17542: More On Farmers Insurance—A Tale Of Simplicity & Simpletons.

 

Advertising Age published additional content related to the newish Farmers Insurance campaign produced by Dentsu Creative and placed by Havas Media, presenting disturbing trends in Adland.

 

For starters, the new White advertising agency is essentially pooling out the concept originally hatched by the previous White advertising agency—and arguably doing so with less cleverness and creativity.

 

What’s more, the original campaign was allegedly conceived by a single freelancer and partner, while the newish campaign lists quite a few White men as creators.

 

The newish campaign is rooted in simplicity—yet its execution and delivery appear to be cumbersome, clumsy, and complicated.

 

RIP, Professor Burke—how the J.K. Simmons character made Farmers famous

By Tom Hamling

Helluva run.

The last time I saw J.K. Simmons was in 2013 and he was surrounded by a dozen stunt cats and a giant pile of fake snow. We had just wrapped up a scene about how putting kitty litter behind your tires is a great way to get your car unstuck after an ice storm. A ridiculous end to what had been a ridiculous run of probably 30 commercials we had shot together over the previous three years.

You see, in 2010 Farmers Insurance had a massive problem. They were totally invisible and being outspent ten to one. Not only that, every time they ran a commercial, more people attributed it to State Farm than to Farmers. I was freelancing at 72andSunny when the RPA recruiter called and asked if I could work on the Farmers pitch for a couple of weeks. I asked, “What’s Farmers?” They said, “It’s insurance.” I said, “Never heard of it.” They said, “That’s the problem.”

I took the gig, and my parter Laura Hauseman and I immediately got to work reading everything we could about this invisible billion-dollar brand.

Hidden deep in the research was an internal program, the University of Farmers, that the company used at its headquarters to train agents. It was an ownable point of differentiation. That was the answer. We knew it. By the end of the day, we had a strategic brand platform around “smart” and a campaign featuring a “tough but fair” insurance professor teaching a new crop of agents the ins and outs of smart coverage.

The campaign that won the pitch was literally written for J.K. Simmons.

I hung his picture above my desk and cranked out 100 scripts in his voice. I never thought he would say yes. That never happens. But he did … on the condition that this character had a name. Sidenote 1: His original name was Professor Aloysius Finch—later changed to Professor Nathaniel Burke after lots of back and forth with our awesome client John Ingersoll. Sidenote 2: Our backup choice was Academy Award winner Chris Cooper.

The first spot ever featured Professor Burke quizzing agents about a flaming jet ski caught 10 feet up in a tree. Other spots had Professor Burke manning an actual flame thrower, walking through scenes while being attacked by multiple dogs and standing in a subzero freezer holding an exact replica of the biggest hailstone in U.S. history.

Of course, when trying to transform a brand you need lots of distinct and ownable assets. Professor Burke was one of many. Every one of the spots opened with a distinct class-bell sound effect, a sign saying “University of Farmers” (shot on UCLA’s main quad) and of course the jingle that we wrote to sound like a glee club at a smart Ivy League college.

It worked immediately. In just a few months, agent quotes went up 30%. Brand linkage went from 15% to 77% despite still being enormously outspent.

This past Monday, my phone lit up like a Christmas tree. Texts from a lot of old and current friends that Professor Burke was done. Even though I had left three years into the campaign, Farmers and a slew of talented people at RPA did an amazing job keeping this baby running for 13 more. Almost unheard of in today’s day and age. Hats off.

As I was saying goodbye to J.K. around a craft service table surrounded by feral cats, we talked about how crazy the past couple of years had been. Almost overnight, Farmers went from being totally invisible to being a part of pop culture. The brand instantly became a question on “Jeopardy.” Diplo and Andy Milonakis made NSFW rap videos about it. Yes, the jingle was a big part of that. But so was J.K. And when he won his Oscar in 2014 for “Whiplash,” Neil Patrick Harris sang “He won an Oscar” to the tune of the jingle we wrote.

A lot of people will be armchair quarterbacking this week asking if Farmers was right to retire Professor Burke. The honest answer is that I don’t know. There are a lot of smart people who know the business and what it needs today better than I do. What I do know is this: when you take an honest truth about your company, pursue it relentlessly and consistently and make it a part of culture, it changes the course of a brand.

