From YouTube.
Pre-roll is the one format with an escape hatch, and 96% of it gets skipped the instant the button lights up at five seconds. Everyone treated those five seconds as a hook to beg you not to skip, a fight you lose 96 times out of 100.
Put the whole ad inside the unskippable five seconds, deliver the sell, announce 'you can't skip this GEICO ad, because it's already over,' and then refuse to end while a dog eats the family's dinner.
The Stupid/Smart of it
Stupid: Spending the whole real ad in five seconds and handing the rest to a held dinner-table pose and a dog, daring the viewer that it is over.
Smart: Finishing your ad in five seconds sounds like giving up, until you see the skipper has already been fully advertised to and the stayer is being rewarded, so GEICO cannot lose.
Any brand could try it; only one read the 96% the other way, that five seconds is the entire airtime you actually own and everything after is a maybe.
The sell completes before the skip button exists, so the remaining film stops selling and becomes a reward for staying, which is exactly why people stayed.
The stillness. The actors genuinely hold the smile, and the comedy lives in the strain of holding it while the ad refuses to end.
Idea-poweredIt works when you describe it out loud. You could brief this. Survives paraphrase.
The devices behind this one, from our library of ways in: