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I was watching the Giants get blown away by the Green Bay Packers this evening, when the above commercial for State Farm insurance kept coming on.
This year State Farm, which is a major life, health and auto insurer in America, has been running an ad that relies on its well-known 40-year-old jingle, “Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there.” (I think this was originally, “just like a good neighbor”, but never mind.)
The gag is that whenever the policy holder says this famous line from the world of voiced commercials, a State Farm agent appears to help them with their immediate claim. What’s very funny is that the people whom the insured is with start dreaming up their own wants and desires, which immediately appear as well.
Some sexual tension in that one, where the nagging girlfriend turns her boyfriend into handsome actor Mehcad Brooks. In turn, she gets changed into lingerie model Selita Ebanks. (Having come to you recently from Japan, of course I had to look the names of these actors up. Man, I have to know who is who and what’s been going on here. It’s part of my re-integrating to American society!)
There are two or three others out on the net, with different themes.
The jingle itself is the brainchild of Keith Reinhard, who had worked for the Needham ad agency in what is known in the ad world as the golden age (or creative era, depending) of the 1960’s and ’70’s. I am not sure if the talent went to such phrases as “you deserve a break today” as much as that commercial messages simply became much more pervasive, more entrenched than they had been before television. Maybe the innovation was in how the message became more personalized than it had been in, say, the 1950’s. It was less of someone’s hard sell, and more of a suggestive, soft sell.
So the appeal of “just like a good neighbor”. Bringing in the retired Bob Barker, who is like the Mino Monta of American TV, adds to the retro theme.
The young woman’s “whoa hoo hoo hoo” has its own distinctiveness. [Update 3/30/11: the best guess, since I get a routine hit on this very question, is that this is ad actor Nichole O’Connor (Twitter feed).] You can bet that must be a thing she does as part of her everyday style, that the folks shooting the piece had her do 12 times to get it down just how they wanted it.
[Update: one from back in the ’80’s . . . at 0:35
Hoofin 