Brands that make culture make money. And a lot of that comes down to leveraging distinct brand assets. Sometimes you create them and sometimes you inherit them. But all that really matters is what you do with them. That’s how you make a brand rich and famous. And while Professor Burke may have retired to a beach, the mark he left on Farmers will last forever. I hope the jingle lasts another 16 years.

Helluva run.

17541: The Tech Bro-ification Of Marketing Is Technically BS.

 

Time published content titled, “The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing,” whereby the author believes White men are seizing control of marketing despite being outnumbered by White women.

 

Okay, except it’s common knowledge the White men versus White women numbers skew in favor of females, but White men still dominate in positions of power and pay.

 

And don’t forget White men and White women—separately and collectively—do waaaaay better in the marketing arena than people of color.

 

The true problem remains the whitewashing—that is, white privilege, systemic whiteness, and white supremacy—of marketing.

 

The Tech Bro-ification of Marketing

 

By Miranda Shanahan

 

Miranda Shanahan is a brand consultant, content creator, and speaker.

 

Scroll through LinkedIn, and you will find a flurry of new job listings with curious titles: “Narrative Engineer”, “UGC Engineer”, “Media Engineer.” At first glance, they sound like entirely new disciplines. Look closer, and they feel suspiciously familiar. 

 

As someone who has built a decade-long career in the marketing industry, I wondered: Why are these marketing roles being relabeled? I took my question to social media. “Is marketing being rebranded so boys can do it too?” I quipped on TikTok between meetings. 

 

I checked back a few hours later, and my comments section was aflame with marketers, tech folk, and VCs. Some had sensed something was off but couldn’t quite name it; others shared the most absurd titles they’d come across; and some pushed back, arguing that something genuinely new was emerging.

 

The tech bro-ification of marketing is underway. It’s not the first time a profession has been repackaged like this. But beneath this trend lies a broader pattern around how work is named, coded, and valued. The question: why is this happening to marketing—and why now?

 

Part of the answer lies in who marketing has come to be associated with. According to a study by the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), 67% to 70% of marketing practitioners are women, making it one of the few female-dominated fields in the corporate sector. Research consistently shows that as a profession becomes associated with women, its pay and status tend to decline, and marketing is no exception. Plenty of professions skew one way or another, but those patterns aren’t driven by biology but rather our cultural stereotypes about who is good at what kind of work. 

 

The marketing industry is a broad church, but decades of cultural shorthand have flattened it into something quite specific. Shows like Sex and the City and, more recently, Emily in Paris have portrayed marketing as women and gay men throwing parties and coming up with zany ideas. Over on social media, this has calcified into the “marketing girlie” trope: the personality hire who makes things pretty in Canva and forces her boss to do TikTok dances. The cliché of a tech bro, by contrast, is that of a hyper-optimized lone wolf genius. These are stereotypes, but they have economic implications. 

 

The perceived value of a profession, the language used to describe it, and who is seen to be performing it have always been intertwined. Before “software engineer” was a job title, coding was a secretarial task, mainly done by women. Cosmopolitan even ran an article in 1967 titled The Computer Girls, touting it as an ideal career for women.

 

Software was “soft” work versus the “hard” work of building physical things. Even Margaret Hamilton, a computer scientist at NASA in the 1960s, described feeling like a misplaced “stepchild” among the hardware engineers.

 

Hamilton coined the term “software engineer” in an effort to get her work taken seriously, much to the amusement of her almost exclusively male colleagues. Yet through the 70s and 80s, “software engineering” emerged as a bona fide profession: well-paid, prestigious, and over time, predominantly male. 

 

There were many different forces responsible for the shifting demographics of the software engineering profession, but it is undeniable that changing language has a habit of changing who feels welcome. Research has shown that women are less likely to apply for roles unless they feel they are 100% qualified or, in other words, welcome. 

 

The same dynamic is now playing out in marketing in reverse. In consumer brands, marketing has always been a core discipline. I would argue Nike’s most valuable asset isn’t the technical spec of a sneaker, but the story around it. However, in Silicon Valley, the hierarchy works differently: those who build sit above those who sell. Except now the very thing they’ve relied on for growth—coding and technical creation—has been commoditized by AI.

 

The first inkling of recalibration came when tech bros suddenly started emphasizing the importance of taste. “Taste is a new core skill,” declared OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. “In the AI age, taste will become even more important. When anyone can make anything, the big differentiator is what you choose to make,” pronounced technologist Paul Graham. 

