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NJM Insurance Bets on Squirrels to Sell Business Coverage
NJM Insurance Group's 'Nuts' is a dialogue-free, comedic film spot created by ad agency Brownstein and directed by Pete Marquis for production company Good Behavior, premiering in the United States in September 2025 as part of NJM's ongoing commercial-lines campaign that repositions business insurance through cinematic reversals and dry humor.
The spot opens inside a nut factory where a loose bolt dislodges a single nut into a peanut-sorting line — a setup that appears to be building toward a standard industrial accident. Instead, the scene pivots sharply: the errant nut escapes unharmed as an air duct collapses and floods the factory floor with dozens of live squirrels. The reversal is the point. Much as an insurance claim rarely unfolds as a business owner predicts, NJM's service, according to, extends into places its commercial customers may not anticipate. The squirrels, both absurdist prop and structural argument, carry the entire persuasive weight without a single line of spoken dialogue.
'Nuts' is the latest execution in a campaign lineage that includes 'Banana,' which launched in December 2022 as NJM's first large-scale business-insurance push, and 'Bull,' per reporting by brownsteingroup.com. Each spot deploys the same structural device — an apparent crisis that resolves in an unexpected direction — to dramatise NJM's coverage breadth across the United States. The campaign runs across connected television, over-the-top streaming platforms, social media, and digital channels, targeting NJM's commercial customers directly. Good Behavior, the production company behind the spot, was named a 2025 Ad Age A-List Production Company Standout, according to, lending additional industry credibility to the execution. The Clapboard Score for 'Nuts' is 73 out of 100.
NJM Insurance Group established its creative philosophy in April 2021 when it launched the consumer platform 'No Jingles or Mascots, Just Great Insurance' with Brownstein, as documented by njm.com. That positioning rejected the anthropomorphic mascots and earworm jingles deployed by dominant US competitors such as GEICO and Progressive, instead staking NJM's brand identity on straightforward reliability communicated through craft rather than character. When NJM expanded into commercial-lines advertising in December 2022, per brownsteingroup.com, Brownstein extended the same anti-spectacle logic into a new register: instead of avoiding entertainment, the agency weaponised it through structural surprise.
The strategic insight underpinning 'Nuts' and its predecessors is grounded in a commercial reality that business owners recognise immediately — unexpected problems in business rarely resemble the problems you prepared for, according to. A bolt drops; squirrels appear. The format transforms a dry insurance proposition into a repeatable creative system in which each new execution can introduce a fresh scenario while reinforcing the same brand truth. This is category-level differentiation in the United States insurance advertising market, where competitors including Liberty Mutual have historically leaned on humor through recurring characters rather than pure situational reversal.
NJM expanded its commercial-lines product offerings beginning in 2018, per njm.com, which gave the brand a genuine product story to tell by the time its business-insurance campaign launched. The creative strategy does not manufacture a positioning; it dramatises one that already existed. Adrian Castillo, creative director at Brownstein Group, described the campaign concept as a visually striking, cinematic reversal of expectations grounded in the reality that unexpected events define business risk, as reported by brownsteingroup.com. That conceptual clarity is what allows a wordless squirrel sequence to function as a coherent insurance argument across CTV, OTT, social, and digital placements in the United States.
Pete Marquis directed 'Nuts' for production company Good Behavior. Marquis described the creative challenge as striking the right balance between the surreal and the grounded, according to, and that tension is the defining quality of the spot's production craft. The film carries no dialogue, no voiceover, and no explanatory text during its central sequence, which means every persuasive beat must be communicated through staging, timing, and camera movement alone.
The production combined live-trained squirrels with visual effects, as documented by, a decision that anchors the absurdist payoff in physical reality rather than pure computer-generated imagery. Live animal performance introduces genuine unpredictability on set, and Gary Greenberg, chief creative officer at Brownstein Group, noted in commentary reported by that the squirrels were given peanuts and a path to run — a method that, by his account, produced reliable results and became a metaphor for NJM's own brand promise: the unexpected can be the most dependable part of the process. The production anecdote is not incidental; it reinforces the campaign's core message at the level of the shoot itself.
