Twitter
Andrew Davidson 
Susan Menke 
Susan Wolfe 
Lisa Hronek Insurance
Dead on Arrival
As usual, the recent holiday season brought in a vast assortment of advertising across all sectors of the economy. What stood out for me were the ads I saw on TV for the ASPCA. They were disturbing, yet engaging. They tackled the classic problem when people know something needs to be done, know there is a solution, and yet do nothing about it. The music, images, and dialogue all combined to create a call to action fueled by……wait for it……. an emotional response.
As I uncomfortably watched ASPCA’s ad and resisted the urge to flip to another channel, I realized that I’ve never seen any marketing from a life insurance company that had anywhere near that kind of emotional engagement. Life insurance advertising seems to hit on logic, convenience, and price. All the items that you think about, but don’t feel about life insurance, even though it’s actually an intrinsically emotion-laden product. At the most basic level, its presence is a relief, and its absence causes dismay. Its unique value is how it can soften the financial and emotional blow to enable families to continue as well as can be expected after the excruciating trauma that occurs with the death of a loved-one.
Those recent ads by the ASPCA inspired some questions for the life insurance industry. Where’s the marketing aimed at family breadwinners that actually elicits an emotional response? Where are the ads with the kind of gut-wrenching emotions that embalm you in the reality of how much of an unbelievably despicable person you are for not protecting your family properly? Why not show what’s going to happen in the nightmarish aftermath of losing a loved-one, if they discover there was too little, or worse yet, no life insurance at all? Insurers are in a unique position to provide perspective to consumers by showing how inexorably bound for financial ruination they will be without enough life insurance coverage in order to maintain, and pull together the pieces of their lives. Insurers do the public and themselves a disservice by marketing to consumers so shallowly. Here’s your call to action life insurers, make me feel something. Make me feel uncomfortable. I dare you.
Insurance Marketing on my iPhone
I recently embarked on a road trip that took me more than a day’s drive away. These kinds of trips used to be somewhat daunting when you took into consideration the various radio station offerings as you move into the more sparsely populated sections of the country. To help keep me alert and engaged while I’m driving, I’ve always enjoyed hearing something new and unexpected. In the past, satellite radio has been great for that but I recently discovered an alternative that works almost as well. Pandora. I’m able to set the types of things I want to listen to and make my own “Radio Stations” I just plug in my iPhone to the car’s sound system, and off I go.
Since I opt for the advertising supported version of Pandora, I occasionally hear an advertisement. Generally they are short, sweet and to the point. On this particular trip, I only heard one ad for what seemed like only a few times an hour. It was for American Family Insurance. The ads were very short and since I was an attentive audience for the better part of 16 hours I heard the ad many times. In fact, it was the only ad I heard while listening to Pandora on this trip. When I realized that I was only hearing a single ad for a single company I thought that was pretty astonishing. On regular radio when they go to a break you hear many ads for a variety of products and services. They are doing something a bit different here.
A few hours into my trip as I heard the American Family ad again, it made me think that I have also seen ads for American Family Insurance on one of the games I play on my iPhone. These aren’t product specific ads, more like company branding with the call to action to find out more about what American Family Offers. A simple message really, with the potential to stick.
It’s pretty clear that American Family is using the electronic/mobile media format as a way for their brand recognition campaigns to stand out from the clutter. One of the problems any marketer faces is that of getting an effective number of repetitions and in multiple formats for the message to be front and center in the consumer’s mind. In this case, I think American Family’s strategy is pretty effective. The company was definitely front and center for a while. It even got me to write a blog about it.