How insurance became one of Australia’s most exciting marketing battlegrounds
Welcome to the first Unmade special report.
Today marks a new phase for Unmade as we move into the next stage of our plan to bring you authoritative analysis that isn’t necessarily available elsewhere.
Having joined Tim Burrowes at Unmade in February with a remit of delivering specialised content for our paying subscribers and running the back end of the business, today I can share my first piece of work.
With the insurance sector among the most innovative and competitive in the marketing industry, we’ve chosen that as our first topic for an in-depth briefing.
In today’s special report we aim to offer you a substantial guide to the data, the players and the context making this such a fascinating battleground.
Below, you’ll find:
Exclusive data from Standard Media Index on how advertising budgets are being spent across the sector
Our independent, opinionated overview of the industry landscape including who has hit and who has missed
Analysis of the marketing-driven business performance of the key insurance brands
Previously unreleased data from campaign monitoring service Canda on where the television advertising schedules are landing
Interviews with some of the most significant marketers in the sectors on what they want from their agency partnerships
Kantar research on where the opportunities lie for insurance marketers
YouGov research on what consumers think of the key brands
Among the brands and agencies whose work we have assessed are: Suncorp Group, IAG Auto & General, Greenstone Financial, The Monkeys, Thinkerbell, Bear Meets Eagle On Fire, Initiative, Carat, 303 MullenLowe and more.
If you haven’t yet subscribed to Unmade, we are now offering a seven day free trial. Existing subscribers to the paying tier can read on below.
Where insurance marketing sits right now
Insurance is one of the hardest, most closely fought sectors for a marketing professional to work within.
Heavy competition, consumers chasing the cheapest price and policies automatically rolling over, means that overturning incumbent inertia is just one of the obstacles.
Then there’s a backdrop of industry headwinds. The pandemic created an increase in claims in some insurance sectors and a general drop in the income received by insurance companies from the investment of their cash reserves.
Meanwhile, a rolling toll of natural disasters including bushfires and the recent east coast flooding dented profits for all the insurance players, and put marketing budgets under pressure.
As we head next week into the final quarter of the 2022 financial year, what’s become evident is that there is a small group of brands making big marketing plays. They may be led by top-of-funnel moves like those of IAG’s NRMA Insurance or direct response such as Real Insurance, but there are also plenty of brands not making marketing headlines who are playing their own game.
The industry as a whole: Problematic profits
According to financial regulator the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority, net profit after tax for the general insurance industry plummeted from $3.4bn for the year ending September 30, 2019, to $903m for 2020. It only recovered slightly last year, up to $944m.
Although Australian cities went through a number of significant lockdowns and dealt with heavy restrictions on movement, insurance companies were able to capitalise on increased consumer need in some sectors including automotive and health as well as higher gross written premiums.
According to APRA: “For the year ended 30 September 2021, the industry net profit after tax of $944 million and return on net assets of 3.2 per cent were broadly unchanged relative to the prior year. The result was supported by improved underwriting results but investment income continues to be subdued.”
How key brands are faring
The insurance market is largely dominated by big groups managing multiple brands. It’s much like the global agency landscape – networks operating multiple agencies with slightly different focuses and a range of smaller brands or independents circling around.
Some of those big groups provide insurance products for other brands. For example, rather than underwriting its own insurance, Coles Insurance is backed by IAG and Guild Insurance. In the majority of those cases, the marketing is led by the brand that the insurance takes its name, from rather than the backers.
While traditionally there was a focus on top-of-funnel marketing for insurance brands, according to marketing management consultant Darren Woolley, CEO of TrinityP3, that is now shifting.
“There’s a lot more focus these days on targeting,” he says. “There’s certainly a lot of requests that brands want agencies to really get how to target in the digital space. The conversations are not that often around building great emotional brand connections, because a lot of them are not really spending that much money in that space.”
Another factor in the insurance sector is the presence of brokers, with the need to influence these middlemen, as well as direct consumers.
