So Easy a Caveman Could Do It
The insight
GEICO's brief was almost nothing: say that buying insurance on GEICO.com is easy. The team reached for the oldest cliché in the drawer — "so easy a caveman could do it." A dead line. But they noticed the interesting thing isn't the ease; it's the insult. What if someone were actually offended by it?
The idea
Don't just say the line — put a real caveman in the room to hear it. Cavemen who never went extinct, who now live as urbane, thin-skinned modern sophisticates, and who are deeply, wearily offended that this brand keeps implying they're stupid. A throwaway put-down becomes a running comedy of manners about outrage and prejudice. (The writers cribbed the tone from George Saunders' short story "Pastoralia.")
How it works
The format is a machine: drop the deadpan, put-upon caveman into an ordinary modern scene — a fancy restaurant, a therapist's couch, an airport walkway gliding past the very billboard that insulted him — and let the discomfort play. Because the joke lives in the characters, not the gag, it can run and run. It made a low-interest insurance brand genuinely, quotably famous, and the line entered the language.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: anchor a national insurance campaign to prehistoric men with hurt feelings — and, later, spin them off into a primetime ABC sitcom.
Smart: the flip turns the weakest line in the brief into character comedy you can extend forever. But note where the Smart ran out: the 2007 sitcom "Cavemen" was cancelled in about six weeks and is remembered as one of the worst shows ever made. Same idea — brilliant at 30 seconds, a disaster at 22 minutes. Knowing that edge is the discipline.
Why we love it
It took the single most throwaway thing in the brief — a tired cliché — and made it the entire show. And the failed sitcom is a gift: proof that a great idea has a right size, and that the bravery to go stupid has to be matched by the discipline to know when to stop.
Who made it
Client: GEICO
Agency: The Martin Agency (Richmond, VA)
Writer: Joe Lawson
Art Director: Noel Ritter (who coined the line)
Team: Cody Spinadel
Sources: Wikipedia — GEICO Cavemen · Wikipedia — Cavemen (TV series) · Communication Arts
The way in
The device behind this one, from our library of ways in: