The creative team behind GA Insurance’s marketing campaigns has gone full Hollywood with “Honey, I Sued the Company” — a clever, unmistakable riff on the classic 1989 Disney film Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. The visual language is immediately recognizable: the oversized dog, the man with the distinctive red-framed glasses staring it down, and a tiny figure running across the frame in sheer panic. The copy lands the punchline perfectly — “Family Drama Meets Financial Cover. Get GA Liability Insurance & Stay Protected.”

I have to give credit where it is due. I have been observing GA Insurance’s billboard campaigns for a number of years now and I wrote about one of their more memorable efforts back in 2023 when they had the audacity to call out ChatGPT on a billboard for being inaccurate about their true market position for various classes of Insurance. Whether the creative is bold, occasionally risqué, or outright cheeky, their billboards consistently do the one thing that many billboards in Kenya often don’t do — make you stop, look, and think.

But here is my honest marketing critique of what is otherwise an impressive campaign idea.

During this weekend alone, I spotted two other billboards in this same series — one clearly inspired by The Silence of the Lambs and another drawing from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Now consider this: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is from 1966. Honey, I Shrunk the Kids is from 1989. Even The Silence of the Lambs, the most recent of the three, came out in 1991. I personally first watched that film in high school so that tells you everything you need to know about who this campaign is actually speaking to.

The movie-inspired creative will land brilliantly with Gen X consumers and possibly Baby Boomers who grew up with these films. But for Millennials — and certainly for Gen Z — these references will either draw a blank entirely, or at best land as something vaguely familiar their parents once watched. That is a significant contextual gap when you consider that Millennials and Gen Z are arguably the most important insurance market right now — first-time homeowners, first cars, young families, emerging small business owners. They are exactly the demographic GA Insurance should be actively recruiting, and a campaign anchored in 35-to-50-year-old pop culture is not the most direct route to their attention.

The fix is not complicated. Apply the same brilliant creative framework to films that Millennials and Gen Z genuinely love. Imagine this concept applied to Black Panther, Get Out, Avatar, or John Wick. The wordplay possibilities are endless and the cultural relevance would be immediate and far broader.

My second concern is the one that I imagine their legal team has already had to wrestle with: copyright. Even where the original poster artwork has not been used verbatim, the visual identity, compositional style, and character likeness of these films are all copyrighted works. The fact that the campaign has been publicly flighted suggests that GA Insurance has cleared the necessary hurdles (if any do exist?), or they have built a strong enough “transformative use” argument to feel comfortable. But it’s a question worth asking out loud, because inspiration and infringement can sometimes occupy uncomfortably close territory in advertising.

All said, GA Insurance remains one of the more creatively adventurous brands in Kenya’s insurance market when it comes to their marketing campaigns. The fact that a billboard makes me pull out my phone and take a photograph — and then write a post about it — is arguably the best possible outcome for any out of home (OOH) campaign. On that count alone, they are winning.

Now, if only they could win over my children’s generation too!