That doesn’t mean the big top-of-funnel campaigns have vanished completely. For some, they are still key. But a lack of involvement in this specific area doesn’t spell a quiet marketing department. Here is an overview of how key brands in the space have performed recently.
IAG
Under the leadership of Brent Smart, some IAG insurance brands are becoming well known for creating epic, talked about, campaigns. Those brands include NRMA, CGU and Rollin, while Swan Insurance, SGIO, SGIC, WFI and Lumley Special Vehicles also lie within the group.
To do this, Smart has developed a roster of some of the best known agencies in Australia the likes of Thinkerbell, The Monkeys, Bear Meets Eagle on Fire and CHEP, plus Initiative for media.
Kantar research and The Royal Commission into Financial Services highlighted the divide between insurance products and consumers’ understanding of them. Smart’s work with IAG’s agencies has largely attempted to bring a more human aspect to insurance and make consumers feel things about the sector.
Recent work for one of the biggest IAG brands, NRMA, included ‘New Wheels’, a Christmas campaign by The Monkeys urging drivers to be safe around children on their bikes and ‘Boat Insurers, a campaign by Thinkerbell that plays on the difficulty of reversing a boat into the water.
It’s followed on from more emotional campaigns including First Saturday by CHEP in 2020, where the brand implored Australians to do small tasks to create a more fire safe home after the catastrophic Christmas fires, and ‘Like no one else’ by The Monkeys, which followed NRMA Insurance assessor of 32 years, Judi, as she assisted with insurance claims.
The NRMA brand transformation story won the Grand Effie in the Communications Council’s 2021 Effies Awards for marketing effectiveness.
Meanwhile, IAG also launched new car insurance brand Rollin, with a campaign by new edgy agency Bear Meets Eagle on Fire, led by Micah Walker, featuring mascot Larry, a large yellow ball rapping to Digital Underground’s “Humpty Dance”.
But it was the ‘Tall Poppy’ campaign for insurance brand CGU, led by Thinkerbell, which got the industry talking when it debuted during Nine’s 60 Minutes on Sunday February 20, as a five-minute long spot. The campaign celebrates ‘tall poppies’ in small business, with Smart saying in a press release that “We created Tall Poppy to get Aussies to think differently about tall poppy syndrome and how it holds us back.”
Read how Unmade wrote about Tall Poppy
IAG shows no sign of slowing down the big campaign assault.
“I think we have proved that if you can make content that is engaging and interesting and have big ideas that people connect with and engage with, spend time with, you can really change the low-involvement dynamic in the category,” Smart tells Unmade.
“Also, I believe that if growth is the number one thing we look for as a business, then I’m looking for ideas that are going to drive growth ultimately; so big ideas, business-driving ideas, not just tactics.”
According to one industry insider, “Brent Smart and IAG are only ones going around saying, ‘We will do ads that make people feel things about us.’”
Only Budget Direct comes close to really drawing in consumers with its campaigns like IAG does. We’ll come on to that shortly.
Suncorp Group
Suncorp Group CMO and executive general manager, brand and marketing, Mim Haysom, has just made a massive shift in the marketing output. Most famous for the AAMI, Apia, Bingle and Shannons brand campaigns, the group also includes GIO, Apia, Terri Scheer, Essentials by AAI and Caravan and RV Insurance.
And this year it has significantly restructured the way it works with agencies.
WPP’s Hogarth hit the spotlight when it was announced late February that all of the group’s creative production would now be handled by the agency, led by CEO Justin Ricketts.
Creative agencies Leo Burnett and Ogilvy will remain on the roster for the major brands while Frank Moore Advertising will continue its work with niche Suncorp Group brands. Media is handled by OMD.
Of the change, Haysom tells Mumbrella, “We need to continually look at how we build capability, how we centralise to enable us to manage the portfolio more efficiently, and moving towards a centralised production hub does all those things for us. It enables us to be more agile, data-driven, and flexible in our approach.”
Hero brand AAMI has continually been in market. This year alone two new campaigns have been released. ‘Business like yours’ launched in February focusing on small business coverage as well as ‘Bargain Regret’, launched in January which highlighted the pitfalls of buying based on price rather than features.
