Nationwide Insurance is back in the funny business.
The company’s ads are aiming for humor again with a campaign called “The World’s Greatest Spokesperson in the World.”
The effort, via independent Durham, N.C., agency McKinney (which picked up the account from TM Advertising in 2009), shows the spokesman returning after a lengthy hiatus in the woods, where he’s grown a thick beard. After shaving, he dons a suit and starts practicing with a wooden microphone and an old corded phone to get his moves back.
A narrator informs us that the spokesman was once so persuasive that when he left, the global economy crashed 150 percent, and “it was said that his words carried so much weight that you had to lift them with your legs.”
Jason Uzarraga 