• Ad Age, Tuesday, February 20, 2007 11:16 AM

One of the best known icons in advertising, the Aflac duck, is about to clipped -- even though it has an 85% brand awareness level and has firmly made it way into pop culture.

Jeff Herbert, the company's first CMO and a longtime package-goods marketer, wants the duck, created by Kaplan Thaler Group, New York, to be less visible so he can focus marketing on what the company actually does: sell supplemental insurance.

"Our industry is a difficult one for the average consumer to understand," Herbert says, "We want to move our brand from being known to owned." And that also means changes to the media strategy, as Aflac will rely less on the duck's primary medium: television. "Because of the nature of our awareness vehicle, a duck, in order to hear him, the most prominent vehicle was TV," Herbert says. "Now we think that we have awareness, and we can buy media differently."

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