Name: Aflac's CEO on the History Behind the Duck Commercials
Uploaded: 2025-12-24T16:00:00Z
Duration: 21 min 18 s
Description: Dan Amos, CEO of the insurance company Aflac, spoke about its duck advertisements and much more with Barron's editor at large Andy Serwer.

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Dan Amos, CEO of the insurance company Aflac, spoke about its duck advertisements and much more with Barron's editor at large Andy Serwer.

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Aflac's CEO on the History Behind the Duck Commercials

Hello, everyone, and welcome to "At Barron's." I'm Andy Serwer. And welcome to our guest, Dan Amos, CEO of Aflac. Dan, great to see you. Thanks so much for joining us.

My pleasure.

So, supplemental insurance, that's what Aflac does. A lot of people don't really understand what that is, so break it down for us, please.

Well, in your healthcare system, whether it be national healthcare in Japan or be our healthcare system in the United States, there are gaps that are created in the healthcare to try to create some control over expenses, although it really hadn't been done that much, but that's the idea. And those gaps that are created, people need additional cash to cover those, whether it be things like copays and deductibles, or someone goes to a particular area for cancer treatments that are specialized, or they're out of work, or the spouse is out of work taking care of the loved one. Any of those things, we pay this cash to them, and they take that money, and fill the gaps that are created. And usually when you put those together with major medical, it'll cover most of the expenses that are created in that gap.

Right, and we've seen the commercials with Nick Saban and Deion Sanders explaining it with the duck. We'll talk about the commercials in a little bit, but the company is a family company initially founded by your family. It's a big publicly traded company to be clear, but your father and uncles founded the company in Columbus, Georgia. How did that come about?

Well, John, my uncle, was the principal founder, and they looked for a place to go to form the insurance company. Believe it or not, Columbus, Georgia was the biggest city in the South that didn't have an insurance company. There was a little insurance company in every town across the south. And we ended up choosing Columbus, and they have supported us, and we actually went door to door selling the stock. The Amos family didn't have that much money, and so we had to raise capital. And so that's what took place over those period of years.

Right, and the family owns collectively less than 10%, I think you were telling me, at this point, rest publicly held. Let's get back to the business a little bit, Dan. Some 70% of the company's revenue, as much as, I should say, comes from Japan, which is the world's second largest insurance market. I think you insure one of every four households there, tens of millions of people. Why Japan? What is it about that country?

Well, Japan... First of all, what happened is John Amos, my uncle, went to Osaka to the world's fair, and he noticed a thriving economy. And back then, we know what this means, but we didn't know at that time. He noticed people wearing surgical mask, and he asked why. And they said, well, it was to stop the spread of a cold. And his comment was, "Anybody that'll do that will buy insurance. I gotta get license there." And he spent four years working on getting the license. And finally, in 1974, we received license. And last year was our 50th year doing business in Japan.

Right, a big part of that is the cancer insurance business, which you mentioned. Why is that bigger in Japan, Dan, than in the United States, the cancer insurance business?

Well, I think, first of all, they thought they were having, back in the early '70s, an epidemic of cancer. They weren't. They just weren't living long enough to get it. The life expectancy around right after the war was about 50 something years old. It's now extended to 80 years old. So cancer is a disease of age. The older you get, the higher the incidence rate goes. So people thought it was such a big issue. They wanted to buy something to cover. So, we were the second company to be licensed in Japan, and we came up conceptually with the idea of offering a life insurance product, but it paid 10 times that amount if you died of cancer, and then we paid so much a day for every day you're in the hospital. Now, from there expanded beyond that, but the other thing we were gonna do is set it up where we could sell our product within the corporations. So a Toyota or Mizuho Bank, or whatever it might be, 90% of all the companies on the Tokyo Stock Exchange offer our product to their employees, and then we pay the commission to the company. And ultimately, it's a cycle that worked very well for us.

Right, I mean, it's a very stable economy there. I'm sure you have a pretty low default rates and all that, but it's an aging population, declining population. How are the demographics of that country treating you?