 

As Snap CEO Evan Spiegel put it: AI makes it easier to build new products, so distribution is the biggest challenge facing consumer technology businesses. 

 

The truth is that taste, distribution, and marketing have always been important. But now that AI is cheapening other kinds of work, tech has been forced to admit that marketing actually matters. 

 

The problem is, “marketing” comes with baggage. Decades of cultural coding have made it a hard sell internally, so tech is dressing it up in clothes they feel comfortable wearing. Brand strategists become narrative engineers. Marketing managers become growth architects. This shouldn't be much of a surprise. Tech has a penchant for taking familiar ideas and selling them back to us as revolutionary. Taxis become Ubers, bed and breakfasts become Airbnbs. Marketing is just the Emperor’s latest outfit. 

 

In some cases, these roles are genuinely becoming more technical, but mostly the language is being stretched so thin it’s hard to separate reality from corporate fiction. Just like using a calculator doesn’t make you a mathematician, using vibe coding and automation tools doesn’t make you an engineer. Marketing has always been part science, part art. The irony is, AI is automating the technical parts faster than anything else. Creative intuition, human judgment, and, yes, taste, are still the hardest things to replace. Yet still, employers reach for technical language to signal value. 

 

Perhaps the upside will be that job titles with a technical veneer could command higher salaries and more respect from leaders who respond better to “engineer” than “marketer.” The problem, though, is the more we conflate value with tech, the more we devalue the art of marketing and the people who practice it.

 

It might not seem that deep, but marketing’s rebrand is part of a bigger pattern. When you control the vocabulary of a field, you decide who deserves a place. Tech has always been good at making familiar ideas feel like breakthroughs, and marketing is just the latest one.

17540: Honestly, New Farmers Insurance Campaign Is BS.

Advertising Age spotlighted the newish campaign for Farmers Insurance produced by new White advertising agency Dentsu Creative, with media duties being handled by new White media agency Havas Media.

 

The campaign theme declares, “Honesty Is Our Policy.”

 

Good luck promoting that platform. After all, advertising practitioners and insurance salespeople are consistently ranked among the least-trusted professions.

 

Farmers Insurance unveils a pink-drenched refresh and tweak to its jingle

 

By Tim Nudd

 

Farmers Insurance is refreshing its brand with a coat of pink paint and a change to its famous jingle.

 

The company’s first major brand refresh in several years debuts in a campaign from new agency Dentsu Creative. The effort, themed “Honesty Is Our Policy,” debuts today (July 13) across TV, digital, social, out-of-home and experiential. It includes updated branding that prominently features bright pink visuals and a reworked version of the insurer’s longtime jingle.

 

A minimalist 30-second anthem spot … speaks directly to viewers against a solid pink background, delivering a straightforward message about understanding insurance. The spot also introduces a choir that will become a recurring brand element as part of the new platform.

 

Longtime spokesman J.K. Simmons is absent from the new campaign. “Professor Burke has been a strong and recognizable part of the Farmers brand for many years, but all professors reach their tenure, and we’ve retired him from the new campaign,” Farmers told Ad Age.

 

The choir sings much of the dialogue in the melody of the famous Farmers audio signature. At the end, the “We Are Farmers” refrain has been rewritten as “You Have Farmers,” shifting the focus from the company to the customer.

 

Supporting spots have a similar structure.

 

The repositioning reflects Farmers’ effort to address what it sees as lingering confusion around insurance policies and coverage details. Rather than emphasizing products or pricing, the campaign focuses on helping consumers better understand what their policies include and how coverage works, using more direct language across marketing and customer communications.

 

“The strategy is grounded in a simple belief: our customers’ insurance coverage should be easy to understand, with no jargon, no big words and no lawyer needed to make sense of it,” said Eleanor Solomon, head of creative for Farmers Insurance. “Farmers is introducing tools that help make insurance easier to navigate—highlighting what is and is not covered, offering coverage reviews even if your policy is with another insurer, and, in some cases, helping consumers explore alternatives when Farmers isn’t a fit for them.”

 

“The strongest brands don’t abandon their history, they build on it,” said Andres Arlia, executive creative director at Dentsu Creative. “We took the equity Farmers has earned over decades and reimagined it for a moment when consumers are looking for transparency over jargon and understanding over complexity. Every creative choice, from the visual refresh to evolving ‘We Are Farmers’ into ‘You Have Farmers,’ was designed to make the brand feel useful, human and relevant.”

