The billion-dollar bet that turned insurance into entertainment

Here is the paradox at the center of the American insurance industry: the companies that dominate market share today got there not by explaining what they sell, but by refusing to mention it. Warren Buffett’s GEICO spends more than $2 billion a year on advertising. Almost none of it describes a policy. Almost all of it produces comedy.

I’ve spent a career studying how the screen reshapes commerce—as President and CEO of The Museum of Television & Radio (now The Paley Center for Media), as Harvard Law School’s inaugural Visiting Professor of Entertainment and Media Law, and as a bipartisan adviser to four presidential administrations on media, communications, and technology policy (Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama). What GEICO, Progressive, Allstate, and Liberty Mutual have built is something I have not seen any other industry replicate: a competitive landscape where the primary corporate asset is not the product or the distribution network, but a comedy franchise.

The numbers bear this out. The GEICO Gecko has been on television longer than most sitcom characters. Progressive now runs two parallel comedy franchises simultaneously—Flo, who has become a genuine pop culture icon, and Dr. Rick, the “parenta-life coach” whose campaign about new homeowners turning into their parents won........

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