Well, anytime you're in a situation where the population is getting smaller, it's an issue for us, but we've been able to broaden our product lines and come out with new products as well as reinvent the existing product in some new form. For example, with the cancer product, now it pays expenses like radiation, cobalt, things on those lines, or it does outpatient treatments. We didn't have that originally. So it's evolved with time with treatments and how they've changed. The other thing is is when we started, there were no copays or deductibles in Japan in their national healthcare. It then went from 10% to 20% percent and now to 30%. And we think, again, it can go up more, we don't know, but they're trying to take control of their healthcare costs. Also, the number of days in the hospital in Japan, you went from the hospital directly back to work. In our society, everyone's got an extra bedroom. And so when someone gets sick, you take 'em from the hospital and bring 'em home. They didn't do that. So the average number of days in the hospital for cancer treatments back when we started was about 45 days. It was less than eight days, and now it's even gotten less in the United States. So that's an adjustment as well.

Shifting gears, Dan, you are one of the most longstanding CEOs of a publicly traded company in the United States, I think right up there with Warren Buffett who's stepping down soon. How did that come about, how you stayed in that seat so long? And I gotta ask you, do you have a succession plan?

Yes, I have a succession plan. And what I would say is I backed into it. I loved what I did. I just kept doing it. And one day someone said, "I bet you're one of the longest-serving CEOs in the country." And that's the first time I'd really thought about it several years ago. When I had passed 30 years as CEO, I thought, well, that's interesting, but you have to remember. Long-term CEOs in my world or in your world, it doesn't matter. It's what the numbers ultimately achieve. And so I'm honored to have that, but keeping it, you have to make the numbers and that's what's important.

Right, I think you mentioned you've been CEO for over half the company's life at this point.

That's correct. I've been 36 years and the company's 70 years old,

Do the math, right? I wanna ask you about the Aflac duck. And you told me this story before, but it's really pretty remarkable. How did you all come up with the Aflac Duck as your spokesperson, spokes animal?

Okay, well, we had been trying to figure out how to build name recognition. There are over 200 insurance companies in the United States that start with American, there are over 50 that have family in it, and there is a insurance company called American Family Life Insurance Company. And we're called American Family Life Assurance Company. And we knew that we could never get name recognition by staying where we were, and we had to take some chances and look at different ways. So we had been in the business of trying the advertising, and we had about 3% name recognition and it ticked up over a period of 10 years to about 9%. But it told me we were never gonna get there in my lifetime, and that was unacceptable. So we bid it out to different organizations. And actually, my wife, Kathelen, was doing it at the time, and she found Kaplan Thaler Group and these women designed and worked with some of their people that were in creative areas. And they said, the more we think about this, Aflac sounds like a duck quacking. And they came up with the idea of a park bench. And having the Aflac duck at that time come up to it. Now, what I have to say about it is it was wild because back then you had Prudential in the rock and you had very conservative things, and there weren't any companies doing humor. And in our case, we were actually making fun of the name. And so I was a nervous wreck, but I had said, "I'll try anything as long as it's in good taste." And so we had tested at that time, Ray Romano with building blocks with children, and it formed Aflac, the blocks did. And it tested an 18 on this system that we use. And on financial services usually doesn't do well on those type of issues. But insurance is even worse because with financial, you get banks. And banks, the more repetitiveness of dealing with the consumer, the higher your name recognition or growth. Well, in the case of insurance, you don't need it unless there's a claim to be paid. So you may go for years and not even know the name of your insurance company if you do it in an employer -employee setting. And that's what we had. So we said we gotta do something different. So we tested the Aflac duck. It tested a 27, three times higher than anything we'd ever tested before. And we decided to go with it. We tested it January 1, 2000. And then on that day, if you'll remember, they thought there was going to be a shutdown because it was Y2K, and everyone was scared to death. Well, nothing happened. And one of the places we had advertised heavily was CNN. And so they didn't have anything to run because there wasn't any news, and it ran over and over again, and it ended up working out great. I majored in risk management and insurance and school. And the things about it, three principles of risk management is don't risk a lot for a little, don't risk more than you can afford to lose, and consider the odds. And when we used that as a way of looking at it, we decided to go with it. But I have to tell you, one of my good friends that was the CEO at the time, I asked him what he thought because Ray Romano had tested 50% higher. And he said, "No one's ever gotten fired for doing 50% better. Go with the Ray Romano, but I promised I would do whatever tested the highest." And so we went with it. So it ended up working great. And to this day, our name recognition is around 90%. And if you think about that, for the amount of money we spend, which is relatively small, we spend about 150 million compared to say, GEICO, that spends 3 billion. So there's a lot of money spent out there that's predominantly property casualty, but in our business, it catapulted us, and then we took it to Japan, and that's another story.

