the progressive girl

I've a friend who like to tease me about being a Flo fan. He made up a little for this by FB'ing me this fantastic article about Stephanie Courtney and her career up to and including Flo:

http://www.cosmopolitan.com/career/news/a38633/get-that-life-stephanie-courtney-flo-progressive/

There have been some roles I didn't get that I really wanted. Originally I auditioned for Joan for Mad Men. They said, "You didn't get that, but will you play a switchboard operator instead?" I said, "Sure!" Then I saw Christina Hendricks in that emerald dress, and I went, Oh, I get it now. I also auditioned for Pam for The Office. I didn't get far in that audition, but I was such a fan of the British Office I was just excited to be there. Both of the ladies who got these parts are so perfect. You have to audition for a thousand "no"s so you can get a "yes."

much prefer the AT&T girl

Caity Weaver interviews Stephanie Courtney -- Flo herself:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/25/magazine/progressive-insurance-flo-stephanie-courtney.html?unlocked_article_code=1.BU0.yRwt.o01D-8trpQXq&smid=url-share

much prefer the AT&T girl

Off-topic, but Good Grief does she have some psycho edgelord incel fanboys.

...but you could probably same the same of any TV spokeswomen.

Very charming and normal Taibbi quote at the top if this thread

a clue to his later turn against progressives

The first few commercials, it was kind of amusing I guess, but as the commercials grew in number her character has started to get reaaaaally fucking annoying. Who knows, maybe she loves the way the character has developed, but for some reason I think that she hates the character,

funny in retrospect as I do not think she now hates the character and is probably quite happy with this regular paycheck plus the cultural impact she's had. These commercials have gone on for so long that they passed through the 'annoying' era ages ago and now are something I enjoy when I see them (which is admittedly not often as I don't watch much commercial tv). She seems like a nice person.

A good commercial would be Flo pleasuring herself with the Geico lizzard and talking dirty!

can't argue with that

weird this thread was bumped today! at about the same time ned revived (and without seeing it until just now), i took this pic

https://i.imgur.com/IhMfc1f.jpg

just read the article, holy shit at the likely $10 million a year paycheck

Very charming and normal Taibbi quote at the top if this thread

― waste of compute (One Eye Open), Sunday, November 26, 2023 5:12 PM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

just saw this. wtf.

glad flo is getting her money. she is a reassuring presence on the airwaves. has been around for years.

i actually don't understand what is supposed to be annoying about her.

in any case, i use njm for car insurance. sorry flo.

A good commercial would be Flo pleasuring herself with the Geico lizzard and talking dirty!
can't argue with that

― I? not I! He! He! HIM! (akm), Sunday, November 26, 2023 7:22 PM (forty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

this is also really not ok.

i actually don't understand what is supposed to be annoying about her.

I think it was the ilxor Homosexual II who long ago stated on ilx that in her experience when a man says he finds a woman "annoying" it generally means he would like to fuck her. Ever since I read that I've mentally tested her observation against each instance where it could be applied and I've come to regard it as true more often than not.

probably also true for murder fantasies like the one taibbi sketched above.

if i was not a man, i would probably think men are trash.

xp It was sunny successor who said that

probably is true of all genders. good deflection from one's true feelings. "omg, you are soooo annoyinggg"

It was sunny successor who said that

I see it stuck in your head, too. thx for the correct attribution.

for reference: truth bombs

was Flo the first time a big company made a recurring character out of a regular employee? seems like a bunch of 'em have done that over the years - Jan from Toyota, the AT&T girl, Liberty Mutual's moustache guy, Jake from State Farm, probably a few others I forgot. that's a pretty good legacy for a TV commercial actor

Fun addendum: Annie Fish on Bluesky dug up the 1999 Bud Light ad mentioned in the piece

https://bsky.app/profile/anniefish.bsky.social/post/3kf5auipjrc27

lol xposts, but I also internalized this truth RE: annoying and have definitely observed it in action so I basically now try to avoid ever describing anyone as annoying lest someone draw the same conclusion.

also, I've always been outspokenly pro-Flo and am glad to hear she's making bank.

For those not on Bluesky, the Bud ad:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDZB6W71-f4

On camera for perhaps 0.7 seconds!

Ah i saw her that time

I remember Patricia Richardson, the mom from "Home Improvement," coming on some talk show & talking about her acting past. She had been in some O.B. tampons commercial (iirc as a bike cop) in the early '80s that she said "kept her from getting a job for 10 years." But look, she went on to be in that TV show, and then, judging by appearances, I think she was also the drummer for Sleater-Kinney. So there's hope for the Progressive girl.

