The brief was to reinforce GEICO’s commitment to making car insurance easy in a way that would break through and invite buzz in the weeks before the Super Bowl, America’s biggest, most crowded advertising event. By attracting online buzz and earned attention, we wanted to reinforce GEICO’s commitment to making insurance easy, and thus, increase quotes.

Since the Super Bowl field is so crowded, we knew we’d need something big, spiky and more memorable than a :30 commercial to break through.

For the past 25 years, the GEICO Gecko has become a legend. A humble, friendly soft-spoken spokeslizard, he has a “Q” rating up there with Mickey Mouse, but he’s a bit of a mystery. Is he British? Australian? Americans love to speculate.

So, after 25 years of speculation, we thought it was time to answer some questions, with a mockumentary that introduced viewers to his family, friends and co-workers, along with familiar faces from past GEICO ads.

Most prominently, we brought back the Gecko’s rival, the GEICO Caveman, a brand anti-mascot so beloved, he once inspired his own sitcom.

But the film was just the start. We created a universe of content mimicking other film rollouts, with trailers, teasers, posters, tie-in products and even IMDb and Letterboxd pages and social media handles for our characters, telling the story of Gecko’s rise and the Caveman’s fall across every medium.

2023 was the year brands dipped their toe into entertainment, turning their brand lore into highly entertaining films like “Barbie” and “Air.”

GEICO has a long history of highly entertaining, quotable ads. For “Legend of the Lizard,” we wanted to break out of the broadcast box, reaching and rewarding our audience wherever they were.

So instead of an ad, we made a film: a 15-minute mockumentary about the Gecko’s backstory that was both a loving tribute and parody of branded films.

Then, we rolled it out with an absolute universe of content. Across TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, IMDb and even film review social network Letterboxd, we rolled out teasers, trailers, movie tie-in products and even gave our characters their own social handles to comment on each others’ posts. Much more than an ad, it was a universe of entertainment, built to meet our audience wherever they are.

In our previous film, “The Nightmare,” the Caveman was invited to appear in a GEICO documentary after a ten-year absence. In this one, he’s filmed the doc and is sitting down with his wife, Tina, to watch some football with the rest of America. Then, in a meta twist, the trailer for “his documentary” airs, and much to his dismay, the documentary is entirely about GEICO’s mascot, the Gecko. The spot introduced our Super Bowl campaign while once again slighting the Caveman in a fun and unexpected way.

The campaign launch was a hit, inspiring over 4 million social shares and 6,000 posts on social media turning “GEICO” into a trending topic on X (formerly Twitter) when the spots aired. Along with many positive brand mentions, the campaign that kicked off with these spots garnered over 2.4 billion impressions. Most crucially, January 2024 was GEICO’s best month ever, with a 50% increase in car insurance quotes over the same time previous year.