Right, so I was gonna say that this caused a whole revolution in advertising and insurance with the geckos, and the caveman, and flow, and all these kind of... The emu and all these kind of wild and crazy things. But you're saying that some of those companies spend more on advertising. They just do more of it, you mean?

Yes, but our name recognition is at the same level of theirs. So God bless that duck. I majored in school and risk management and I came from the sales area. And so I get involved partly because I just enjoy marketing, and advertising, and what we do in that regard. Do you pick, like Nick Saban and Deion Sanders that I mentioned, on the person who signs off on them?

Well, they bring me their suggestions and then I look at it, but in both of those cases, I didn't choose them, but I was happy to see us use them and it's worked out well. One thing about having a coach is you gotta be careful. You use young people, they tend to get in a little more trouble, so you have to be careful. So having coaches with maturity is a much safer way to protect the brand over a long period of time. You may know the story about Gilford Godfrey as the voice of the Aflac duck. And when the tsunami hit in Japan, he went out and said some things that were inappropriate, and we had to get rid of him and replace him. And so, those are little things that are just different that you watch carefully.

Yeah, and I saw you had some guy try out. Over 10,000 people tried it out to be the voice of the Aflac, that thing.

That's exactly right.

How's mine, by the way? You think I could get a shot at it, Aflac?

Oh, sure, I think you can get a shot at it, but maybe you can do... I think you'd do better than me anyway. I know that for sure.

I don't think I quite have it just right. Hey, let me ask you. You talked about the stock. And over long periods of time, the stock's done very well, five years, 10 years. More recently though it's under underperformed the S&P 500 in the past year or so. Why the difference there, Dan? What's going on for the shareholders?

Well, I think, it's hard for me to be able to look at any one specific, but what I can tell you is that the forecast that we have said we would achieve, we have achieved, and we've had a pattern of success to where over the last three, five years, and actually in the last year or so, I'd have to check the numbers, but it's been real close to the S&P 500. I don't know what that specific number was, but I would say we're going to achieve our numbers, and I'm looking forward to having a great year this year and also in 2026,

Yeah, I think it was looking at stock growth versus the index, but that didn't have the total return part in there. And I know the dividend and the dividend yield's very important for your shareholders. You've been a big payer of dividends. Talk to us about that.

Well, this makes the 43rd year in a row that we've increased the dividend, and that includes that period of time in the financial crisis when very few continued it, and we were able to continue and show our ability to perform and come through with it. So that's a very important part. And then the other part is the sheer buyback, which has also helped us achieve our earnings per share.

Another question about the business. How is supplemental insurance different from Medigap?

Well, in our case, ours are indemnity in nature. So we pay X amount a day for every day you're in the hospital, but we have set amounts within our policy, so it's not actual charges. So we'll pay these amounts, and then periodically, every three years or so, we'll introduce a revised product with higher benefits that will go to the consumer to take care of those things. So, we're very predictable in our ability to achieve the loss ratios that we set forward.

Right. And final question, Dan. as someone who's been at this job for considerable amount of time, what kind of peers do you have in terms of CEOs with the same kind of tenure that you have so you can bounce ideas off of people? I mean, you're the oldest guy, maybe the wisest guy in the room. But one of the older guys in the room at this point, do you find you still have people you can talk to and share problems and share ideas with?

Yeah, I do. We're all living longer and so what was 65 was considered old. You're you younger now. And those people either continue or they're in some other type business. But I get an opportunity to talk to people that I really admire and believe in, that have been in my shoes. And what I always tell everybody when they ask me, "well, how do you do it for so long?" my answer is you have to love it. As you're working your way up... Because I came from the family, I certainly had an advantage, and that's why I went into sales, because it's objective-oriented. It's not subjective. But as you work your way up, you gotta be willing to go wherever you need to go to work that way. But ultimately you gotta be happy in what you're doing as you're moving the direction. And it's been fun to me to see the success, and we've tried to give back. We've given right at $200 million to the Aflac Cancer Center and Blood Disorders in Atlanta. Those things are giving back and making life better. And I also have enjoyed watching the success of our employees, people being able to retire, and then most importantly, of the shareholders and their returns and what we've been able to achieve. During my tenure, I've had a 22,000% return compared to the S&P 500 of about 4,000.

Yeah. Well, that's a pretty darn good note to end on. Dan Amos, CEO of Aflac. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thank you.

This is "At Barron's." I'm Andy Serwer. We'll catch you next time.