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Valve and Geico team up on Portal-themed insurance ads
Geico is a US-based insurance company best known for its London gecko mascot. Valve is a US-based video game company that makes a pair of puzzle games starring a deranged, vicious AI. Have you ever wondered what would happen if the two of them got together? Of course you don’t, because why would they, right?
Well, they did. Earlier this month, Geico released a new ad called “Gecko Access Portal,” and that’s exactly what it’s all about: Gecko somehow got into the Aperture Science lab, and he’s asking for help to get out of it – from GlaDOS. Of course, the evil machine isn’t willing to help, and things will soon go awry in a way that anyone who’s played Portal will be familiar — but not before saving money!
It’s a weird, very random crossover that apparently happened suddenly: Valve said Geico had a collaboration on a collaboration, and Valve did just that. But randomness is what Geico does. The company’s other recent ads are based on machine learning, Old West shootouts going awry, turtles and animals in the attic. For my money, it’s not quite on the level of Allstate. “confusion“Sports, but it works: I might not be interested in buying insurance, but it’s all so weird that I have to watch.
This isn’t actually Geico’s first video game collaboration: it also recently did an Angry Birds crossover.
Interestingly, Geico’s ad seems to be targeting older games – Angry Birds debuted in 2009, somewhere between Portal (2007) and Portal 2 (2011) . My guess is that it’s a demographic issue: people in the insurance market today may not play the game as much as they did a decade ago, and that’s where the nostalgia comes in.
Oh, in case you were wondering, that’s actually Ellen McLain, the real voice of GlaDOS in the ad.