Scott EmpringhamAI Marketing Strategist | Helping CEOs Scale with AI

ONE OF THE GREATEST AD CAMPAIGNS EVER 🔥#Marketing#Advertising#Allstate#Mayhem

4 Jun 2026 · 1 min

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1:16

In this spoken retrospective, the speaker explains how Allstate, facing stiff competition from State Farm, Geico, Progressive and other traditional insurers, tasked its agency Leo Burnett Chicago with developing a bold advertising concept. Research revealed that consumers avoided realistic accident depictions, so the brief called for a comedic portrayal of mishaps, resulting in the creation of the "Mayhem" character. The Mayhem campaign, using humor to illustrate potential losses, quickly gained notoriety, boosted Allstate’s market share, and earned numerous industry awards. The speaker notes the rarity of advertising campaigns that endure for 15+ years, citing other long‑running insurance mascots such as Flo (Progressive) and the Geico Gecko as comparable examples.

Chapters

Allstate was starting to get nipped at, and State Farm, and the big traditional players. And I'm like, look, we got a big risk here. I asked the agency, it was Leo Burnett Chicago, to come up with an idea that would show bad things happening and then say to the customer at the end, kind of the brief was, you know, accidents are gonna happen, and if they do, do you really wanna be in the hands of these cockroach carriers? Now, in reality, Geico, Progressive, and all had terrific claims experience, but that wasn't my job to help them. My job was to help Allstate. And what our research showed is people really didn't want to see real accidents. It's too startling and scary. So they came up with Mayhem, which was a comical way of showing the stuff that could happen. The Mayhem campaign exploded and our market share went up and we got a lot, a lot of notoriety, won a lot of awards. And I'll bet you there's not 5 campaigns that are still running after 15 years ago. Flo's done it, Progressive, it looks like, the Geico, you know, ironically in the insurance category, but I mean, you know, you got major brands that have had 10 campaigns in that 15-year window.