 

The work is Dentsu Creative’s first major campaign for Farmers since being named the insurer’s creative agency of record. Before moving to Dentsu this spring, the Farmers account had been at RPA since 2010. 

17539: WPP CPO WTF.

More About Advertising reported on impending layoffs at WPP, spotlighting the new WPP Media Chief People Officer, who will likely be among key players executing the latest RIF.

 

The content closed by asking: Is there a People job in [Adland] that doesn’t really mean less people?

 

That’s a good question, prompting a Google search to define the C-suite function. According to M&A Executive Search, CPO responsibilities include:

 

• Shaping organizational culture and employee experience

 

• Developing DE&I (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion) programs

 

• Creating leadership development initiatives

 

• Driving employee engagement strategies

 

• Aligning the workforce with the company vision and values

 

• Building talent acquisition competitive advantages

 

• Fostering a sense of purpose and belonging

 

Okay, except no way can a new CPO shape organizational culture and employee experience at a global flaming dumpster that is burning out of control.

 

DEIBA+ programs have already been abandoned.

 

Leadership development cannot commence until after dealing with honcho redundancies, resignations, and restructurings.

 

Employee engagement strategies likely involve mandated rah-rah events.

 

Expressing the company vision and values won’t happen before WPP CEO Cindy Rose hatches and articulates the grand scheme. For now, it’s chirping crickets.

 

Talent acquisition competitive advantages are trumped by talent termination.

 

Sense of purpose and belonging? Nonsense of purpose and belonging would be a more appropriate term.

 

In short, given WPP’s current death-spiraling direction, the CPO role could be handled via AI—or eliminated entirely.

 

WPP sets sail for another round of job cuts

 

By Stephen Foster

 

WPP is reportedly embarking on another round of job cuts and newly-hired chief people officer at WPP Media Darren Minshall looks as though he’s been hired to lead the charge. Or maybe retreat. WPP Media employs about 40,000 people.

 

Like all such execs Minshall [above], who’s worked at numerous companies including, back in the day, Havas and MullenLowe, says the right things including “AI isn’t the hard part. Leading people through it is” and “AI should improve work, not blindly replace it” which may reassure some WPP Media folk although the embattled holding company, first under Mark Read and now under Cindy Rose, has made no secret that it sees AI as the secret sauce to put it back on the road to growth.

 

So will Minshall be the grim reaper, on the lines of George Clooney in the movie Up in the Air, where he plays corporate downsizer Ryan Bingham or someone to bring a little balance to the seemingly AI-obsessed holding company?

 

WPP is now divided into creative, media, production and commerce and most people expect its creative agencies to bear the brunt of tech-driven changes. When JWT, Y&R and Wunderman were lumped together with VML it was said to be the biggest creative agency in the world with about 30,000 people. WPP also has Ogilvy of course, which seems to be staying above the fray.

 

But the old GroupM media operation comprising EssenceMediacom, Mindshare and Wavemaker was pretty substantial and numerous too and, although its fortunes have recovered to a degree, it has still to return to winning ways for the world’s really big media accounts, most of which are at Publicis with some others at Omnicom.

 

Is there a People job in adland that doesn’t really mean less people?

17538: On Farmers Insurance And City Slickers-Hucksters.

 

MediaPost reported Farmers Insurance named Havas Media as its new White media agency. Earlier in the year, the insurance company appointed Dentsu Creative as its new White advertising agency.

 

The only explanation for such mediocre firms winning media and creative duties must be the other White holding companies—Publicis Groupe, Omnicom, and WPP—already service insurance brands.

 

Referring to the latest campaign platform, the head of creative for Farmers Insurance declared, “The strategy is grounded in a simple belief: our customers’ insurance coverage should be easy to understand, with no jargon, no big words, and no lawyer needed to make sense of it.”

 

The same probably cannot be said for coordinating efforts between Havas Media and Dentsu Creative.

 

If there’s a policy covering marketing malpractice, Farmers Insurance should apply pronto.

 

Havas Media Named AOR For Farmers Insurance

 

By Steve McClellan

 

Farmers Insurance has appointed Havas Media as its new media agency of record after a review, the company confirmed today.  

 

Farmers’ estimated annual media expenditure is $51.5 million, according to agency research firm COMvergence.

