the Jake from State Farm situation is entirely out of hand

please stay inside the television, sir

The history is important here, both because it helps explain the present and because it is so freaking weird. So we go back in time, roughly 600 years ago, to 2011, when State Farm rolled out what seemed like a fun throwaway ad featuring a confused and suspicious housewife who wondered what her husband was doing on the phone at night.

Maybe you remember it.

This is, like, fine. It’s about as much as anyone can or should expect from a commercial. And the State Farm employee in the commercial, Jake from State Farm, was an actual State Farm employee from Indiana named Jake Stone. Please remember this part. We’ll come back to it.

Some years later, State Farm rebooted the campaign with a paid actor named Kevin Miles in the role of Jake. They built the whole campaign around him, the way AT&T did with Lily and Progressive did with Flo and the way Liberty Mutual has been trying to with “Doug.” Which, like, fine. Whatever. Companies have been using pitchmen and mascots forever. It was all a little strange given the thing where there’s still a real Jake in Indiana who was replaced by a handsome and charismatic young actor, but still within the range of normal.

Until last year. Until Jake from State Farm started appearing in the real world, outside of the little universe where he pals around with famous athletes in the campaign. Until he showed up at an Eagles game sitting next to Donna Kelce, mother of Jason and Travis, identified on-screen as “Jake from State Farm.” The Hollywood Reporter did a profile of Miles around then and had this to say about it all.

[L]ast October, the character stepped off the screen to sit next to Donna Kelce, Travis and Jason Kelce’s mother, at the Eagles-Commanders game, a week after Travis’ relationship with Taylor Swift blew up. He was there because Maximum Effort, Ryan Reynolds’ marketing agency — which specializes in launching campaigns that capitalize on viral moments — saw an opportunity and arranged for it. But there was also a natural synergy. Jake has ties to the NFL, already: The character is canonically friends with Kelce and his fellow Chiefs star, quarterback Mahomes, who are both State Farm pitchmen themselves.

Hmm. There are a lot of words and phrases in there I don’t love. “Synergy” is the big one but let’s not overlook “canonically friends” either. (If Jake from State Farm is canonically friends with Travis Kelce then it stands to reason he could be invited to a potential Kelce-Swift wedding, which I’m sure some marketing dork at State Farm already has on a vision board in a conference room.) And it is kind of perfect that the name of the company shoving a commercial character through the vortex of reality despite no one especially asking for it is “Maximum Effort.” It might be too perfect, actually. Please know that I will be thinking about this for the foreseeable future.

Jake started showing up other places, too, like various All-Star games and events in support of other people on the State Farm payroll. There was a snowball effect here that kind of avalanched itself into the situation at the WNBA draft last week where Caitlin Clark — number one pick and State Farm commercial star — appeared to hug Jake from State Farm before her own parents after getting drafted. 

Samer Kalaf at Defector covered all of this in a very good blog with a very good headline — “Send Jake to a Farm Upstate” — but a few things jump out here that I want to address via bullet point:

• This is so weird for so many reasons, the way they’ve made a commercial character into a real-world figure that interacts with actual humans, kind of like if McDonald’s just started having Grimace be a real being that went to baseball games and stopped at the pharmacy to pick up blood pressure medication on the way home

• I kind of feel bad for the dude who plays Jake, just because the character existing in the world like this almost works as a “find and replace” for his actual real life

• I do not like it at all

And I like it even less after reading quotes like this from giddy marketing types in a recent article in Sportico. Look at these:

“To me, the secret sauce is really to make it as if Jake is real,” The Marketing Arm SVP, creative Craig Miller told Variety in 2021, having worked on the campaign for State Farm. 

This is the thing I was talking about earlier. There is something both depressing and outrageously funny about State Farm making a commercial with a real employee named Jake and then replacing him with an actor and then building their whole campaign around “BUT WHAT IF JAKE WAS REAL???”

JAKE IS REAL

HE IS STILL IN INDIANA

HE NEVER GOT TO MEET CAITLIN CLARK

WHO JUST GOT DRAFTED TO PLAY FOR A TEAM IN INDIANA

THIS IS CRAZY, RIGHT?

“It’s all about curating that persona, in a way over time that creates the right conditions for him to authentically be sitting on a sideline, to authentically be wearing a Kristin Juszczyk vest and for it to feel totally natural for Travis Scott to come by and be like, ‘Hey, what’s up, Jake?’,” Morris said.

