Aflac duck muzzled in new ads

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then maybe it should shut up for a while.

Aflac, the insurance company that rose to pop-cultural heights on the wings of a waterfowl, is launching a $50 million ad campaign that partly muzzles its web-footed friend and instead seeks to better define what the company does. The move is a risky one, given the iconic status the feathered creature has reached since being introduced in January 2000.

Known for its loud “Aflac” quack, the duck has become one of the country’s most recognizable ad icons. Before its first appearance, most people had never heard of the Columbus, Ga., purveyor of supplemental workplace insurance. Since that time, however, Aflac’s brand awareness has skyrocketed to 90 percent from 12 percent, the company says. But in today’s competitive business environment, name recognition alone isn’t enough.

“Consumers were saying, ‘I know you are insurance and you have this duck that quacks, but what can you do for me?”’ says Al Johnson, Aflac’s vice president of advertising and branding.

Madison Avenue is forever wrestling with the challenge of creating ads that entertain while also imparting enough information about a product or service. For Aflac, the idea of better defining what the company does is fraught with risk, say branding experts, since weighing down copy with big explanations might be an instant turn-off for consumers who are used to quick and fun ads that predominantly featured the quacking duck.

Aflac says it was prompted to redo its messaging after increases in sales began to slow and consumer research found that people were confused about Aflac. A survey of 1,000 consumers done in October 2003 by Bantam Group, a research firm in Atlanta, found that 60 percent of respondents said they weren’t exactly sure what Aflac insurance was. Moreover, a telephone poll of 600 consumers, done in April 2004, found that about half of the respondents said the current advertising doesn’t explain what Aflac is.