Inside the Campaign: The Martin Agency’s ‘Fast Forward’ for GEICO

The 4A’s wants to share the thinking and strategy behind creative work being done by our member agencies. Here, The Martin Agency provides insights into it’s wildly successful work for GEICO.

Campaign: “Fast Forward”

Agency: The Martin Agency

Client: GEICO

Project Description

Until now, pre-roll ads have been passive entertainment. GEICO “Fast Forward” changed all that by adding a new level of interaction and creative disruption.

The Challenge

Following last year’s “Unskippable” campaign, this year presented us with a new pre-roll problem – a 15-second media buy without any skip buttons. Our problem was two-fold: one, keep people from hating a pre-roll ad they’re forced to watch to the end; and two, get people to pay attention to our messaging.

Executing “Fast Forward”

We decided to do viewers a favor: fast-forward to the end of our own pre-roll ad. Our target audience was YouTube viewers, who find pre-roll ads annoying and normally tune them out. Our strategy? To create videos so compelling that people would actually choose to watch more.

We ran 15-second pre-roll ads as paid media on YouTube. We designed these pre-roll ads to inspire a direct interaction where, at the end of each 15-second pre-roll, viewers could click to watch the full-length ad (also on YouTube) and see what they missed—not to mention be exposed to more GEICO brand messaging.

New Pre-Roll Possibilities

With “Fast Forward,” we were able to elevate 15-second pre-roll into a platform for long-form brand storytelling. Viewers came to YouTube to watch a video, were served our pre-roll ad, then actually chose to watch more of the ad instead of continuing on to their video.

The Results

In the first three weeks following the launch, the campaign had over half a million views. Most importantly, the extended versions had almost as many views as the paid 15-second pre-rolls. With a 91.7 percent correlation between paid and unpaid views, that means nine out of 10 paid views were being converted into voluntarily watching the full-length ads.

The Creative Team

  • Agency: The Martin Agency
  • Chief Creative Officer: Joe Alexander
  • Group Creative Director: Steve Bassett
  • Group Creative Director: Wade Alger
  • Creative Director: Neel Williams
  • Associate Creative Director: Mauricio Mazzariol
  • Executive Producer: Brett Alexander
  • Broadcast Producer: Liza Miller
  • Junior Broadcast Producer: Coleman Sweeney
  • Group Account Director: Brad Higdon
  • Account Executive: Allison Hensley
  • Account Coordinator: Allie Waller
  • Business Affairs Supervisor: Suzanne Wieringo
  • Financial Account Supervisor: Monica Cox
  • Senior Production Business Manager: Amy Trenz
  • Project Manager: Karen McEwen
  • Production Company: FURLINED
  • Director: Nick Ball
  • President: Diane McArter
  • Senior Executive Producer: David Thorne
  • Executive Producer: David Richards
  • Producer: Jason Gilbert
  • Editorial Company: Cut + Run
  • Executive Producer: Carr Schilling
  • Producer: Annabelle Dunbar-Whittaker
  • Editor: Frank Effron
  • Assistant Editor: Brian Meagher
  • Telecine: MPC
  • Colorist: Ricky Gausis
  • Animation/VFX: MPC
  • Executive Producer: Lexi Stern
  • Senior Producer: Juliet Tierney
  • Production Coordinator: Valentina Cokonis
  • Line Producer: Deepanjali Singh
  • VFX Supervisor: Gizmo Rivera
  • VFX Supervisor/Nuke Lead: Jim Spratling
  • Comp/Prep Lead: Avinash Bhandary
  • Roto Lead: Sivakumar R
  • Music: Black Iris
  • Executive Producer: Jon Spencer
  • Senior Producer: Amanda Patterson
  • Executive Creative Director: Justin Bailey
  • Creative Director: Rich Stine
  • Composer: Justin Bailey
  • Audio Post Company: Rainmaker Studios
  • Engineer/Mixer: Jeff McManus, Mike O’Connor