Tuesday, March 20, 2007

So Easy a Caveman Could Do It

The great Seth Stevenson has a fabulous piece on the Geico Caveman ads. Stevenson groks that the spots are made great by the tiny, tiny details:

In one dialogue-free spot, we see a caveman riding an airport people-mover. He glides past a Geico billboard with the "So easy a caveman could do it" slogan, and he sighs in disgust. This surface joke is fine. But what I adore here is the sparkling precision of the art direction. The soundtrack is bouncy synth-pop from the little-known indie band Röyksopp. The caveman (en route to or from a vacation) totes a wooden tennis racket in a canvas shoulder bag. The implication of these careful cultural signifiers: The caveman has grasped not just literacy and reason but also the affectations of the modern hipster aesthete. (That knowingly antiquated racket might easily have been stolen from a Wes Anderson set.)

At the campaign's ancillary Web site, CavemensCrib.com (it lets you poke around their apartment), we learn that the cavemen are into (among other things): blogging, Tolstoy, yoga, smoked Hungarian paprikash, and Paddy Chayefsky movies. They have poetry magnets on their fridge … in Esperanto.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My favorite exchange:

Caveman- "Walking upright, discovering fire, inventing the wheel, laying the foundation for all mankind. You're right, good point. Sorry we couldn't get that to you sooner."

Commentator- "Sounds like someone woke up on the wrong side of the rock!"