Somewhere in a creative review room, a marketing team is looking at a campaign concept featuring a family gathered around a kitchen table, warm light pouring through a window, a golden retriever nearby, and a voiceover about being there when it matters most. The creative team has crafted this concept thoughtfully, drawing on genuine consumer research, crafting a narrative about protection and peace of mind. The legal team has approved it. The CEO thinks it captures the brand essence.
Twenty-three other insurance companies ran essentially the same campaign this quarter.
This is not coincidence. It is not laziness. It is not even a failure of creative ambition, though it looks like all three from the outside. Insurance advertising sameness is the logical output of a specific set of industry conditions acting on rational people making rational decisions. Understanding why all insurance ads look the same is understanding something true about how categories constrain creativity — and how creativity finds its exits anyway, when it bothers to look.
The Category Trap
Insurance sells an invisible product. Unlike a car, which you can show in motion on a coastal highway, or a phone, which you can film being used in gorgeous light, insurance is the absence of catastrophe. It’s the thing that exists so that the worst thing that could happen doesn’t ruin everything. You can’t photograph protection. You can’t film security. What you can film is the thing that protection makes possible: the family, the home, the future, the ordinary Tuesday that continues undisrupted because someone was thoughtful enough to have a policy.
This constraint — show what the product enables, not the product itself — immediately narrows the visual territory. Insurance enables continuity. Continuity looks like family. Family looks like kitchens and living rooms and backyards and children running toward parents. The golden light is emotional shorthand for “things are good right now and we’d like them to stay that way.” The dog is there because dogs test well with consumers and are universally legible as “comfortable domestic life.”
Advertising, you can argue, is the dog.
Risk Aversion in the Risk-Aversion Business
Insurance companies are structurally risk-averse. This is the point of them. And this structural conservatism extends, with remarkable consistency, into their marketing departments. The brief that says “break category convention” still gets reviewed by the same stakeholders who approved the last three conventionally-produced campaigns. The brand safety concerns are real: an insurance company that runs an edgy, funny, or emotionally complex campaign risks communicating that they are not serious, which is exactly the wrong signal for a company whose entire value proposition is “trust us with your worst moments.”
The few insurance brands that have broken convention — GEICO with its parade of absurdist characters, Progressive with Flo’s cheerful uncanniness, Lemonade with its design-first digital irreverence — tend to be companies that identified a specific positioning advantage in being different. GEICO decided price and ease were the story; absurdist humor communicates “we don’t take ourselves too seriously” and by extension “we’re not like those stiff old insurance companies.” The humor is strategic, not random.
But here’s the thing: GEICO’s success inspired a wave of insurance companies trying to do “the funny one,” which recreated the sameness at a different register. Now there are multiple insurance brands running quirky campaigns that are trying to be the GEICO of their sub-category. The category trap moves, but it doesn’t disappear.
What the Sameness Actually Communicates
This is the most uncomfortable part of the analysis: the sameness might be working. Not working in the sense that it’s building distinctive brands or generating cultural impact or earning creative awards, but working in the sense that it communicates “we are a trustworthy, established, normal insurance company” — which is what a significant portion of insurance buyers need to feel before purchasing. The warm family is not there to inspire. It’s there to reassure.
Effectiveness research in financial services and insurance consistently shows that category conventions build category trust. Consumers recognize the visual language of “real insurance company” and it lowers their purchase anxiety. A genuinely distinctive insurance campaign risks being filtered out as “weird” or misread as “probably a startup that will disappear.” Category sameness is, in certain segments, a feature.
This doesn’t make the creative work interesting. It makes it strategic in a way that’s hard to argue with from inside a client meeting. When the brief says “we need to be trusted by conservative buyers in the 45-65 demographic,” the golden retriever and the kitchen light are a reasonable creative solution, even if they’re also the same creative solution your competitor ran last month.
The Exit, For Those Who Are Looking
The genuinely exciting creative work in insurance happens at the edges: in digital product experiences, in content that educates rather than reassures, in campaigns that target underserved segments who are specifically not being served by the mainstream visual language. It happens when someone with creative courage makes the case that their brand has a specific permission to be different because they’ve earned a different kind of trust.
It also happens, occasionally, when someone in a creative meeting looks at the brief and says the thing that everyone is thinking: “This is exactly what our top three competitors did last year. Is that what we want?” Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes that question opens a door.
The Fuck The Brief notebook is for writing the campaign you’d pitch if you had the permission. Maybe one day you’ll get it. In the meantime, visit No Briefs Club for creative that didn’t ask permission and got away with it.
