QuestionerGEICO has been spending around $400 to $600 million on media advertising a year in the last few years. What are the deciding factors into how much to spend?
WarrenWell, that's a question people have been asking themselves since the beginning of advertising. And, you know, I'm not sure whether it was Marshall Field or John Dorrance at Campbell's Soup or something. One of those fellows said that, you know, when I asked whether they didn't waste a lot of money on advertising, he said, yeah, we waste half of them. We don't know which half. And that is the nature of advertising. Although we can measure it better with GEICO than most companies. We will spend about $800 million on advertising. We spend far more, even though they were the third largest company, we've spent far more than state farmer, all state. And we will spend more and more and more. I mean, we will never stop. We were spending $20 million a year, a little over that, when we bought control of it in 1995. But we want everybody. in the world, while everybody in the United States, we're not going to be selling insurance in China someplace very soon. But we want everybody in the United States to have in their mind the fact that there's a good chance they can save money by picking up the phone or going to GEICO.com and checking it out. And important money. And when we get that message in people's minds, you never know what it's going to pay off later down the line because, as I mentioned earlier, starting in. around September 30th, we saw a big difference in the propensity of people to come to us to save $100 or $200, whereas they might not have cared about saving that before. So we want, here's auto insurance. Everybody has to buy it. Nobody likes to buy it, but they like to drive. And if you like to drive, you need auto insurance. And so it's going to sell, and you're going to buy it from somebody. And if you care about saving money, you're going to check with us. And we want to make sure everybody understand. that.