How Partners Life brought the drama to life insurance
It's an unspoken truth that death sells life insurance. Most brands avoid confronting it head on. A New Zealand insurance company decided they would and enlisted the help of the best salespeople money could buy.
Context
Most life insurance companies don't talk about death. And most people don't have life insurance.
Because even though death sells life insurance, it's also (unsurprisingly) a very morbid, sensitive subject. And most brands don't want to engage with it, even if it means growing the category. But while everyone else ignored it, Partners Life, a life insurance firm in New Zealand, wanted to find a way to address the topic head on, to convince people that they needed to take out life insurance.
Objectives
- Get more people to take out a life insurance policy
- Don't be seen as morbid, weird, or exploitative
Strategy
The best spokesperson for the benefits of life insurance is a dead person. Sadly there aren't many available for hire - except in one specific place. TV characters die all the time, and often their deaths are followed by an ad break. The ads from The Last Performance campaign aired at the end of each episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, before the credits rolled. Each episode of the show usually involves a death, and Partners Life got the actors whose character had died to reprise their role, playing reanimated corpses with strong opinions on life insurance.
Outcome
Partners Life’ website saw a 135% increase in traffic over the campaign period and the campaign generated a 75% increase in direct leads to its financial advisors and a 26% increase in brand awareness. And the campaign won the Cannes Grand Prix in the Health & Wellness and Golds in the Media and Creative Strategy categories.
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The work
