How much does kevin miles make from state farm

Jake From State Farm is one of those advertising characters that stick in your mind long after the television is turned off. There is something about the smiling, khaki-clad actor consumers find easy to relate to. Being likable goes a long way in making a marketing impact.

The winning face behind State Farm's Jake is Kevin Miles. Miles might look vaguely familiar to some viewers who recognize him from his small roles in several other television ads. Yet the punchlines delivered as Jake from State Farm seem to be what people remember the most.

Jake from State Farm is keeping himself busy

Kevin Miles is taking advantage of his modest celebrity as Jake From State Farm. The South Side of Chicago native studied at the Chicago Academy for the Arts and then Webster University's Conservatory of Theatre Arts, according to Forbes. But it was Miles' role as Jake from State Farm that seemed to open new doors for him.

Lately, fans can spot Miles in Netflix's Tall Girl 2. Though his cameo role in the show is brief, it serves as a pivotal moment in the protagonist's character development. Miles has been featured in small parts in several television shows through the years, including Criminal Minds and S.W.A.T.

Distractify says to look for Miles in the upcoming dystopian film titled Uglies. No release date has been announced yet but it is expected to hit the screen by the end of this year or the beginning of next year.

Where else can we expect to see Jake From State Farm?

State Farm is a familiar sponsor of the National Basketball League and an advertising mainstay in the world of televised sports. The insurance company owns the naming rights to the Atlanta Hawks' home court, State Farm Arena. PSFK notes that State Farm also presents pregame segments for the NBA2K e-sport league.

Now Jake From State Farm is set to play a role in the new NBA 2K22 video game. Jake From State Farm is featured as a non-playable character (NPC) in the game tasked with welcoming players to The City.

Interacting with the digital Jake allows players to unlock State Farm-inspired garb for their own created characters. The Jake From State Farm avatar is based on the Kevin Miles character, khakis and all. To earn their own khakis and red polo shirt, players wait to hear the tagline "Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there" to proceed.

State Farm has big plans for future branding

State Farm has ambitious plans to expand its advertising brand both in online gaming communities as well as in real-world events. Jake From State Farm will figure prominently in many of these campaigns. A recent Twitch livestream event called "Battle of the Khakis" featured Jake From State Farm as well as other NBA2K streamers.

It's true Kevin Miles is best known for his smiling face as Jake From State Farm. But he has quite a resume as a commercial actor and has represented several brands. You might recognize him from his parts in ads for Slim Jims, Taco Bell, or Pepsi, among others.

State Farm's sports-targeted television advertising campaigns include a commercial for the Super Bowl. Miles' Jake From State Farm character appeared with rapper Drake and with NFL players Aaron Rodgers and Patrick Mahomes in the big event. 

We have likely not seen the last of Jake From State Farm on the television screen or in the latest digital sports action game. Most of us are okay with that.

Get the best deals on car insurance with Jerry

Whether you choose State Farm or another insurance carrier, Jerry can help you find the best prices on car insurance. We compare prices from all the major insurance carriers to help you find the best deals.

In the past year, “Jake, From State Farm” actor Kevin Miles has catapulted to fame. On TV, he’s spreading the word about insurance rates to everybody from delivery drivers to NFL MVPs. In the streets, he’s posing with fans clamoring for pictures and autographs.

As spokesman for a national ad campaign with back-to-back Super Bowl spots and his face on multiple platforms, it’s not his fame that surprises. 

It’s the lane in which it’s happening. Miles as Jake is the kind of regular, stand-up everyman that Black people see in our families and communities all the time. We just seldom see him on television, or historically in America, as a good neighbor.

In a popular culture conditioned to understand young Black men as athletes or entertainers, or on one side or another of the criminal justice system, Jake represents a departure. The character offers a window into the racial architecture of fame.

Often, “you’ve either got to be wacky, or you’ve got to be dangerous” to land jobs as a Black actor, said the 30-year-old Miles.

Miles moved from the South Side of Chicago to Los Angeles to pursue acting, and had already done some commercials when he auditioned for the role of Jake.

Many other insurance spokespeople are comedic talents. They’re witty and quirky. 

“I knew if I tried to do something wacky or crazy, it probably wouldn’t have fit me or my frame,” he said.

“I just wanted to come with something that felt like truth. Felt like a best friend that’s next to you,” said Miles. “Honestly, that’s just closer to me.”

The Marketing Arm

“Jake is like the guy next door, the boy next door that grew up,” said Henry C. Boyd, a marketing professor at the University of Maryland. “The perception is there that, man, you went out of your way, Jake. You gave me the inside deal.”

Insurance can be dull and it can take antics and hyperbole to stand out. But Boyd calls Jake’s charisma, charm and conventional good looks something that can win for State Farm. “He’s become a franchise success,” said Boyd. That success marks a universal, all-American appeal. But don’t misunderstand. Without the slightest patina of performative ethnicity, he still feels authentically Black.

It’s all that low-key cool. 

“Who was the most extraordinary, low-key person we’ve seen in the last 20 years?” asked Mark Anthony Neal, chair of the department of African and African American studies at Duke University. With Jake, “you also hear that Barack cadence,” Neal said. “He speaks in small bunches. And then it’s kind of an accent, then he speaks in a couple of more bunches. So it’s never too fast, but it’s stylistically Black.”

