Geico turned a talking gecko into an advertising icon. Now its CMO wants that fame to sell more than car insurance

Geico has the kind of brand recognition most marketers spend their careers chasing. Its Geico Gecko has been selling car insurance for more than 25 years, while slogans like “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance” have become embedded in American culture.

Arianna Orpello, Geico’s chief marketing officer, thinks the mascot’s recognition now approaches rarefied territory.

“Everybody loves the gecko,” Orpello tells Fortune. “It doesn’t matter if they’re 10 or 80.” She likens the character’s recognition and likability to that of Mickey Mouse, calling the advertising intellectual property an asset “most marketers would kill to have.”

Orpello’s challenge now is turning that enormous brand equity into a broader growth engine, using AI, data, and personalization to deepen customer relationships and expand what consumers associate with Geico.

“We definitely don’t have an auto insurance awareness problem,” says Orpello, who joined the insurer in January after years in financial services. “We do have an additional product line awareness problem.”

Auto insurance remains the foundation and vast majority of Geico’s business. Geico now wants consumers who know it for car insurance to consider it for everything from home and renters insurance to motorcycles, boats, personal liability, and business insurance.

Closing that gap is part of a broader transformation inside Geico’s marketing organization. Orpello inherited an operation heavily oriented toward traditional advertising and auto insurance. The goal now is to preserve the broad reach of Geico’s advertising while using data to understand when customers may be preparing to shop around, what other insurance products they may need, and how to reach them accordingly.

Geico is also rebuilding its marketing workflow around AI, a process made easier, Orpello says, by the company’s relatively limited legacy infrastructure. Within roughly four months, its marketing operations and transformation team built an AI road map and launched five pilots that she says are already driving business results. (She declined to disclose the results or detail the individual pilots.)

AI is also changing how consumers research insurance. Orpello says adapting to AI-mediated shopping ranks among her top two priorities, as tools that can research policies, compare coverage, and surface options introduce a new gateway between insurers and potential customers.

Geico is studying how that behavior is evolving and working to ensure information about its products surfaces in AI-generated results. The company is also considering how to work with AI platforms as their advertising capabilities develop.

The implications extend to what happens after consumers find Geico through those channels. People who have already used AI to research policies, coverage, and competitors may arrive considerably more informed, changing what they expect from the insurer’s own digital experience.

“How do we evolve the destination experience for customers and consumers that are going to be really, really smart and knowledgeable coming in,” Orpello says, “and don’t want a website that’s just static and hasn’t taken into account all the great work that they’ve already done to understand and study the marketplace?”

Data is playing a similar role with existing customers. Orpello says nearly 60% of consumers shop for auto insurance within 12 months. Geico is analyzing signals such as visits to product and cancellation pages, customer calls, and poor service experiences to understand when a customer may be preparing to shop around and how to respond.

The company is also using data to determine which products may be relevant to customers based on factors such as life stage, location, and assets, helping Geico market insurance products outside auto more precisely.

Generative AI is giving the Geico Gecko a similar degree of personalization. Someone pausing a show such as Bridgerton, Orpello says, could see the character appear in a Victorian setting, while during a sporting event the gecko could respond to what is happening at the game. Geico has also experimented with the character interacting with basketball star Azzi Fudd. The approach allows the insurer to adapt its advertising to what consumers are watching while keeping its most recognizable brand asset at the center.

As Geico looks for more personalized ways to reach consumers, its media mix is shifting away from linear cable toward creators and live experiences, with more marketing dollars also going toward insurance products outside auto.

The result is a marketing model that Orpello says needs to be “equal parts entertainment company and direct response company.”

For a 90-year-old company, the transformation is ultimately about making one of the best-known insurance brands work differently, using technology to turn broad recognition into more individualized customer relationships.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com