Name: How a Duck Became the Most Famous Mascot in Insurance
Uploaded: 2025-12-26T20:23:00Z
Duration: 5 min 29 s
Description: Hear Dan Amos, CEO of Aflac, discuss the marketing strategy, Ray Romano, and more.

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Hear Dan Amos, CEO of Aflac, discuss the marketing strategy, Ray Romano, and more.

https://m.wsj.net/video/20251226/3e9c025a-f9fc-4888-8593-3468f4dc71e6/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

How a Duck Became the Most Famous Mascot in Insurance

I want to 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, spokesanimal?

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 and 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 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 will grow. 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 in school, and the things about it are 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 use 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 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 three 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.