So, two more bullet points:

• No

• This quote summons plenty of existential dread in me on its own but I can make it even more strange

Here, look, from the profile of the actor who plays Jake that we discussed earlier:

Miles is single. He wants to share his life in new ways. But it’s tricky. He’s recognizable. So he has a policy: If his dates sit down and call him Jake — which they have on multiple occasions — that’s it. He’s polite about it — he doesn’t say what he’s thinking — but it is what it is.

This is such a weird and unnecessary bummer. We didn’t have to do this! No one asked them to! We could have just kept the commercial characters inside the television and not opened up hazardous portals that we might not be able to close. The best we can do now is try to limit the damage, hopefully before a massive winged buffalo is sitting courtside at an NBA Playoff game.

THE COOLEST THING I SAW THIS WEEK

What we have here is an episode of Pablo Torre Finds Out where Pablo and his team uncover the long-rumored promo tape the New York Knicks made to try to woo LeBron James as a free agent way back in 2010. It is… so bad. Not the episode of Pablo’s show. That’s great. He and Jason Concepcion and Rob Perez have a blast running through it all clip by clip. I mean the video itself is bad. You will not believe the collection of people they compiled to attempt to attract a 27-year-old Black basketball star. Reasonable arguments can be made that no video has ever aged worse. I gasped at least twice.

But that’s not the big takeaway here. The big takeaway is that the video includes an appearance by James Gandolfini and Edie Falco, in character as Tony and Carmella Soprano, in witness protection, after the events of the series concluded. It raises so many perplexing questions, many of them covered in-depth by my buddy and Knicks fan Alan Sepinwall. My favorite is the idea that New Jersey’s most infamous mob boss is in witness protection a few miles away across the river in Manhattan.

Good video, though. I hope it means my beloved Sixers eventually try to recruit Victor Wembanyama to the team with a video of Charlie from Always Sunny. Couldn’t go much worse.

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— Vulture interviewed Heidi Gardner about that killer Beavis and Butthead sketch from the other week, which was basically perfect outside of two minor quibbles: one, the YouTube title for the video was “Beavis and Butthead,” which kind of ruined the surprise for anyone who checked out the link the next morning; and two, it kicked off another round of the discourse about people breaking during sketches and whether it is okay or a crime punishable by death, which remains deeply exhausting 

— “We are so back” gets a trend piece

— I loved this blog about the people who whip around the ocean to repair the deep-sea system of cables that keeps the internet working so I can half-watch Ocean’s 12 on a streaming service some night when there’s no sports on and I’m not in the mood to commit to anything that requires my actual attention

— I like the Garbage Day newsletter for a bunch of reasons (keeps me informed on internet stuff, points me to other cool things, makes me feel like a reasonably healthy person when it covers something so aggressively online that even I do not understand it), but a big one is phrases like “white nationalist crypto backpack zoomers jumping from one friendship casino to another” and “emo night cruises for people who remember Klout”

— Hit Man looks like it’s going to kick an incredible amount of ass

— Martin Scorsese is making a Frank Sinatra movie which he somehow has not already made

— Quentin Tarantino is no longer making The Movie Critic as his final film, which leaves the door cracked open for him to pivot to making a movie where someone steals Paddington’s marmalade and it leads to three hours of cussing and bloodshed

— Brian Cox go on Hot Ones

— Gold heist

— Golf memorabilia heist

—Elephant on the loose 

— Good headline: “Nick Offerman 'spent the whole night' high in jail after being mistaken for robber”

— Another good headline: “AMC Exec: We Wouldn't Have Made the Dune Popcorn Bucket if We Knew You'd Be Sickos About It”

— a third good headline: “Cybertruck Deliveries Halted Due To Car Being A Big Piece Of Shit That Doesn’t Work”

— Keanu Reeves and Werner Herzog both landed voice roles in animated movies this week, which is really just very solid casting work

— quick explanation for people who aren’t sports-mad maniacs like me: NBA arenas have been doing these promotions called Brickin for Chicken where everyone in attendance gets a voucher for free Chick-Fil-A nuggets if a player on the opposing team misses two consecutive free throws and, this week, in an end-of-season game that meant nothing, former Sixer and John Wick villain Boban Marjanovic intentionally missed his second free throw to guarantee the crowd all got free nuggies and everyone went freaking wild about it

Okay, that’s all. Please share and subscribe and consider upgrading and try to close the vortex that separates fiction and reality.