GEICO Tiny House

Geico Tiny House | Meredith Bishop in Tiny House

She seemed so familiar when I first saw the commercial in 2004. Who was the girl in the Geico commercial? I wasn't the only person who wanted to know. Many forums across the World Wide Web were filled with inquiries about the name of this mysterious "This is NOT awesome" actress. For months, no one got a reply, but eventually the facts began to emerge as the commercial picked up considerable media attention.

I've always had questions about television commercials. They are usually fleeting and so not important enough for me to do anything, but I've wanted to see an Internet Commercial Database site come online for years. The IMDB has grown into a somewhat useful resource through the years (it still relies extensively on visitor submissions, so you have to be careful about placing too much faith in what it says). An ICDB site would be just the thing. So many neat stories and actors show up in commercials.

For example, Netzero (a company I will never sign up with again because they charged my credit card three times after I cancelled the account with them) used to run a killer commercial in its login screen. The commercial showed a guy leading a corporate tour through a massive production facility. He proudly explained how his company was delivering products to customers all over the world in an efficient, timely fashion. A very attractive woman (who seemed very familiar to me in a Julia-Louis Dreyfuss way) asked him how they did it. So the guy offered to show them, and off the group went on a trip into the bowels of the plant. As they crossed through a huge industrial complex, he yelled out, "Now don't freak out!" Finally, he led them into a small vault and there in the center of a room sat a black rocket (the Genuity emblem).

Geico's "Tiny House" commercial is so like that Genuity commercial. The fact that I have done research on "Tiny House" but not on "Don't Freak Out" (or whatever that commercial was named) indicates that Geico had the more compelling commercial. Okay, maybe their girl is just a tad cuter. Maybe I like "I just want to make an omelette!" Maybe I think the tiny house is awesome. It doesn't matter. You're reading a page about "Tiny House" and that's that.

I was amazed at how much information crept out about the spot. For example, it was apparently produced by The Martin Agency of Virgnia and it was scripted by Joe Lawson. Lawson's name (and "Tiny House") appeared in a news article about humor in television commercials with some input from James Twitchell, who teaches a course on American culture (expressed through advertising) at the University of Florida.

And Non Stop Music did the soundtrack for the commercial. You can download Tiny House as a .MOV (QuickTime) file from Non Stop's newsletter page.

I finally discovered the name of the actress on ModBlog. This site has quite a collection of pictures of Meredith, only one from "Tiny House". She starred in and produced a movie named "Klepto". I never heard of it, but I'm sure many Meredith fans have.

So, where did I see Meredith Bishop before? Quite possibly, she just looked familiar to me for no reason other than that she is really, really cute. But since she was a co-star on The Secret World of Alex Mack (she played Alex's older sister Annie, who was a teen genius), perhaps my sub-conscious reached deep, deep, way back into time to that one day where, as I was channel surfing in the 1990s, I settled on Secret World for the space of about 15-20 minutes. That is about as much time as I invested in the show. Sorry. It just never struck my fancy enough for me to become a fan. Maybe I missed out on something good.

Anyway, following the trail of Meredith Bishop clues, I learned there were no official Web sites for Alex Mack. And virtually all the episode lists still available are inundated with ads. But you can learn a little about the show at Episode Guides by LS: The Secret World of Alex Mack. Not quite ad-free, but you can get to the content more easily than with other sites.

An interesting feature article by Burk Sauls tells about his experience as prop designer for Alex Mack. But, enough about The Secret World of Alex Mack.

The "Tiny House" spot has been lauded as the best ad on television by Slate's Seth Stevenson. Hm, well, I don't know if I would call it the best. Some of the old sports ads were pretty good. Anything with Bubba Smith crushing stuff is pretty interesting. But I digress. One of the neat facts about "Tiny House" is that the production crew apparently kept the actors interred in the set (really built so small they couldn't stand up straight) for several more hours than they wanted to be there. The actors' expressions of frustration are thus fairly genuine as they grew more and more tense. Imagine the explosions that would occur if they really had to live there for a year!

So, there you have it. Nearly all the information I could find about this awesome commercial. Grant Thompson fans will want to read his first-person feature from the Gainesville.com site. Otherwise, that is it. My quest is over. I know who the girl and guy are. I know the story behind the commercial. I know more than I ever wanted to know. I can now get it out of my system. I can move on with my life.

Although it might be nice to know where they got the idea for the cave man commercials, but, you know what? That's okay because I saved a bundle on my car insurance (what can I say? I called GEICO, too).