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.