You are now entering Ad Space, a realm of commercials, brought before us so we might examine how they work, and discuss why we both love and hate them so. So it is written …
The Product:
Esurance
The Promotions:
The Pitch:
We’re a violent, shadowy, black-ops insurance company … but our sales rep is a sexy Sydney Bristow/Kim Possible hybrid!
Most of what I have to say about the rise (and fall) of Erin Esurance is derived from this article.
Gist of it is, back in 2004, Esurance’s gimmick was that it let you buy insurance entirely online, without needing to meet face-to-face with a sales rep, something that was rare back then. Market research determined that 18 – 24 year old males were the most willing to make online insurance purchases, and in researching what 18 – 24 year old males liked on gaming forums, Esurance discovered that an awful lot of them were obsessed with the character of Sydney Bristow from the then-hit TV show Alias.
Thus, Erin Esurance was born: a corporate spokescartoon who wore a pink wig and sexy outfits, kicked a lot of ass, and went on over-the-top missions inspired by the she spy craze of the 2000’s.
The character was initially a big success, garnering a lot of attention for the fledgling insurance company. However, just five years after the character’s creation, Esurance retired Erin in 2010. They gave no explanation as for why (well, no explanation that wasn’t a bunch of that corpo-speak spin doctoring that means nothing), but there are two main theories as to what happened.
First is that, while Erin Esurance was a very eye-catching spokesperson, they weren’t actually great at making people want to buy insurance. Anecdotally, I’ve heard people say how they caught these commercials on TV and assumed they’d channel surfed onto a cartoon action show, so when the cartoon spies suddenly started talking about insurance, they were like, “Wait, all that was for a crummy commercial?”
For a more hard numbers approach, there was a survey done of corporate mascots, which found that, while 19% of consumers found Erin Esurance sexy, only 5% of them found the character sincere … and 30% found ’em annoying.
Though that high sexiness rating brings us to the other big theory for why Erin Esurance is no more.
Simply put: Esurance was not prepared for the sheer volume of pornographic fanart their mascot would inspire. I feel like a company now would take it as a given that you can’t produce a sexy cartoon character (or even an in-no-way sexy cartoon character) without it getting the Rule 34 treatment, and you just have to manage the brand around that. But in those early days of the World Wide Web, Esurance was not up to the task – it got to the point where, if you did an image search for “Erin Esurance”, 9 out of 10 results would involve the character naked.
While sex can sell, for a company selling something as thoroughly unsexy as insurance, that was probably a bit much.