The campaigns continue to leverage the well-known AAMI women but arguably the height of the brand’s creativity was between 2011-2014 with the character Rhonda played by Mandy McElhinney.
Advertising monitoring service Canda recorded 71 different TV executions for AAMI, 39 for Shannons and 22 for Apia across 2021. But previously heavily marketed brand Bingle recorded 0.
Woolley acknowledged that Haysom’s role is one of the most complex in the insurance industry, particularly as Suncorp Group provides a range of financial services, not just insurance.
“She’s leading quite a complex, multi-brand business,” he says “From the outside, it seems like she’s doing a very good job.”
But another source who had picked up the lack of activity from Bingle also said it was surprising that a brand with the importance of Bingle to the Suncorp Group business could be seemingly left in the marketing wilderness.
There is a positive that Suncorp Group can hang on to in terms of insurance. According to the YouGov BrandIndex, which ranks brands according to whether past and present customers would recommend them or not, AAMI is the most recommended insurance brand in Australia.
With a new agency strategy, the market will expect to see the fruits of that in H1 of FY23.
Auto & General
Unlike IAG and Suncorp Group, Auto & General as a parent brand is not as well known in the Australian industry, but its hero brand, Budget Direct, is one of the most prolific.
With marketing led by chief growth officer Jonathan Kerr, Budget Direct has invested heavily in creatively focused campaigns for more than a decade. In 2008 it first released its Michael and Michelle series, better known as the ‘Boojay boojay’ ads where French accented Michelle sings about her Budget Direct experience
Since then, the Budget Direct story has been one of consistency. Consistency in creativity, consistency in marketer and consistency in agency.
Kerr has led the marketing of the brand since 2007, and the brand later went to pitch with 303 MullenLowe being appointed in 2014. It has remained with Budget Direct to this day, despite the recent departure of CEO Nick Cleaver.
“The only agency we use on a retained basis is 303 MullenLowe,” Kerr tells Unmade. “We work on very specific research projects with select research agencies and we sometimes build specific interactives with digital providers, but the vast majority of what we do, including all media planning and procurement, is conceived, designed, created, managed, attributed and optimised by our remarkable marketing department.”
With 303 MullenLowe, Budget Direct brought Captain Risky to life, a daredevil that did every conceivable activity that Budget Direct would not insure before the brand switched to the Sarge series in 2018. That series followed hard-bitten detective ‘Sarge’ who investigated a number of out-of-this-world activities.
Kerr may be the bravest marketer in the insurance space, if not the marketing industry. In moving from Michael and Michelle to Captain Risky, and then from Captain Risky to Sarge, he has shown that he is not afraid to kill a successful campaign in search of something even better.
Sarge was an all-in effort by Kerr and the team. The series kicked off with a two-and-a-half minute ad by award winning British director Daniel Kleinmanairing on primetime Sunday night television. A massive deal at the time for not just insurance marketing but marketing in general. Big risk, but as it turned out, big reward.
But Kerr baulks at the idea that it is creativity for creativity’s sake.
“The way we think about this is we never fall in love with a campaign,” he says. “We just want the results. So we are always trying to work ahead of what the next step is. We are trying to think about this year, next year and the year after, and where we are going with it. If we felt that we would be more successful with a stick man animated advert, that is exactly what the advert would look like.
“The reason why the ads are like they are is that our research tells us that the fact we are different matters. That is part of our current communication concept. We should stand out and be different. The only thing that is budget about Budget Direct is the price. So we need to lead that – you can tell people that, but it’s better to show them in the way you communicate.”
QBE Insurance Group Limited
QBE Insurance Group Limited was founded in Townsville in 1886 and has gone on to become a multi-national insurance company headquartered in Sydney and listed on the ASX. Its hero brands QBE and Elders Insurance have seen the most outward promotion recently. But it’s never been as prolific as IAG or Auto & General.
Led by chief marketing and communications officer Sara Foale, QBE works with The Core Agency on creative and Custom Media for buying, as well as Them Advertising. The relationship with The Core Agency has been particularly long-lasting, the agency having been appointed in 2014.
