Rob Thielke has one of the most recognized faces in Seattle, but most people think he’s someone else.
His friends know him as an insurance agent, an actor and a family man.
“I’m really pretty normal,” Thielke said. “Most people meet me, they’re like, ‘Well, he’s married, has kids, he lives out in the country.’ I go to church on Sunday. You know, pretty traditional, pretty conservative.”
Not when he’s on television.
Thielke is that wacky guy in the late-night Vern Fonk Insurance Inc. commercials. Lots of people think he’s Vern Fonk himself.
From 9 to 5 most days, Thielke is the office manager at Vern Fonk headquarters in Everett. The 31-employee company sells homeowners and auto insurance, specializing in high-risk and DUI coverage.
His other job is to conceive, write, cast and star in the low-budget ads that have built up a cult following since he first went on the air in 1995. Thielke makes about a dozen ads a year.
“It’s really quite an ensemble of people that put in ideas for them,” said Rene Mulvaney, the business’s owner since 1995 and the real Vern Fonk’s daughter. Fonk died at 75 in May, leaving a void in the company that has been family-owned since 1952.
But it wasn’t until Thielke’s outrageous ads that Vern Fonk Insurance became a household name and expanded from Seattle into Everett, Kent, Kirkland and Tacoma.
“It basically started out, I was just being goofy, silly in the office all the time,” said Thielke, who began as an insurance agent in 1989. “Vern says, ‘Hey, I want you to go do some TV ads.’ “
Thielke called up his brother, Joel, for advice. Joel Thielke, an actor in Hollywood who flies up to work on every Fonk ad, gave him some pointers: Make an ad quick, get background music and write a tag line.
“From there I just started thinking of weird, bizarre things that are relevant to society, and make fun of it or parody it,” Rob Thielke said. “And I just did a couple of them, and the phones started ringing off the hook.”
One of Thielke’s first ads, a parody of the 1994 hit movie “Forrest Gump,” resonated with the company and its partner-in-crime, Stevenson Advertising Inc. of Lynnwood. Home audiences liked it, too.
“That one really garnered a lot of attention back then,” President Brett Stevenson said. Stevenson’s company also produced the infamous yet effective MoneyTree Inc. ads that feature talking caterpillars.
Dan Turner, a marketing and international business lecturer at the University of Washington Business School, said the ads fulfill the three big objectives of advertising: They attract attention, send a strong message and call viewers to action.
Thielke reminds us: “Remember to honk when you drive by Vern Fonk!” (Yes, the neighbors complain.)
Some people don’t like the commercials, Thielke said. He’ll get calls from people – mostly outside the target audience of 18- to 34-year-old males – who say the ads are disgusting or offensive. “I ask them what’s offensive about it, and they can’t come up with anything,” he said. “It’s just weird.”
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