The Background
After a 6-year hiatus from TV, Zurich came back with a bang with a powerful brand campaign, and to a fantastic TV ad and brand proposition centred around the positive concept of insuring – “For What Can Go Right”.
This campaign was shortlisted in the Best TV Strategy category at the 2023 TAMI Awards
The Challenge
Zurich came to UM with a big ambition in 2022 to strengthen their 4th position in the market on brand consideration and to start closing the gap on their top three competitors.
A review of the market in May 2022 indicated that two of their top three competitors for Brand Consideration (BC) – Axa & Allianz – each had a significant media brand spend relative to Zurich. Aviva, in addition to its media spend, also had a significant sponsorship with the Aviva Stadium, and they also had new entrants to the market like Royal London to consider.
Zurich had not been on TV since 2017 so UM were excited to be able to tackle this challenge with the main media channel that they knew could help deliver on all Zurich’s objectives and give them the stature and stand out they required.
The KPIs included:
• Maintain/increase unaided brand awareness
• Maintain/strengthen 4th position for brand consideration
• Increase score for brand consideration
• Reach the audience at scale
The Strategy
This campaign had a clear strategy, and the focus was on driving that brand consideration score. However, as Zurich had not been on TV since 2017, and this was a brand-new AV asset UM could not ignore the job that had to be done on awareness,
and the competition that existed in the market.
UM used their UM Proprietary planning tool Growth Accelerator to set the objectives and to identify they key channels to drive KPIs and not surprisingly TV came out on top.
As the financial market is complicated, especially considering insurance and pensions where Zurich operates, UM knew that building trust would be important and TV is the most trusted medium among consumers. In addition to this UM had to consider the breadth of the target demographics. Zurich insurance have a broad remit to target all adults to drive their car and home insurance offerings. When considering pensions, the target audiences are more nuanced. They needed to target older audiences (50+ Upgraders) to upgrade their pensions to maximise the return in time for retirement. They also needed to educate and convert younger demos (35-49 Early Starters) to consider starting a pension which is not an easy task as most younger individuals see this as being too far down the line to sacrifice their hard-earned salary at a young age with the added pressures of inflation, housing and rental crisis. These two audiences consume media a bit differently and UM needed to take this in to account when planning their AV strategy to consider all traditional and new AV media options like Adsmart capabilities and Broadcast VOD alongside their linear TV buy.
UM decided to use linear TV as the lead media channel for general broad reach and to ensure that products showed up in contextually relevant areas for the audiences who are in the market for each product such as home or car insurance.
The Plan
This campaign was planned across broad reaching media, focusing on channels with strong trust metrics to achieve UM’s objectives.
Focusing on brand, they wanted to achieve broad reach of our diverse audiences and ensure that Zurich was top of mind for all.
In order to target their audiences more accurately with the right messages, whether needing to reach car and home owners for insurance purposes or younger audiences for pensions, UM upweighted the campaign with Sky Adsmart to focus on these audiences more granularly.
The final element of the campaign consisted of running on Broadcast VOD across all players to again pick up these lighter TV viewers.
While UM launched in the most expensive and busiest time for TV, they wanted to increase brand consideration and get to the 4th position. They have found trust played a key role in this, and so focused on premium, high rating programming to assure Zurich was associated with premium and trust. Shows like The Late Late Toy Show, I’m A Celeb and the World Cup to name a few. They also ensured that we appeared around content people followed on a regular basis such as news, current affairs and longstanding and loved soaps. As well as that UM wanted to be contextually relevant to the Zurich audience and placed ads
around content such as DIY and property programming.
The last strand of thr AV strategy was digital video where we ran across YouTube, Programmatic VOD and Connected TV,
running a mix of awareness and consideration formats.
The Results
The campaign results delivered seeing the following across measured metrics on awareness:
- a +2% uplift in our prompted brand awareness score v Q3.
- Zurich moved from 5th position in Q3 to 4th position in Q4 (4% behind Allianz in 3rd).
When looking at brand consideration we saw the campaign deliver the following results:
- a +2% uplift in brand consideration score v Q3.
- Car insurance increased +7% from 16% to 23%, moving up from 5th to 4th position.
- Home insurance increased +1% from 23% to 24%, maintaining 4th position.
- Life insurance increased +5% from 23% to 28%, maintaining 3rd position.
The ranged brand campaign, together with the pensions campaign had limited short term impact but contributed to the long-term growth ambition by maintaining levels compared to previous post campaign highs. For those exposed to the ranged brand campaign there was positive impact on advertising awareness, consideration and
preference.
“At Zurich, our brand promise is to create a brighter future together for our customers and people. Based on insight, we recognise the importance of building emotional connections with them and the positive impact that can have on consideration and advocacy. So when developing our strategy for our Range Campaign with our media agency, UM, it was clear we needed a strong TV presence to help us achieve and accelerate this. And we did just that. We are delighted with the campaign results. We have seen measurable increases in awareness, consideration and action during the campaign period across our key life, pension, car, home and farm lines of business as well as improved advocacy measured through improved NPS scores in quarter four. Zurich in Ireland is part of a wider global company and the performance of our TV-led Range Campaign has also been warmly received by our parent with performance results recently show-cased across many of our global markets. The media strategy UW developed and executed, including a presence for the Zurich brand in all the top rated TV programmes, along with the measurable results TV delivered, supports a strong business case for future investment in this important channel.”
Zurich Ireland
Credits
Brand:
Zurich
Media Agency:
UM
Award:
Shortlisted in the Best Use of TV Strategy category at the 2023 TAMI Awards