In May last year The Core Agency released a new brand platform for QBE Insurance, which was the eighth most recommended insurance brand in the YouGov Brand Index.
That’s the story of QBE marketing. Ever present but never prolific. Its marketing strategy doesn’t match its enormous business size.
According to one source, QBE’s creative certainly can’t claim to be at the forefront of insurance marketing, but the fact it has remained with the same agency set for years indicates it’s comfortable with the strategy and output.
The brand has dabbled in boundary pushing work, for example, the Safer Roads campaign that ran in South Australia in 2018, featuring framed photos of families smashing into stationary objects in attempt to drive down road fatalities (which statistically it did). It was in-part created by school kids. But this style of work has not been seen nationally.
The last time QBE made somewhat of a creative wave was its 2016 campaign, ‘Call me or click,’ to the tune of ‘Call me’ by Blondie, done by The Core Agency.
NIB Group
NIB Group was best known for its long-standing relationship with Australian NRL legend Paul Harrogan, but those days are long gone and it’s been relatively quiet of late for a group that boasts it provides health and medical insurance to over 1.4 million Australian and New Zealand residents.
Last year TV monitoring service Canda registered just 20 different advertising campaigns on TV, the majority of them leaning on simple messages.
NIB seems to be setting itself up for movement though, with head of marketing Chris Donald busy on the agency roster front of late. In February it was announced that BWM Isobar had taken over creative duties for NIB from Saatchi & Saatchi while production agency Slik was also later added.
The first campaign from BWM Isobar dropped recently and provided a fresh look and feel for the brand helped by a brand refresh by Landor & Fitch in January.
Previously a prolific brand on the marketing front, expect more to come from NIB this year.
Greenstone Financial
The dark horse of insurance marketing, Greenstone Financial is one of the most prolific insurance advertisers and you will very likely have an opinion on its strategy.
You may not know the name Greenstone Financial, but you will know the name Real Insurance – the brand with the woefully acted TVCs featuring fictitious couples and families discussing their potential insurance needs. Greenstone also operates RSPCA Pet Insurance, Australian Seniors and Guardian Insurance.
Don’t scoff just yet at the Real Insurance strategy, though. Led by CMO Simon Hovell, there is a lot of sense in it even if the TVCs will never win any awards. It has flooded the market with them.
Over the last year Canda recorded 102 different TVCs for Real Insurance, the vast majority of which were played on secondary channels during off-peak.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, on the long list of agencies that Greenstone provided Unmade, there was no dedicated creative agency, although it enlists Carat for its media buying. But it does maintain a relationship with Medium Rare Content Agency, producing Australian Seniors DARE Magazine and Australian Seniors Life’s Booming podcast.
Industry leaders are genuinely impressed by how Greenstone, through its Real Insurance brand largely, sticks to its guns. “It’s absolute classic direct response,” one mentions. “Off peak means the placement is cheap and you can saturate the market. The audience during these times is not paying as much attention to the content so they are more inclined to jump on their phone or laptop and act. You don’t need a creative agency to do ads like this, but get the strategy right and it’s very effective.”
They get a low mark for creative work, but that’s not their game. A close to perfect score for strategy and execution.
Medibank
It’s been a good ride over the last year for Medibank, which also operates Ahm. As of the end of FY21, its customer numbers sat at 3.7 million while there was 4.6% growth in policy holders. While the problematic practice of insurance businesses using premium increases as a way of growing profits without growing customer numbers remains talked about in hushed tones, Medibank’s new CEO David Koczkar stated in the latest annual report that the business “ … delivered our lowest average premium increase in 20 years.”
Medibank, whose marketing is led by Fiona LeBrocq, is determined to reinvent itself as a health company as opposed to being known as an insurance company. This has been seen in its marketing through the ‘Live better’ campaign via TBWA Melbourne detailing how Medibank customers are changing the way they live for better health.
