A Geico Holiday Special? New Insurance CMO Spotlights Entertainment

Geico’s famous animated Gecko used to turn up only in TV commercials. He recently enjoyed guest-star billing on a podcast.

The cartoonish figure with the sophisticated accent appeared in June on WNBA player Azzi Fudd’s ‘Fudd Around and Find Out,” thanks to A.I. that allowed the character to interact with the sports star. “There’s not a lot of extra time for tinkling the ivories or playing pickleball, or whatever,” the Gecko replied when asked about hobbies.

“It’s a nerve-wracking process,” confides Arianna Orpello, who joined Geico as its chief marketing officer in January. “This is one of the biggest assets that Geico has as a company. So you have to make sure it’s going to work and it’s going to work well. That takes a lot of energy to get the tools working the right way, to train the models in the right way.”

Despite the extra attention required, more of Geico’s famous characters, ad scenarios and slogans are likely to debut in surprising venues, the executive says during a recent interview. Over three decades, Geico has “created these character worlds. You’re going to see us use them a lot more. You’re going to see them show up in places they haven’t shown up in before.”

As a result, Geico is seeking intriguing alliances with media outlets. “Any marketer would kill to have some of these entertainment-based assets that Geico has built,” she says, adding that the company is giving new thought to how it positions itself. “What does it mean to be a modern entertainer?” Orpello asks. “Because that’s what I actually believe we are.”

Geico will continue to dive into podcasts, working with iHeartMedia to launch a TikTok Podcast Network that will give it a strong hand in sponsoring creator voices and shows. Geico will back “Raiders of The Lost Podcast,” a program focused on popular movies, as well as an original effort from Diana Flores, a star quarterback with Mexico’s flag-football team. Geico has also struck up a partnership with Apartment Therapy, a media company focused on lifestyle and design, that will result in a new series centered around creative choices and investments that turn rentals into homes. The program will be distributed across Meta, TikTok and YouTube. A new alliance between Geico and Oprah Winfrey’s weekly podcast was unveiled in July.

There is more on the way, and some of it could raise eyebrows. Look for a marketing alliance between Geico and Dairy Queen — both are part of the Berkshire Hathaway portfolio — as well as a Geico holiday special in weeks to come. The company is working on “bringing back lots of our characters into a holiday-themed world, you know, akin to — picture Frosty or Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” she says. “I think I can actually ask permission to do really interesting things like this.” She declined to offer more details about the special, including on what media platforms it might appear.

Not every marketer could pull off such stuff. Media companies are paying increased attention to upstart digital advertisers that range from the online retailer Wayfair to the A.I. company OpenAI. But these relatively nascent businesses don’t often have the intellectual property to attempt some of the more intriguing — and intricate — concepts that Geico does.

The insurance company was one of the first in the category to devise spokes-characters and clever quick-hit commercial memes in a bid to make what was once a relatively boring category stand apart. Now the field is flooded with characters from Progressive’s Flo to Liberty Mutual’s bizarre new Liberty Biberty. State Farm’s Jake character recently enjoyed a cameo role in the Netflix series “Running Point.” Geico recently allowed NBC Sports to revive the “Hump Day” talking camel that appeared in its commercials in 2013 in a promo touting the debut of NFL football on a Wednesday night. Geico wasn’t even mentioned, the executive says, and viewers still recognized the character.

Building a library of ads that can evoke nostalgia or emphasize durability takes decades. Coca-Cola last year unveiled a six-minute commercial vignette from producer and creator Kenya Barris that showed the company as a “sponsor of generations” and illustrated its presence at a family-run business over many years — complete with era-appropriate logos and markings.

Geico’s marketing history and library “is hard to match,” says Orpello. “When you look at the amount of money that has been put into building the brand of Geico and the character worlds and the value proposition, it’s really hard for a start-up to come in and try to unseat some of that.”

As the insurance category grows ever more competitive, Geico may need its popular hits. Almost 60% of consumers with insurance policies will shop for a new one each year, says the executive. With that in mind, insurance companies need to talk to consumers every day. “You have to be relevant, top of mind, preferred, interesting, connected and there has to be recency,” she says.

Even the smallest amounts of advertising contact are being scrutinized. When streaming users halt a selection on Hulu, Netflix or Peacock, Geico even wants more specificity in the “pause ads” that surface on screen. “If you were just watching ‘Bridgerton,’” Orpello says, a viewer ought to see “something that feels like you’re in Victorian times and the Gecko set in that environment.” In the middle of an action series, viewers who pause should seek something like the Gecko climbing a wall. How about sports? Maybe “the Gecko is actually interacting live in real time based off what’s happening in that game.”

“We’re just trying to think about how an entertainment brand behaves, and how do we pull that through the entirety of the ad experience and the entirety of our customer experience?” says Orpello.

The marketing executive may be feeling new heat as well. Her past jobs have largely been in the banking sector, where customers aren’t as prone to switch financial institutions. Orpello was most recently chief brand officer for Goldman Sachs, one of the nation’s most august Wall Street firms.

Geico is putting new money behind marketing. Total underwriting expenses rose 34% in 2025 to roughly $5.5 billion and rose another 28% in the first half of this year, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission from Berkshire Hathaway. Those increases were driven primarily by advertising and other customer acquisition costs, according to the company. Geico’s premiums grew more than 5% in 2025, to $45.2 billion, as the company put new effort into keeping policy holders from moving elsewhere and bringing former customers back under its umbrella.

The company has dipped its toes in similar waters. In 2024, Geico unveiled a 15-minute documentary on the Gecko’s fictional origins and childhood. TV fans may recall that Geico’s popular Cavemen commercial characters were the center of an ABC sitcom in 2007, developed in part by some of the people who worked on the original ads for Geico at its longtime advertising partner, The Martin Agency. The show did not generate much positive reaction and was quickly canceled,

Orpello acknowledges that some of her efforts may not bear fruit, but such work can’t be ignored. Without it, she says, Geico will see its standing with consumers erode.

“I think there’s going to be a lot to play with. Some of it’s going to work. Some of it’s probably going to bomb,” she says. “We’re going to learn along the way, and I think we’re going to get better and we’re going to figure out how we continue to connect with audiences in unique ways.”