The nature of the commercials also help reinforce Jake’s chill. “Especially the ones with [Phoenix Suns star] Chris Paul, all kinds of crazy stuff is about to happen, but with Jake, there’s never any drama,” Neal said. “It’s always, ‘No, we’re good.’

“Think about Dennis Haysbert, who also did these auto insurance commercials after playing the president on [the Fox series] 24,” Neal said. “There’s just something about his coolness under pressure that white folks are drawn to.”

The Marketing Arm

Students Alexis Williamson, a political science major, and DeWayne Carter, a psychology major, both 20, were in Neal’s Black popular culture and history of hip-hop class in the spring semester. They say the face of a company impacts their buying decisions. Williamson says her family uses Allstate because her mom likes Haysbert. But “it’s not top of dome anymore because Dennis Haysbert isn’t their guy, and Jake is State Farm’s guy,” she said. The Jake campaign, “I definitely would say gives me a different idea about the corporation.”

The nuance here matters. It’s not simply that Jake is Black. It is that “he doesn’t have to be a rapper, or he doesn’t have to be a star quarterback, basketball player, whatever it may be,” said Carter, himself a defensive tackle for Duke’s football team. It makes Jake’s popularity a hundred times more powerful, Carter says. “He can just exist. He can just be himself.”

“It’s so authentic and that’s what is appealing to me,” said Williamson. “It feels like there’s somebody Black on that [State Farm creative] team and they’re allowing them to create in a really significant way.”

Patty Morris, assistant vice president of marketing for State Farm, says the relaunch of the Jake campaign and leaning into the “Like a good neighbor” slogan “has probably been the most rewarding thing I’ve worked on.” It’s the affection people have for the character and “a culmination of things that have happened in the last year and a half,” with COVID-19 and the racial justice movement that make him the right character and message for the times.

The Marketing Arm

In 2019, when State Farm sought a brand refresh, The Marketing Arm ad agency encouraged the company to lean into Jake. They cast widely to find a professional actor to carry the campaign and replace the actual State Farm employee who gained a cult following as the original Jake in the 2011-2016 campaign. They relaunched Jake sitting at his cubicle during the Super Bowl pregame in 2020.

In this year’s Super Bowl commercial with NFL MVP quarterbacks Patrick Mahomes and Aaron Rodgers, Drake played Jake’s stand-in. The campaign helped make State Farm one of Ad Age magazine’s top 10 marketers of 2020. And it was part of a brand overhaul that helped the 98-year-old insurer grow its auto policies by 1.5 million last year.

This meant reaching younger, more diverse audiences, and putting Jake in gaming and music and sports. Jake is also in situations that reflect changes in identity and demographics. 

“That’s why the pizza commercial is so striking,” said Neal, referring to the spot where a young delivery driver insists on giving Jake free pizza and a tub of ranch dressing as thanks for giving her that special “Parker” rate. “Here you have a young, non-traditional white woman, who is representative of a certain kind of constituency, and Jake. And they connect. They vibe on some sort of level, because it’s going to be their world going forward. It’s going to be, her world is going to be Jake’s world and all kinds of non-traditional figures.”

“We set out to say, ‘All right, if we’re going to extend this character and really scale this into a full-fledged campaign, we need this humanization of the brand to be relatable and likable.’ Of course we said those things,” Morris said. “We didn’t go into that casting saying, ‘We need to cast a young, energetic, supercharismatic African American man.’ We said, ‘We need to cast the person that best embodies our brand ethos.’ And that certainly includes authenticity, it includes being honest and helpful, and those are all part of State Farm’s brand value set and that’s what we were looking for. And the best person to fit that role was Kevin and he was African American, and that was great with us.”

Williamson, like her classmate Carter, is getting a certificate in management and marketing. She says the ad campaign demonstrates cultural literacy, a standard by which her generation judges the companies that are asking for their money. 

We’re “in a space where we still have to explain that Black people exist in the world just as anybody else. Just like white people. We are not juxtapositions to white people. We are just people,” she said. “I think Jake does a really good job of just being out in the world and existing as he is, and he is Black. And so that comes with different mannerisms and tendencies that other communities may not have, but at the end of the day, he’s still a super relatable guy.”

It’s a simple thing that Black people have been preaching forever, Carter says. “Representation matters. Not only representation, authentic representation, not performative action.” 

Not the people companies hire “just so they can say we’re diverse,” he said. “Authentic representation matters because it’s authentic, it’s real, it’s beautiful in my opinion.” And it sells. That’s the lesson to take from Jake. “Especially in this day and age, people love to see diversity, especially at a corporate level,” Carter said. “That’s a big thing that corporations can take away.”

Miles, who eventually wants to go on to bigger roles, hopes his portrayal of Jake helps casting agents understand that Black people have more to give than the single dimension that’s often asked of them. 

He quotes a line from the Drake song “6PM in New York” about ambition and who belongs on the throne. “All the great actors that I love are just phenomenal at playing in the middle, sometimes, and I just wanted to be close to that, too,” Miles said. “I just wanted to see where my everyman was.

“It’s great that at the core of what I’m trying to do, it’s resonating and being seen,” said Miles. “I hope that it opens a door, where that can be a norm.” One that shows a regular brother, with a low-key chill, can also superstar.

Liner Notes

If you liked this essay, you can take home a lot more great writing from Andscape by getting our new book, BlackTold, on sale now, wherever books are sold.

Lonnae O’Neal is a senior writer at Andscape. She’s an author, a former columnist, has a rack of kids and she writes bird by bird.