Ahm, meanwhile, whose marketing lead is Amanda Romeo, has taken a different approach, with new brand platform ‘You’re good’, delivered by The Monkeys in February last year to aid the brand in what Romeo described as a plan to diversify into new services.
The simple drawing style of the ad is meant to reflect the idea that Ahm provides simple, straightforward and affordable health insurance. It seems their research is in favour of Jonathan Kerr’s aforementioned stick man strategy.
By all accounts the strategies are working, with Koczkar stating “We grew more in the past 12 months than we have in over 10 years, our Medibank and ahm brands both achieved their highest ever levels of customer advocacy and we saw customers engaging with our broader health offerings in record numbers.”
But it may want to keep an eye out on Ahm – according to the YouGov BrandIndex, it was the only insurance brand to fall last year in the ratings, albeit by just 0.2 points.
Coles Insurance
The battle of the supermarket giants’ insurance businesses is not being won by Coles, according to every source that Unmade spoke to. And it’s not hard to see why they think that.
Not since the Coles ‘Little Red Quote’ campaign in 2013 has a Coles Insurance campaign made a splash in the industry. The agency responsible for that, and other campaigns of significant success for Coles (think ‘Down, down’), Big Red, has recently been removed from the roster.
Coles marketing division, led by Lisa Ronson, this month took the unusual step of sending out a press release to highlight the fact it had asked three networks to respond to an RFP to create a bespoke agency model covering creative, media and strategy. Those networks were Omnicom, WPP and Publicis Groupe.
Who else has a bespoke agency model? Woolworths.
It’s not particularly surprising. As one industry leader who did not wish to be named tells Unmade, “Woolworths has outperformed Coles recently and has invested more. Simple.”
Coles offers home, motor vehicle and landlord insurance to approximately 350,000 customers in Australia and is therefore a small player in the wider industry. Insurance is a small play for Coles itself, with the insurance business part of Coles Financial and barely mentioned in the annual report.
But the next year will be key for Coles and whether it does anything with the insurance part of the business. Woolworths is currently running away with it and it’s yet to be seen whether Ronson and the team of new agencies will look to respond.
Woolworths Insurance
By comparison to Coles, Woolworths seems to have its house in order. In late 2020 it brought all of its partners together in the iconic Seidler building in Surry Hills. The move saw digital arm WooliesX, creative agency Greenhouse powered by M&C Saatchi, retail media arm Cartology and BigWX come together in the same office.
It was done under the marketing leadership of Woolworths CMO Andrew Hicks, who’s been able to operate somewhat in the shadows as the industry maintains its focus on higher-profile Ronson and Coles.
Like Coles, Woolworths doesn’t separate out its insurance business in the annual report, but it does offer more insurance products than its supermarket rival – including car, home, landlord, pet, renters, CTP and life insurance.
It’s car and pet insurance in particular that has been the focus of recent marketing campaigns for the brand. The talking parts of a car’s interior happily explaining that Woolworths will beat any comparable comprehensive car insurance policy won’t win a D&AD Pencil, but that’s not the point.
But bringing on Dr Harry Cooper to help promote Woolworths Pet Insurance shows significant intent.
“It’s the same old agencies making the noise,” one industry leader quips. “The Monkeys, Thinkerbell, etcetera. There are some clients that create great opportunities for agencies, and there are other clients where there’s not the same opportunity in public. But those clients may spend more money, they’re just not investing it in that sort of top of funnel awareness consideration, they’re spending it elsewhere. That’s Woolworths. And if you were in the ecosystem it has created, you wouldn’t be unhappy at the moment.”
Customers of all types of Woolworths Insurance aren’t unhappy either. YouGov’s BrandIndex results for 2021 put Woolworths insurance in sixth overall, in front of QBE, Bupa and Ahm among others.
This all puts Woolworths Insurance in an enviable position for 2022. One industry leader told Unmade, “There are two key ways to succeed in this game. One is investing in marketing and media and the second is investing in the digital experience. I think they’re the two key leaders if you want to grow in today’s market. Woolworths has ticked both boxes.”
Youi
Another insurance brand currently in marketing flux is Youi.
