Clan of the Caveman

So Hughes took the next step: He'd already created multiple creative teams--now he would turn them loose to tell multiple, distinct narratives designed to highlight various aspects of the brand. The "Good News" campaign--a faux news report of some calamity followed by the punch line: "But the good news is, I just saved a lot of money on my car insurance"--first launched in 2003 and picked up steam with the introduction of the new teams. Then came the cavemen.

The brief from the client had been short: "Make people understand that GEICO.com is simple." Both Lawson and Noel Ritter, the art director, had just finished reading a short story, "Pastoralia," about people who have to play Neanderthals in a theme park. After a synaptic sizzle or two, a slogan was born: "GEICO.com: So easy a caveman can do it." But they kept pushing, tweaking a simple concept into a brilliant one: A clutch of metrosexual cavemen, having somehow eluded extinction while developing a taste for racquet sports, plasma TVs, and "duck with mango salsa," is insulted by the company's advertising. The spots were an instant hit, spawning a trip down the red carpet at the Oscars with a hot babe on a caveman's arm, and a GEICO-developed Web site, Cavemanscrib.com, showing the hirsute hominids at home with their iPod docking stations, glossy fashion mags, and hors d'oeuvres on toothpicks. In March, ABC said it was interested in a pilot for a sitcom to be written by Lawson and directed by Speck-Gordon, the same team that directed the Will Ferrell movie Blades of Glory.

As Hughes saw the parallel GEICO accounts play out in the marketplace, he realized he'd actually discovered a better way to do branding, perhaps even a new media strategy altogether. "Once upon a time," he says, "an ad was about a company's unique selling position. But people can now accept more complex brands, and I thought we might be able to build a deeper relationship if we built on multiple fronts." Soon enough, the "Testimonials" campaign debuted, featuring actual customer endorsements embroidered by celebrity pitchmen--Little Richard, Burt Bacharach, and Peter Graves among them. The campaign was huge, culminating in a series of voice-overs for failed American Idol candidates on Leno.

Martin has since begun rolling out multipronged strategies for a variety of clients. UPS has spots directed at four different audiences with Azula's whiteboard as a common thread. And, Hughes says, you may well see the same from Wal-Mart.

It's a windy, overcast day in early spring, and the Martin Agency's new friends from Bentonville have arrived in Richmond. The marketing team from Wal-Mart, and its Martin counterparts--the creative team, account management, strategic planning, and others--have been ranged around a conference table since early morning, hashing out strategy and reviewing work.

Tony Rogers, an earnest young Wal-Mart marketing exec, is bubbling with enthusiasm about the work and his new partners. "One of the really neat things about Martin is that a lot of the people who work here are Wal-Mart shoppers and they intuitively understand the brand," he gushes. "It's a combination of a pretty successful track record combined with a real humble approach that impressed us."

There had been speculation in the trade press that one of the things Wal-Mart found attractive about Martin was that it wasn't one of those snobbish New York agencies. But while it's true the Martin crew is relatively down-to-earth, the fit probably has less to do with a shared love of low prices than with Martin's proven ability to deliver the kinds of measurable results so dear to the fabled Arkansas bean counters. (Much of the meeting in the boardroom that day was about creating "a common set of metrics, a dashboard, so we'll know what's working and what's not," says Brad Armstrong, the agency's senior Wal-Mart account executive.)

In fact, even though gauging ROI (return on investment) has become the advertising mantra of the moment, that has been a Martin strength since the agency bought a little New York direct-mail firm in 1986 and moved it to Richmond. As Hughes points out, "We do a lot of recruiting from places that don't do general advertising: direct-marketing companies, interactive companies, places most agencies look down their noses on. But the world is moving toward a direct-response model."

His direct-response team--traditionally at the bottom of an agency's strict caste structure--has been in the thick of it ever since. Indeed, the lead work the agency showed Wal-Mart at the pitch was by a direct-response writer. Integrated teams "make our direct-response work more imaginative, and our nondirect-response work more accountable," Hughes says.