko, another popular insurance mascot.
In the intervening decades, the average consumer has likely encountered Jake From State Farm; Progressive’s Flo and her colleagues Jamie and Mara, not to mention Dr. Rick; Allstate’s Mayhem; Geico’s Cavemen; and Farmers Insurance’s Professor Burke. Liberty Mutual recently expanded its gallery of characters with a fuzzy yellow creature called Liberty Biberty. The challenge for Aflac is that many of the aforementioned insurance companies spend $1 billion or more annually on advertising, with Progressive spending more than $4 billion, according to data from S&P Global and Dowling & Partners.
Aflac typically spends under $100 million on U.S. advertising, according to MediaRadar, a tracker of ad spending. Keep in mind: Aflac is more of a specialist, selling supplemental insurance that pays out extra cash benefits for out-of-pocket costs and bills that are not covered by primary health insurance.
Does Knutson feel he’s under pressure to stand out? “I think about it all the time,” he says. “The answer is, ‘Absolutely, yes.'”
He has a few tools within easy reach. The Duck, he says, “is extremely cheap for a celebrity, at least from a payment standpoint. He works for bread, a different kind of bread than what you or I work for.” He also has the support of the company’s senior executives. Aflac CEO Daniel Amos has run the company for decades and played a role in launching the waterfowl into advertising stardom.
Still, says Knutson, “we have to punch above our weight.” Consumers might not encounter Aflac ads in as many places as they do commercials from others, he says, but the company hopes “that people who do see them are more inclined to remember the message and, hopefully, act on it.”
Artists Equity has made a name for itself as a producer of commercials that command attention. Among its best-known efforts are a series of Super Bowl ads from Dunkin that feature Affleck and several famous associates, and a spot for Stella Artois that pairs Damon with soccer great David Beckham.
Affleck was extremely involved in the process, says Knutson. “If we had twelve creative reviews with them, Ben was in all of the first six of them,” he recalls. In many cases, a celebrity featured in a commercial doesn’t start working on it until much later in the process, he notes. Indeed, an agency might tap a young associate to read lines that a star will handle for the finished product. “That speaks to how intertwined he and his team have been in this project.”
New Aflac/Affleck ads are expected to run into 2027, says the executive. A second flight will begin to surface around Thanksgiving, around the time many employees are considering insurance options during open-enrollment processes. And in March, Aflac will have a presence alongside some notable entertainment properties, says Knutson, without offering further detail.
The initial contact between Aflac and Affleck came after Knutson talked about the concept with his boss, Virgil Miller, president of the insurance company. From there, Knutson sent a “cold email” to the Artists Equity executive he thought would be most appropriate. When the two companies met to discuss concepts, Knutson was surprised by how much of Affleck’s interest his team had captured. “To have an agency founder who also happens to be a celebrity asking smart questions about supplemental health insurance? It really blew me over.”
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