While the financial performance is good (gross written premiums and net earned premiums up) and parent company Outsurance, based in South Africa, also reported good organic growth, the marketing function is currently going through significant change.
Late last year Youi CMO Joachim Holte departed the business after less than 18 months in the role. It was his second CMO role that lasted less than 18 months after he spent just over a year as the CMO of Flight Centre.
While the job ad has now been removed, there has been no word on a replacement as yet. Unmade reached out to Youi for comment but has yet to receive a response.
Youi’s current CEO, Hugo Schreuder, was previously the CMO of the business, a role he ironically stepped into after initially being the CEO of the business during its start-up phase.
The brand is famous for its relatively formulaic advertising, particularly the TVCs, featuring in-car discussions about its insurance products with actor Matthew Moore (Bump, Home & Away, The Offspring).
It’s another example of solid direct response marketing, but with a headless marketing team currently, expect the same old from Youi, which most recently worked with Emotive and GMG Digital.
A new CMO often brings change to agency rosters, but as one source said, “Youi have been doing the same style of advertising for years and the CEO was the previous CMO. How much a new CMO will be able to change will be questionable. And based on the results change may not be wanted, either.”
The brand contributed to a 35.8% increase in annualised new business premiums for Outsurance, recently formed a partnership with Blue Zebra Insurance and has entered the CTP insurance market.
Hits
Brent Smart, CMO, IAG: Controls the marketing of a number of well-known insurance brands, holds the P&L for Rollin and has built an enviable agency roster including The Monkeys, Thinkerbell, CHEP and Initiative.
Jonathan Kerr, chief growth officer, Auto & General: One of the most significant tenures in the marketing industry has lead to a string of epic campaigns that have driven results and created long term success for both Auto & General and partners like 303 MullenLowe.
Mim Haysom, CMO and executive general manager, brand and marketing: Like Smart, controls a number of high-profile insurance brands which, under her leadership, have had significant marketing output. Recent changes to the structure of Suncorp Group’s marketing output won’t be seen until nearer the end of the year.
Michah Walker, founder and CCO, Bear Meets Eagle on Fire: Starting to muscle in on the finance industry, not just the insurance space. Recent finance brand work from Bear Meets Eagle on Fire has been high profile, such as the launch of investment app Stake, Wisr’s ‘For your smarter part’ campaign and the launch of Rollin with mascot Larry.
Chris Colter, chief strategy officer, Initiative: As CSO of Initiative, he’s got a big role in shaping the strategy for IAG’s marketing. It’s off to a good start with sources telling Unmade his input into the CGU ‘Tally Poppy’ campaign in particular was ‘very, very, smart’ having shaped a significant portion of it, including aiding in the gamble to take out an entire 5-minute segment.
Misses
Coles Insurance: A restructure to the extent that Coles is doing, as publicly as it is doing it, suggests Ronson and Coles are looking for significant gains. The lack of follow up in the years after ‘Little Red Quote’ and the surge from Woolworths insurance pose a big challenge.
Youi: As it stands, the marketing team is headless. With the CEO being the former CMO, it raises questions as to what sort of freedoms the new CMO will have. Although the direct response strategy has proven solid so far, a brand needs a marketing leader to continually reassess the situation.
Allianz: Allianz wasn’t mentioned in detail in the above section because, despite the high profile switch to Howatson + Company (then Howatson + White) as the new agency’s first client, the marketing output, particularly top of funnel, has been subdued. Appointed by Sophie Finn, general manager marketing at Allianz, expectations were high that the strategically and creatively led agency would be able to give a relatively corporate brand a personality, but it’s yet to truly show up.
The marketers have been spending
According to the Standard Media Index (SMI), calendar year 2021 was a record year for spend, with the insurance category cracking the $500m mark for the first time, at $505.6m, up 20.1% compared to 2020 and more meaningfully up 13% on pre-pandemic 2019.
That percentage didn’t quite match the percentage growth of overall spend across all categories which also broke records. It hit $8.6bn for CY2021, up 23.9% on 2020.
