According to YouTube (that's the extent of the research I'm willing to do today) this awful "mayhem" ad campaign is currently in it's twelfth year. That's a milestone worth celebrating for some of the morons who comment on these ads, but personally I think they've gone from mildly amusing to Just Stop Already Obnoxious and they reached that destination quite some time ago.*
In this ad, some of the very worst child actors I've ever seen pretend to be Distracting Commercials for Birth Control while a harried, exhausted mom who pulled the short straw drives them to Pee Wee Football, that ridiculous joke of a way to spend an afternoon she's at least smart enough to not want to hang around to witness (I went to one of these games once. There was a play run roughly three times per hour, with at least twenty minutes of delay due to injuries after Every. Single. Play. An ambulance was called twice. I am not kidding. The game ended after two hours which felt like six with the score 0-0. I can't even remember which nephew I was there to support.) Because I guess AllState doesn't want to show an accident taking place while there are kids in the car, Exhausted Harried Mom doesn't damage the family SUV until AFTER the distraction has exited. That this makes zero sense doesn't matter because Mr. Oh So Funny Mayhem Guy gets to do his "you'll have to pay for this if you called The General like most white suburban moms with brand new SUVs do Because That's How Reality Works" schtick.
All of this makes me miss the looming dark presence of Karl Malden appearing to narrate the end of someone's dream vacation because they lost their wallets and didn't get American Express Traveler's Checks, whatever those are. But like Pizza Hut commercials, this is just part of the cost of watching football on the weekends, I guess.
*if you Google "Mayhem Ads" you'll find that someone with no respect for the treasure which is Time has actually compiled a ranking of all of them, from best to worst. I am not kidding. Someone did this.
As I've said before, people need insurance but none of the zombies who make the ads know how to sell it. Thus, talking lizards, millennial cavepeople, Peanuts characters and so on and so forth.
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