The insurance business is all about taking calculated risks, so Aflac CEO Dan Amos always makes sure his numbers line up before he makes a big decision. 

Still, on New Year’s Day 2000 — the day the now-famous Aflac Duck quacked its way into the world for the first time — he was anxious. 

“I realized at that moment that I had bet my entire life on a duck, and I was scared to death it wasn’t going to work,” Amos joked to a group of University of Georgia students during his Mason Leadership Lecture on Oct. 2 at the UGA Chapel. 

In the end, that duck changed the way insurance was sold in America and catapulted Aflac from a company with 4% name recognition to about 90% in just a few years.

In the late 1990s, Amos was trying to raise Aflac’s profile. Founded by Amos’s uncles and father in the 1950s as American Family Life Assurance Company of Columbus, Aflac became one of the largest insurers in Japan in the 1970s and 1980s, but it wasn’t a household name in the U.S.

“We ended up going outside and hiring several firms to make presentations,” Amos said. “We actually had 25 different presentations made on different commercials.”

One pitch was for Ray Romano, star of the sitcom “Everyone Loves Raymond,” to play a coach and spell “Aflac” on a field with a group of children, but it didn’t move the needle.

“I realized we had to do something bold, but I never dreamed they would come back with the idea of the Aflac Duck,” Amos said.  

The duck was a winner when tested with audiences, but it was way outside the norm for financial and insurance companies at the time. 

“The problem was we were making fun of our name,” he said. “Back then, you didn’t have insurance commercials that were fun. You didn’t have Flo; you didn’t have the Geico Gecko or any of those things. I was scared to death that people wouldn’t like it, but I told the advertising agency I would go with whatever scored the best with test audiences if it was in good taste. And the duck came back first.”

What Amos remembers that most others won’t is the duck launched on Jan. 1, 2000, when a huge audience spent the day glued to CNN to see whether the Y2K computer glitch would crash the economy. It was a time of high anxiety. 

But instead of bad news, the world’s computer systems kept running, and CNN was left with extra advertising time. The Aflac Duck aired on repeat between news stories about banks and hospitals running smoothly and the heroic IT professionals who successfully updated the software the world needed to keep running.

“We ended up taking our name recognition to 90%. Now that’s good — I mean, that is Nike, Coca-Cola levels of name recognition,” Amos said. 

When the advertising firm surveyed audiences about the duck, they reported that most of their respondents insisted on imitating the duck’s signature voice when answering questions, Amos said.

Inside the company, people also went nuts for the duck.

“Our agents and salespeople were so enthusiastic,” he said. “They all wanted to go buy a duck costume and wear it. And we said, ‘No, you cannot wear a duck costume.’”

The company put in place a list of rules that dictate how and where people can use the duck to keep it from soiling the Aflac brand — and it’s worked. 

“Now, when you see a white duck, most people in America think ‘Aflac,’” he concluded.