Each month we provide insight into the creative and media strategies behind the campaigns of industry-leading advertisers, with estimated costs per web visit results provided by our data scientists utilising sources including Hitwise, Nielsen and BARB.
In the latest Adquirer, we look at three different life insurance advertisers, each with their own approach to convincing the viewer of the superiority of their product in order to trigger an immediate response. We explore the similarities and differences in their media deployment and creatives, as well as the differing calls to action in play.
Like Beagle Street, Smart Insurance focuses on the theme of protecting your family’s future if the worst should happen; again, through the eyes of a young father.
The motivation for setting up life insurance is outlined immediately, followed by the setting up process visualised through the father’s phone call to Smart Insurance. The cost and cover amounts are clearly stated on the phone call as well as displayed on the screen. Incorporating response-based necessities, their phone number and URL are continuously displayed from 14 seconds into the 90-second spot, and on the end frame, the voiceover asks the viewer to call the displayed number or visit smartinsurance.co.uk. It’s bright and it’s clear.
20% of impacts appearing on ITV1 and ITV2 is potentially an over-reliance on these two higher priced stations. In addition, 24.2% of equivalent impacts on The Jeremy Kyle show alone also appear to place a lot of faith in the response this daytime TV favourite can provide a campaign. As such, it is possible that Smart Insurance found it to be the most effective programme and increased focus on it accordingly.
There are no ads shown on Sundays, which has mostly been the case for the past 4-5 years and very little investment into Saturdays. As seen with Beagle Street, this appears to be the industry norm; however, that’s not to say Sundays couldn’t have been tested over the last 4-5 years as part of continuous development. 85% of Smart’s adverts are 90 seconds long, with longer adverts being the industry standard, allowing more time for detailed messages to be delivered, with Vitality bucking that trend with their shorter versions.
To wrap up the Beagle Street similarities, Smart also utilised a vast amount of film numbers in 2017, 235 to be exact. There are seven different creatives all following the same story of a 32-year-old father that’s a non-smoker, deciding it’s time to give Smart Insurance a call to find out about life insurance, with the main difference being the unique 0800 phone numbers displayed in each. Using this many film numbers, although potentially used to aid response tracking, carries a considerable cost to the advertiser as every version requires trafficking to the sales houses, with a fee attached to each version. Campaign measurement and analysis technology have advanced to reduce the need for this many versions of an ad, so it would be interesting to know the cost: benefit ratio here. To that end, we were unable to attain the requisite data from Hitwise to carry out the cost per website estimations.
