She’s unmistakable in her white shirt, slacks and apron with the word PROGRESSIvE stenciled in big blue letters across the front. Why, it’s Flo, of course, the insurance carri- er’s very distinctive and highly-successful spokesperson. Through almost a decade the company has promoted Flo via on-air commercials and through in-print advertising. As one of Progressive’s “insurance claims concierge specialists,” millions of us have been captivated by her bubbly effervescence and quirky personality.


Flo must be doing something right. They keep making and airing more commercials!


When those myriad ads began running, back in 2008, I inwardly marveled at the use of the term “concierge” stated so freely on television, realizing that word had finally gone mainstream. Why was this so important to me? Heck, through fourteen years prior to Progressive’s ad coup, when I told certain folks that I was a corporate concierge by profession, they’d stare back blankly not understanding what a concierge was, let alone what being a corporate concierge actually meant. So I felt those commercials were subtle little educators on the title itself.


[And speaking of mainstream – It didn’t hurt to have filmmaker Wes Anderson spotlight the concierge within his comedy masterpiece, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and its own fictitious version of the guild called the “Society of the Crossed Keys.”]


Except the more I thought about it, the greater I became inwardly-agitated by Progressive’s big lie. “Flo isn’t really a concierge,” I rationalized. “Is this what’s happening to my profession? Is the term now that generic?” Doing an online search, I began to find countless everyday jobs possessing that title – my title – in so many manufactured ways: There was the Concierge Florist and the Concierge Travel Agency. I even saw an ad for a Mobile Concierge Dry Cleaners!


This was in 2008.


Now, I’m not so concerned with the falsification of the term concierge. No, today I have a far more important question: “Will the concierge profession, as we know it, even survive?”


Mid-Atlantic EvENTS Magazine 67


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