And according to SMI CEO Jane Ractliffe, the insurance category was unusual, recording growth in spend across the majority of media types.
“It’s unusual to have growth across all major media as usually product categories are continually moving their ad spend across many media,” she tells Unmade. “So this consistent growth simply reflected the fact that demand from insurance advertisers was especially strong last year.”
She also notes: “The Insurance category’s ad spend is now 13% above what it was in the pre-COVID 2019 year. Most of the growth has been seen in the Brand/Sponsorship and Health Insurance categories, with Life Insurance and Travel Insurance unsurprisingly recording the largest declines from that period.”
Outdoor recorded the biggest increase in spend YOY, but it must be remembered the medium all but shut down during lockdown periods and was therefore recording significantly reduced spend in that time. TV, cinema and digital also recorded significant growth.
The fact that CY2021 is an all-time record (and obviously therefore an increase on pre-Covid CY2019) is key, suggesting that insurance brands are seeing substantial growth opportunities and are willing to spend to find them, despite profits at a much lower number than previously recorded.
On TV specifically…
According to advertising monitoring service Canda, insurance brands have had a significant run of TVCs. In 2021 it recorded 766 different insurance advertising executions run on metro TV.
And while QBE, Suncorp Group and IAG have had a large range of TVCs running since the start of 2021, it’s some of the challengers that have been creating the most individual ads and running them consistently.
Canda statistics show that Greenstone Financial’s Real Insurance and Outsurance’s Youi, two of the most prolific when it comes to direct response strategy, have had a significant number of TVCs running, 155 combined over the last year.
This can be seen when compared to some of the more high profile brands, like Budget Direct (29) or NRMA Insurance (29). The ratio of peak to off-peak placement is also completely different, highlighting the varied strategies.
For example, over the year of March 9 2021 to March 9 2022, Budget Direct had 23,222 spots in Sydney. 6,990 of those were placed during peak, 15,229 during off-peak and 1,003 overnight.
By comparison, during the same period, Real Insurance had 46,486 spots in Sydney, broken down into 1,736 in peak, 44,721 off peak and 29 overnight. Furthermore, the majority of those ads were run on secondary channels. Only seven spots were placed during the peak on primary channels.
Below is a selection of some of the most well-known insurance brands showing the amount of the number of different advertising executions created, the number of times the ads ran in metro areas (the spot count) and the metro market where they ran the most.
What insurance marketers want from their partners
With some long partnerships in the insurance marketing industry, as well as fresh alliances, insurance marketers are after a range of different things from their partners.
Unmade asked a group of them plus a consultant for their thoughts on agency partnerships.
Brent Smart, CMO, IAG
For me, it’s always about the work. It’s always about ideas that can change this low-involvement dynamic of our category, products and our brands. I think it’s about getting consumers to lean in, engage, and connect. I think that’s awesome and I always try to drive ideas like that.
Creativity is the answer to that. You can be really creative, but you can really change the sort of involvement dynamics of the category and we can point to that on NRMA
We’ve proved that if you can make content that’s engaging, interesting, and has big ideas that people connect with, engage with and spend time with, you can really change that low-involvement dynamic of the category. I am all for ideas that achieve that.
The second thing is also I believe that if growth is the number one thing we look for in a business, then I’m looking for ideas that are going to drive growth, ultimately. So big ideas, business-driving ideas, not just tactics, from our agencies.
Ultimately, I believe our agencies are really important strategic partners. I believe the outside perspective they bring is so important because it’s very easy to get super myopic in your own category and almost looking outside for inspiration.
Darren Woolley, founder and global CEO, TrinityP3
In insurance there’s a lot more focus these days on targeting. There’s certainly a lot of requests that insurance brands want agencies to really get how to target in the digital space. The conversation’s not that often around building great emotional brand connections, because a lot of them are not really spending that much money in that space.
There’s a lot of them that are really focusing on acquisition and retention rather than brand building, so much further down the funnel rather than up at the awareness level. And I think in some ways it’s a mistake.