― This is four-dimensional art; the 4th dimension is incredibly powerful. (Abbott), Tuesday, May 4, 2010 11:06 AM (thirteen years ago) bookmarkflaglink

this made me miss abbott

loooool that’s an excellent abbotttt post

speaking of the AT&T girl it really bugs me that Keegan-Michael Key is in the latest commercial and doesn't really do or say anything? like he's still a fairly big name, he still does a lot of movies and voice work, kinda pathetic to basically be an extra in a commercial isn't it?

if i was not a man, i would probably think men are trash.

― treeship.

counterpoint: i'm more fond of and less judgemental of men now that i don't feel like i have to _be_ one.

There is something distinctively straight male about concocting a murder fantasy about a woman one has a crush one, as mr. taibbi did upthread. I am glad this is less acceptable now than in 2010.

was Flo the first time a big company made a recurring character out of a regular employee?

i feel like this had a moment in the 70s as well: the maytag repair man, the "time to make the donuts" guy, etc

Good call. Time to make the donuts guy was a character named Fred the Breaker. I knew the actor who played him. He was also the Breakstones Sour Cream guy!

Fred the Baker not breaker!

see that shit would not fly today. remember the Sprint "can you hear me now?" guy jumping to T-Mobile? something about that just didn't feel right.

At some point, commercial broadcast television became a subsidiary of the auto insurance industry. We did not see this happening.

I feel like I have seen more ads for car insurance than I have for any other good or service. And they all have their cutesy memes and whatnot. The cavemen, Flo, the thing with the emu, the thing with the gecko, etc.

One used to see ads for beer or hamburgers or long-distance telephony or diabeetus supplies or whatever. At present, advertising is mostly about car insurance.

This is a strange timeline and I want out of it.

earlier in this same timeline, commercials were all about husbands berating their wives about coffee

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnjjkgIO3Ck

now we get insurance-selling lizards

The proliferation of insurance commercials has always boggled my mind. Like who changes their insurance that much? I only pay renter’s insurance, but I haven’t changed it for like 20 years. Maybe I’m not the target demographic here.

If it didn't work, they wouldn't do it. Or so one would assume.

I dunno. Allegedly, John Wanamaker said that half of the money spent on advertising is wasted; you just don't know which half.

auto insurance is one of those things where everyone feels like they pay too much, I suspect, so people are likely to shop around for that at least once a year.

...

we could all save up to 15% by switching to geico

is what i heard

ya I think what it comes down to is everyone needs it, few really care much about how 'covered' they are, so it maybe just comes down to which ad you saw last. I mean I assume that's what their internal studies tell them, which may explain why very few of these commercials have anything to do with insurance at all.

personally the thing I find irritating about them is that they're so self-aware and cynical. like half the Geico ads now seem to be about how there are so many Geico ads on TV. same with the Progressive ads, they all have this subtext like "yeah we know commercials are annoying, so we're going to do you a favor by making them entertaining", but there's something wrong about that. its like when brands on Twitter start co-opting memes and act like teenage edgelords, shit that might be funny if it was a parody Wendy's account, but coming from the actual Wendy's account it's just makes you cringe. real stepdad-trying-way-too-hard vibes there. or maybe when a teacher tries to make something 'fun' but in a way that just reminds the class they're being held captive.

one fun thing about my current media diet is that the fewer commercials I see, the weirder & more impenetrable they seem. there are so many ads now that appear to just be self-referential callbacks to long-running campaigns and jokes that seem to have become completely untethered from whatever the original product or premise was, just some bizarre nonsequitur of a scene with the name of a product at the end of it, and its impossible to parse if you're not up on all the years of lore.

like the credit card company ads that feature rampaging vikings or norsemen or whatever? these uncouth vikings show up at a board meeting or a child's birthday party, do schtick for 15 seconds, and then yell the name of a credit card at the end. Ok? I assume at one point 15 years ago there was a punchline that made sense comparing credit cards to vikings somehow. but to see it with fresh eyes shorn of context its just like, wait, why was I shown that? I dont think it makes for "good advertising" per se, but it often makes watching TV these days an amusingly strange experience.

It's 2023 and the commercials are weirder than the shows

Frogbs and President K., this was one of the points made by (sorry) David Foster Wallace.

When Saturday Night Live started making fake commercials for things that didn't exist (like "edible diapers"), people started watching commercials differently.

People were like, "Is this a real ad or a fake one?" And then, predictably, advertisers started making real ads that seemed like they might be fake ads.

That's how we get J.K. Simmons in an apron with a helicopter feeding a lizard to an emu. Or whatever. Sorry, I can't keep track. There's also a caveman, or something.

TS: Milana Vayntrub vs. Stephanie Courtney

i never knew stephanie's real name until this recent article dropped, so milana

Sometimes I need to remember that she doesn't even do insurance ads.