Muse by Clio published editorial coverage of the spot on September 23, 2025, under the headline 'You Want to Sell Insurance? Release the Squirrels!', according to musebyclios.com, signalling trade recognition of the execution's creative distinctiveness. The choice to rely on visual storytelling over dialogue is consistent with the wider campaign series, which treats each factory or commercial setting as a self-contained environment where mise-en-scène carries the argument. For a media asset intended to run across connected television and OTT platforms in the United States, the absence of dialogue also ensures the spot communicates fully in sound-off viewing environments — a practical production decision with significant distribution intelligence behind it. Production credits beyond Marquis and Good Behavior are not fully documented in publicly available sources.
The 'Nuts' campaign accumulated more than 900,000 views across its distribution channels, according to. For a business-insurance spot targeting commercial customers in the United States — a relatively narrow audience segment compared with mass consumer insurance advertising — that figure reflects meaningful reach within a category where awareness campaigns rarely generate organic viewership at scale.
No verified performance data beyond the view count is publicly available for 'Nuts' at the time of this analysis. No coverage of the spot has been identified in Campaign, Ad Age, Adweek, The Drum, or Contagious trade publications, which limits independent third-party assessment of its business impact. What the structural evidence does support is that the campaign system NJM and Brownstein have built since December 2022 has produced at least three distinct executions — 'Banana,' 'Bull,' and 'Nuts' — each redeploying the same reversal mechanic across new commercial settings, according to brownsteingroup.com. That iterative investment signals client confidence in the creative platform's effectiveness.
The spot's format carries inherent distribution efficiency. Dialogue-free execution travels without localisation costs across every digital and streaming environment in the United States. The blending of live animal performance with visual effects gives the spot a production quality that sits above the category average for commercial-lines insurance advertising without requiring the sustained media spend that competitor mascot campaigns demand. The Clapboard Score for 'Nuts' is 73 out of 100, reflecting strong creative craft and conceptual clarity within a campaign architecture that has demonstrated longevity, while acknowledging the limited public data available to verify downstream commercial results.
'Nuts' is a dialogue-free insurance spot set inside a nut factory. A loose bolt triggers what appears to be an industrial accident, but the scene reverses when an air duct collapses and releases live squirrels across the factory floor, dramatising NJM's message that its business insurance delivers reliability in unexpected places, according to.
Ad agency Brownstein created the 'Nuts' campaign for NJM Insurance Group. Good Behavior served as the production company, with Pete Marquis directing. Good Behavior was named a 2025 Ad Age A-List Production Company Standout, according to, and the spot launched in the United States in September 2025.
'Nuts' is the latest in a series of business-insurance executions from Brownstein and NJM that includes 'Banana' and 'Bull,' per brownsteingroup.com. Each spot uses a cinematic reversal mechanic to show that NJM's commercial coverage extends beyond what business owners in the United States typically anticipate, reinforcing a platform launched in December 2022.
Live-trained squirrels were used during the production of 'Nuts,' combined with visual effects, according to. Gary Greenberg, chief creative officer at Brownstein Group, noted the squirrels were given peanuts and a clear path to run, making them unexpectedly reliable on set and a practical metaphor for NJM's own brand promise.
The 'Nuts' campaign accumulated more than 900,000 views across its United States distribution channels, according to, which include connected television, OTT, social, and digital platforms. The spot received editorial coverage from Muse by Clio in September 2025 and carries a Clapboard Score of 73 out of 100, per.
NJM's campaign, created by Brownstein, deliberately avoids mascots and jingles — a positioning established in April 2021 per njm.com — setting it apart from competitors such as GEICO and Progressive in the United States insurance market. 'Nuts' relies entirely on visual storytelling and situational reversal rather than recurring characters or spoken brand claims.
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