Yesterday, while searching for something else utterly un-Peanuts related, I stumbled across an ad campaign that I don’t think I’d ever heard of before. A series of eight ads for Connecticut Blue Cross ran in newspapers during 1958. By 1958, Peanuts had been used in various commercial ways, like Peanuts books and toys and to illustrate the somewhat promotional guide The Brown Book of Picture-Taking (1955). And of course it had been used to advertise Peanuts things, like the fact that a newspaper is running the Peanuts strip. However, off the top of my head I can’t think of any earlier examples of Peanuts being used in advertisements for a non-Peanuts product (or, in this case, a service.)
It was a minor campaign compared to what was to come the next year; where the Ford Falcon campaign would be national, involve creating a lot of new Peanuts strips and spot art, original animation, and so forth, this campaign was limited to Connecticut, presumably just print, and did not use new art (the art in the examples below come from the April 19, 1953 and May 31, 1955 strips.) But this looks to be a significant baby step into world which would give Peanuts an even larger place in the culture, advertising cars and restaurants, pistachios and vacuum cleaners, and yes, for more than 30 years, insurance. 
(By the way, did you realize that MetLife has picked up the Peanuts license again? No surprise if not, as it’s on a much more limited basis now; they’re using Snoopy to advertise pet insurance!)
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