How Many Jakes Are There?

Please don’t mess with Jake from State Farm.

Is it just me or does anyone else notice that highly successful campaigns make it very hard for clients to move on to something new? They keep falling back to; “Well, this new concept is good but not as good as that great campaign was. Can’t we just run that one again?” I’ve heard that several times in my career. Being creative, and by creative I mean fresh and different, is risky. It’s hard for clients to step into their “discomfort” zone. But when they do and it’s successful, they find it hard to do the same thing again.

I also think many clients are lazy. The best example of that is the “Got Milk” campaign. This campaign was a huge success for the milk industry. So, what happens, every small business and do-it-yourself marketers began “Got (fill in the blank).” To me this is not just knocking off someone else’s work but it’s lazy. Can’t anyone be original and creative? But again, that takes work and risk, and that’s just too much effort.

So, what’s happening with Jake from State Farm? Very simply, I get the need to appeal to a more diverse audience. I get the desire to demonstrate that State Farm as a company promotes diversity. But why mess with Jake? So, here we are with a commercial that was very popular, even iconic for State Farm, so let’s just update Jake to be the “new” look of State Farm.

Again, I get it, all the reasons why and the goal. But honestly, to me, it’s again just lazy. It’s too much work to try to create a new more diverse State Farm agent, so let’s just reintroduce Jake and change his race. Wow, that’s so subtle. I would never have noticed the switch. Maybe that’s the point too, since the original spot aired years ago maybe State Farm thinks all these new young drivers won’t remember the original Jake and just go with it.

So, really? That’s the best you can do with that? How do you know that commercial will even appeal to a younger audience?

That takes me to the rest of the new Jake campaign. There seems to be no problem creating new spots with Jake from State Farm as the hero. I commend them for actually doing something new, so why not just give the agent a new name and be done? But after watching the spots I can see that the spots just don’t make any sense - at all. Maybe the scripts made sense to the client, but as an audience and consumer, they are so contrived and not funny - just - stupid. It gives Jake a bad name.

So, on the one hand I wish they would be original with their new agent diversity campaign, but at the same time I wish they could do something original that is actually respectful of diversity while hitting the humorous mark. This new approach does neither.