Football season has begun, which means Sunday fundays, wings and beer, fantasy lineup setting, fall leaves changing and – who are we kidding, it means more television commercials featuring Packers stars Aaron Rodgers and Clay Matthews.
And who else but State Farm – the Illinois-headquartered insurance company that gave us the brilliant "Discount Double Check" concept and then predictably bashed us over the head with it repeatedly for the next four years – could be behind it?
In the "Pep Talk" spot, dramatic piano music plays in the background as Matthews and Rodgers hype up large, ambiguously football-looking actors with raucous rallying cries in a vaguely Packers-ish locker room that has an infused water dispenser in the middle of it.
"Nobody comes into this house without paying the price!" Matthews shrieks.
"Not here! Not EVER!" Rodgers replies, as their yellow-pantsed, non-NFL-product-license-infringing teammates roar in approval.
A voiceover says, "State Farm knows that for every one of those moments, there’s one of these."
Cut to Rodgers whispering the same threatening lines, attempting to obliterate a fly in his house with a golf club. And let me tell you, things don’t quite go as planned!
Matthews gets the punchline, and the advertising framework for the "Here to help life go right" campaign is actually pretty good, as usual with State Farm. But maybe we just miss (currently on-hiatus) B.J. Raji dancing or maybe we’re sort of tired of seeing the same old dynamically demographic-relatable marketing duo in every ad on television.
If the company really wanted the most fiery, intense and compelling Packers player, it should have cast Mike Daniels. But fresh faces and authenticity probably don't sell bundled home and auto insurance as well.
In any event, it’s funny enough to endure seeing it a dozen times a Sunday for the next four months.
Born in Milwaukee but a product of Shorewood High School (go ‘Hounds!) and Northwestern University (go ‘Cats!), Jimmy never knew the schoolboy bliss of cheering for a winning football, basketball or baseball team. So he ditched being a fan in order to cover sports professionally - occasionally objectively, always passionately. He's lived in Chicago, New York and Dallas, but now resides again in his beloved Brew City and is an ardent attacker of the notorious Milwaukee Inferiority Complex.
After interning at print publications like Birds and Blooms (official motto: "America's #1 backyard birding and gardening magazine!"), Sports Illustrated (unofficial motto: "Subscribe and save up to 90% off the cover price!") and The Dallas Morning News (a newspaper!), Jimmy worked for web outlets like CBSSports.com, where he was a Packers beat reporter, and FOX Sports Wisconsin, where he managed digital content. He's a proponent and frequent user of em dashes, parenthetical asides, descriptive appositives and, really, anything that makes his sentences longer and more needlessly complex.
Jimmy appreciates references to late '90s Brewers and Bucks players and is the curator of the unofficial John Jaha Hall of Fame. He also enjoys running, biking and soccer, but isn't too annoying about them. He writes about sports - both mainstream and unconventional - and non-sports, including history, music, food, art and even golf (just kidding!), and welcomes reader suggestions for off-the-beaten-path story ideas.