 

“Effective immediately, Havas will support media strategy, planning, buying, activation and measurement across Farmers Insurance’s national marketing initiatives,” the company stated. 

 

Earlier this year, Farmers Insurance launched separate creative and media agency reviews. The firm announced that it had named Dentsu Creative as its new media agency in April. 

 

The firm previously worked with both RPA and Zenith on media assignments. RPA had been the firm’s longtime creative agency. 

 

Separately, the company unveiled the first work from Dentsu Creative and new assets that the company said are designed to make its offerings easier for consumers to understand. Changes include the new Farmers Coverage on a Page resource, a snapshot of coverage included in select Farmers auto and home policies. Also new: Farmers Coverage Review sessions.  

 

“The strategy is grounded in a simple belief: our customers’ insurance coverage should be easy to understand, with no jargon, no big words, and no lawyer needed to make sense of it,” stated Eleanor Solomon, head of creative for Farmers Insurance.

17537: WPP Reduces Staff, Increases Exclusivity.

 

Advertising Age reported WPP plans to eliminate hundreds more jobs in 2026 as the Roserrection advances.

 

Advertising icon Jay Chiat famously wondered, “How big can we get before we get bad?”

 

As this blog previously opined, WPP answered that question for holding companies decades ago. The global flaming dumpster continued answering the query for White advertising agencies, bundling and erasing iconic firms to create mediocre monstrosities like VML.

 

WPP CEO Cindy Rose now finds herself in the peculiar position of trying to answer, “How small can we get before we get bad?”

 

There’s something counterintuitive about improving WPP by firing thousands.

 

Rose can feel relieved DEIBA+ dedication disappeared before she joined, so Elevate28 need not be concerned with outdated imperatives such as fairness, equality, and justice.

 

Ad Age stated, “Cindy Rose has acknowledged that there will be job cuts and said that savings will come largely from eliminating duplicative finance and HR functions…” Um, Chief Diversity Officers and DEIBA+ teams were typically compartmentalized in the HR department.

 

It appears Elevate28 will elevate exclusivity, underrepresentation, and systemic racism—except for White women—potentially taking the industry back to 1928.

 

WPP plans to cut hundreds more jobs this year as its restructuring continues

 

By Ewan Larkin

 

WPP expects to cut jobs globally in the mid-to-high hundreds between now and the end of the year, according to a person familiar with the matter, as part of the company’s ongoing turnaround strategy.

 

Some employees were informed today of their roles being affected at WPP agencies including VML, though the scope of today’s cuts was not immediately clear. WPP and VML declined to comment for this story. WPP had 98,655 employees at the end of 2025, it previously reported.

 

The layoffs are part of WPP’s broader Elevate28 turnaround plan, under which the company is targeting £500 million ($678 million) in annual cost savings by 2028. CEO Cindy Rose has acknowledged that there will be job cuts and said that savings will come largely from eliminating duplicative finance and HR functions, cutting real estate costs and selling assets. The company has also reorganized into four core units: creative, production, media and enterprise solutions.

 

WPP’s workforce has contracted sharply in recent years. The British holding company ended 2025 with 8.7% fewer employees, accelerating from a 5.4% decline the year before. That left its workforce at the end of last year at about 1,200 employees below its 2020 level, when pandemic-era cuts reduced staffing by about 6.5%.

Contributing: Brian Bonilla and Jess Nagamoto

17536: OOH WPP VML ODN WTF.

The social media post depicted above from Outdoor Nation unintentionally underscores how Adland is a messy cesspool.

 

First, WPP Creative White advertising agency VML hatched the Wendy’s creative campaign to run in Indianapolis. Um, localized messaging is hardly groundbreaking—and this concept doesn’t even qualify as mediocre.

 

Next, Outdoor Nation boasting about its strategic media plan is pathetic too. Surely the strategizing, planning, and execution could have been handled via AI or any entry-level media wonk who wasn’t replaced by AI.

 

Additionally, WPP has been positioning itself as a single White operating company, offering simplicity, efficacy, and efficiency to clients. Yet Outdoor Nation is an independent vendor. So, why did VML partner with the Tennessee-based firm versus tapping WPP Media—given the global unit supposedly won the Wendy’s media account earlier this year?

 

Finally, the social media post and associated PR make no mention of Black-owned media involvement, which is outrageous given Blacks represent nearly 28% of Indianapolis’ population.

 

In summation, the OOH from VML, WPP, and ODN warrants WTF.