We used pre-roll video ads (watched on desktop and mobile) to get people talking about GEICO car insurance, then drive them to get a rate quote.

No one likes pre-roll ads. People just want to skip to the video they actually came to watch. So we decided to make pre-roll videos whose message was literally unskippable. On top of that we wanted to create a video that was so entertaining, you couldn’t help but watch the whole thing through.

The Unskippable “Elevator” racked up over half a million views in the first month and dozens of articles on some of the web’s most popular news and entertainment sites (Huffington Post, front page of Reddit, Forbes, Time, etc.). These videos put the GEICO message in front of millions of new customers and flipped the idea of “pre-roll” ads on its head—from something to be skipped and avoided, to something to be enjoyed and shared.

These videos were posted to GEICO’s YouTube account and also ran as YouTube pre-roll, which is the medium they were specifically designed for.