They came. They quacked. A few honk-ered.
“Be the duck,” said Ann Pinyan of Sandy Springs as she tried to explain her approach to acing America’s coolest, if quirkiest, job search this week. “That’s all I could come up with: ‘Be the duck.’ ”
That’s all it would take, supposedly. Someone with that rare, slightly mysterious quality needed to infuse a single word — “Aflac!” — with just the right something to make ordinary folks laugh, cry and buy boatloads of insurance. All without ruffling anyone’s feathers, like the last guy unfortunately had.
Eleven thousand people who thought they had what it took to be the voice of the once annoying, now iconic spokesduck of TV commercial fame auditioned online last month. When Columbus-based insurance giant Aflac decided to hold in-person tryouts in six cities, another 5,000 tried to snag a slot in Atlanta alone.
In all, some 150 lucky ducks got to dip their toes into the audition pond at the Annette Stilwell Casting Agency in Buckhead, including Pinyan and others who’d come from as far away as Ohio and Tallahassee.
That’s nothing. In Las Vegas, more than one Elvis impersonator showed up dressed like the King to make like the duck. (The job pays hunka hunka well, in the six figures for a few days’ work annually.)
“People, whether they love the duck or don’t love the duck, are intrigued by the duck,” Jon Sullivan, Aflac’s manager of external communications, said Tuesday at the Stilwell Agency, where aspiring spokesducks were handed a sheet of “Quack-ifications” to pore over while a steady stream of shrieked “Aflacs!” emanated from behind the closed door of the audition room.
“The way the American people have embraced the recasting of the duck has been eye-opening to say the least,” Sullivan continued.
Yeah, about that whole “recasting” thing ...
It suddenly became necessary when screechy standup comedian Gilbert Gottfried tweeted rather tastelessly about the recent Japanese natural disasters. Even if you didn’t know Aflac does 75 percent of its business in Japan, everyone quickly knew Gottfried as the decade-long voice of the duck.
Faster than unguarded duck pâté at a charity do, Gottfried was gone. Aflac’s tough-love approach to quickly removing him, and then potentially opening up the voice-over gig to the Everyduck, has drawn praise from humanitarian and public relations crisis-management types alike. It’s also raised some tough questions.
Like, is being the Rebound Duck really all it’s quacked up to be? Anyone who’s ever dated someone right after he or she has gone through a bad breakup knows the challenges of stepping into the original’s webbed fee — er, shoes.
“It’s hard, because the way the [Gottfried] duck sounds has been there in your head for years and years,” admitted Derek Wortham, 33, of Atlanta, who grew up doing funny noises for his family and whose mother urged him to try out. Before stepping into the room where Stilwell and crew tossed auditioners various curve balls like “Be a duck on a high wire” and “Sing [“Aflac”] like you’re a show-tunes duck,” the insurance broker wondered aloud: “Do you go in there and do something completely different? But it is the brand, so how far do you get away from that?”
Aflac’s Sullivan admits that finding a new voice capable of getting up to speed fast (the first commercial is planned to run by the end of this month) and sticking around for a long time is part art, part quack science. “If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that there’s talent everywhere and it sometimes comes from the unlikeliest places,” he said, citing the likes of “American Idol” and YouTube “discoveries” like Justin Bieber as precedent, while emphasizing it’s a serious job search. “Maybe it will end up being someone from the ranks of the Everyman or Everywoman, and maybe not. At some point we’ll probably just know.”
In other words, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck ...
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