A lot of them are really saying, “Yeah, no, no. We want an agency that gets how to communicate with our broker channels, and we want someone that can use data to make our digital medium more effective.” So it’s much more about the bottom of it, lower down that funnel, rather than at the top.
Melody Townsend, general manager of retail marketing, BOQ
From our agency partnerships we want not just media strategy for a campaign, or a product, but an integrated approach to media strategy and design over a 12-month period, as we navigate external pressures including covid, a federal election, concern about inflation and interest rates rising plus internal cost pressures. Essentially, that means every marketing dollar needs to yield a positive ROI.
Jonathan Kerr, chief growth officer, Auto & General
We are peculiar. We run 90% in-house, nearly 100 people and we are an agency. We’ve been doing it ever since I’ve been here. Part of that is because of the ability to turn on a dime and do whatever you need to do whenever you need to do it.
Now, what we need our agencies to do is to focus on the big stuff. That is kind of the grand brand strategy piece. So what we do is we use our agencies when we are looking for very specialist capabilities and excellence in that type of arena, and that is their role. We craft it with them and so we need our agencies to learn our business and genuinely understand how it really works, and then what we need them to do is to be quite flexible in what part of the process they are involved in.
You need a pretty mature relationship there. You need a relationship where they want to have the people involved that are experienced enough to learn a business but at the same time their egos are not so big – they are comfortable when we say ‘you do this part, we will do this part and let’s do this part together.’
If I was going to put a bow on it, I would say the work we do with our agencies is 110% focused on results, not awards. You need an agency that is there for the real reason that we do this, to go on that journey with you so they give you the right advice about stuff that is going to work, not just win awards.
What do consumers want and how do they react to insurance brands and products?
According to research of 3,500 Australians from a diverse background, pulled for Unmade by Kantar, “Despite high uptake of some insurance products, there is a discrepancy between Australian’s understanding of these.”
This becomes problematic when further research suggests that more confident and knowledgeable consumers tend to have more insurance policies. Insurance companies therefore have a job to do in educating consumers in a way that is easy for them to understand the benefits of having appropriate insurance policies for their needs.
Furthermore, the Kantar research suggested that the most opportunity for brands was in income insurance and life insurance, where lack of understanding among consumers of the benefits is higher than other insurance categories.
Other findings from Kantar included:
Males overall hold more insurance products
Gen X are more likely to have life insurance (38%)
Gen Z and millennials are less likely to have any type of insurance
Those with a higher income are more likely to hold different types of insurance products such as health insurance (72%), life insurance (34%), income protection (23%) and travel insurance (18%)
Those born overseas are more likely to have health insurance (69%)
What consumers really think
Research company YouGov creates the YouGov BrandIndex. It ranks brands based on asking respondents ‘Would you recommend the brand to a friend or colleague?’. Only respondents who are current or former customers of a given brand are allowed to respond to that brand.
Rankings data was collected between January 1, 2021 and December 31, 2021. Sample sizes vary between 7,000 and 13,000.
The results are below.
Suncorp Group tops the charts with AAMI, IAG is represented by NRMA Insurance, Budget Direct scores well in fourth while big player QBE is beaten by Woolworths Insurance.
While Ahm was the only brand to record a drop last year, it still makes it into the top 10.
2022 will provide opportunity for those willing to take it
The likelihood of IAG and Budget Direct continuing to produce the blockbuster marketing work in the insurance industry is high. Their marketers are settled, their agency rosters are stable and their brands are in solid positions. Both their marketers believe their current strategies are paying off.
But there are a number of factors that make the chances of a challenge high. Suncorp Group is poised with its new agency structure, Coles Group will likely have a new structure in place for the next financial year and Woolworths has already begun the chase.
Howatson + Company’s hiring of Levi Slavin to replace former partner Ant White could open opportunities for Allianz as well. The former chief creative officer at Colenso BBDO has first-hand experience working with NRMA in New Zealand.
And expect the same strategy to continue for Real Insurance and QBE in particular.
But the real dark horse in this group is Youi. The unknowns within the Outsurance brand mean almost anything could happen to its marketing strategy.
