After 12 years in the top marketing post, State Farm Chief Agency, Sales & Marketing Officer Rand Harbert is retiring from the company. Kristyn Cook, the company’s senior vice president of agency and marketing, will take over as the company’s top marketer beginning next year.
Harbert, who started as an agent with the company in 1992, helped State Farm become more recognizable in an increasingly crowded and noisy category. Among his accomplishments were leading a complete transformation of State Farm’s logo and introducing a reimagined “Jake from State Farm” advertising concept.
Jake, a red polo shirt and khaki-wearing friendly agent, first made his debut in State Farm’s advertising in 2011 through a commercial in which a suspicious wife catches her husband in a clandestine phone call in the middle of the night. In 2018, the brand brought the character back, recast (the original Jake was a real-life agent) and reimagined as more participatory in the world, interacting with consumers looking for the best deal on insurance. More recently, Jake has ventured into the digital world, appearing as a non-playable character in NBA2K 22.
“The reality is Jake never went away,” Harbert told Brand Innovators about the campaign’s development in an April 2021 interview. “We were looking at data like college Halloween outfits in 2018, the most popular male costume was Jake From State Farm and we hadn’t even run that ad in five years. We were thinking less about a character and more about a consistent format, so we of course went to Jake and made the decision quickly that if we were going to utilize Jake we were going to have to go to find a professional actor.”
Cook, who is a former State Farm agent, will take over as chief marketing officer at the beginning of 2023. As senior vice president of agency and marketing for the past three years, Cook has been instrumental in reaching younger consumers and demographics with activations in the metaverse, gaming, and TikTok. Among her recent initiatives has been sponsoring iHeartMedia’s concert and event space in the Fortnite metaverse and launching “The Gamerhood Challenge,” a weekly Twitch series that premiered in May.
“I’ve been so fortunate to work alongside Rand for the past three years and will continue to build on the impactful work we accomplished in our time together,” said Cook. “My connection to State Farm runs deep. My father was an agent, I opened my own State Farm agency 15 years ago, and I’m thrilled to step into my new role.”
