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Issue #9 | The Weight of Words
I was minding my business, probably half-watching something I didn't care about, when this GEICO commercial came on.
MC Hammer. Parachute pants and a construction site. "U Can't Touch This" starts playing like it was 1990…and nobody had to explain anything.
I laughed. Out loud. Eyes wide and smiling.
And then I thought, wait! They got me. How did they get me?
Nostalgia is not an accident.
When a brand drops an 80s or 90s cultural icon into a 30-second spot, they're not just being cute. They're making a calculated bet that your brain will do the heavy lifting before your skepticism even wakes up.
The song plays, something lights up, and suddenly you're not watching an insurance commercial anymore. You're somewhere else, like in a car, at a sleepover, doing the Hammer Dance in a living room that no longer exists, and the product just happens to be there with you.
That's the whole strategy. Borrowed warmth. They didn't build that feeling. They just walked in through a door you left open a long time ago.
And it's working. On multiple generations, which is the part that's actually impressive.
Here's the thing about these songs
If you were alive in 1990, "U Can't Touch This" is a memory. If you were born in 2004, it might have come to you through a TikTok, a movie, or a parent in the car who suddenly got very animated.
Either way, you know it. Either way, it hits something.
That's the multi-generational trick nostalgia marketing has mastered. The original audience carries the song in their body. The younger audience has inherited it, not as memory exactly, but as an aesthetic, as a vibe, as something that feels familiar even if they can't explain why.
So when MC Hammer shows up on a construction site for GEICO, or Jon Bon Jovi rolls up in a convertible for State Farm's Super Bowl commercial, and Ludacris materializes in a flooded kitchen (with the biggest pair of books I’ve ever seen), because a couple said the word "ludicrous," the ad doesn't need everyone to have the same memory. It just needs everyone to feel something. And somehow, they do.
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But here's where it gets interesting and a little uneven.
Not all nostalgia plays are created equal, and I think the difference comes down to how much they touch the music itself.
The Ludacris one? We get it, there’s the wordplay, his name, a pun. Jake from State Farm appears. It’s charming. Low risk. Nobody rewrote anything.
The GEICO Hammer commercial? The song plays. The icon shows up. The ‘Hammer Pants’ are there giving…bad fashion vibes. But the song, "U Can't Touch This," stays intact. They just borrowed its energy and pointed it at insurance savings. I sang along. I enjoyed it. I was actually delighted.
And then there's what State Farm did with "Livin' on a Prayer" for the Super Bowl. They rewrote the lyrics. Keegan-Michael Key and Danny McBride as the founders of fake "Halfway There Insurance," performing revised verses about what their coverage doesn't include. Then Jon Bon Jovi appears at the end to restore order.
It's clever. Genuinely clever. But the moment those lyrics changed, something shifted, and I frowned. The song I knew got swapped out for a sales pitch, wearing my treasured memories of that song. And I noticed.
That noticing is the thin line.
When nostalgia marketing works, you feel good, you associate that feeling with the brand, and you move on. When it doesn't, when it goes one step too far into the thing you actually love — it breaks. Sometimes dramatically, and a withdrawal from a feeling you didn't know they were drawing from.
The marketers know this. They're banking on the fact that most people won't notice, or won't mind, or will be too busy singing along to clock what's actually happening. And for a lot of people, that's true.
But for some of us, the rewrite is the tell. It's the moment the borrowed warmth cools off, and you remember you're watching a commercial.
It's also worth noting: GEICO and State Farm both made major nostalgia plays within weeks of each other, February and March of 2026. Two of the biggest insurance brands in the country, reaching into the same cultural decade, at almost the same time. That's not a coincidence.
That's a trend somebody spotted in a focus group, and then everybody spotted it, and then the ads started airing back-to-back. Hmm.
Which means, we're probably not done seeing this. Whatever song you loved in 1994 is likely, at some point, coming for your auto coverage consideration.
I just hope they leave the lyrics alone. Seriously.
Till next Wednesday,
~Aliya