Here is the paradox at the center of the American insurance industry: the companies that dominate market share today got there not by explaining what they sell, but by refusing to mention it. Warren Buffett’s GEICO spends more than $2 billion a year on advertising. Almost none of it describes a policy. Almost all of it produces comedy.
I’ve spent a career studying how the screen reshapes commerce—as President and CEO of The Museum of Television & Radio (now The Paley Center for Media), as Harvard Law School’s inaugural Visiting Professor of Entertainment and Media Law, and as a bipartisan adviser to four presidential administrations on media, communications, and technology policy (Carter, Clinton, George W. Bush, and Obama). What GEICO, Progressive, Allstate, and Liberty Mutual have built is something I have not seen any other industry replicate: a competitive landscape where the primary corporate asset is not the product or the distribution network, but a comedy franchise.
