MetLife Hopes Campaign Will Help Change Perceptions Of Life Insurance
September 17, 2014 by Stuart Elliott
A new campaign seeks to accentuate the positive about life insurance, promoting it affirmatively as a way to “live for” the loved ones in your life rather than taking a downbeat tack with terms like “death benefit” or “beneficiary.”
The campaign, now getting underway, is from MetLife and comes as the life insurance industry spends September beating the drum for what is surely one of the more fanciful dates on the American marketing calendar, Life Insurance Awareness Month.
(The industry’s nonprofit organization known as Life Happens, formerly the Life Foundation, has a campaign of its own to commemorate the month, featuring the former football star Boomer Esiason.)
The MetLife campaign seeks to stimulate a conversation with consumers about life insurance by asking them to tell the company “Who I live for.” The campaign’s concentration in social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube is signaled by the presence of a hashtag, #WhoILiveFor.
There is no advertising in traditional media, meaning there are no commercials featuring the characters from the comic strip Peanuts, which have long served as brand mascots for MetLife. Alas, it would have been fun to hear Snoopy say he lives for “that round-headed kid.”
The centerpiece of the campaign is a pair of video clips presenting people, in on-the-street interviews, describing who they “live for.” Many of them hold up smartphone screens or snapshots to put faces on phrases like “my mom,” “our son,” “my family” and “my grandkids.”
The people who appear in the clips are from a variety of races, ethnicities and sexual orientations, forming what a New York City mayor once described as a gorgeous mosaic. The vignettes include a young Hispanic man who talks about his boyfriend, an interracial couple, men who could be single parents and a lesbian couple.
There are even pet parents: A man, standing with a woman, says, “We live for our son, Huey, who’s also a dog.”
The two videos are supplemented with shorter clips that shine a spotlight on some of the people who appear in the longer ones. For instance, in one short clip, the young Hispanic man says of his boyfriend, “He’s even helped me come out of the closet.”
The campaign, with a budget estimated at$500,000, is created byCrispin Porter & Bogusky, a division ofMDC Partners that is MetLife’s main creative agency, handling the lead creative duties on the company’s marketing aimed at consumers.
“We’re using the occasion” of Life Insurance Awareness Month “to try to get people to think about insurance in a different way,” saysRichard Hong, senior vice president for global brand and marketing atMetLife inNew York.
A primary reason for taking a new tack is that despite the extensive campaigns fromMetLife and other firms trying to sell policies, 95 million adult Americans — 30 percent of American have no life insurance whatsoever, according to industry data.
Although it is typical to “think about life insurance as a death benefit, people really buy life insurance for the other people in their lives,”Mr. Hong says. “We wanted to flip the lens on this, make it a positive, with a simple question: Who do you live for?”
When people are asked who they “buy insurance for,” he adds, “it’s remarkable how effusive they become.”
“We want to inspire and motivate people to upload their own videos and join the conversation,”Mr. Hong says, “and give life insurance another thought.”
In addition to asking consumers to share content on MetLife’s social media accounts, he adds, “we’re asking them to post videos all over the web, on their Facebook and Twitter pages as well as on ours.”
The diversity of the people in theMetLife videos is “just reflecting what America looks like today,”Mr. Hong says. “Marketers are simply getting better at reflecting what America truly looks like.”
In recent months, several big brands have run ads in mainstream media that feature nontraditional couples and families, among them Cheerios, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola and Honey Maid grahams.
Two additional major marketers joined their ranks last week. One was CVS Health, formerly CVS Caremark, which conveyed the news of its corporate rebranding with a commercial that included a vignette of a same-sex male couple.
The other was DirecTV, with a commercial that is part of a humorous new campaign celebrating how N.F.L. Sunday Ticket can make a subscriber “the world’s most powerful fan.” In the spot, two men — one a fan of theDallas Cowboys, the other a fan of theNew York Giants — play out their rivalry in superhuman fashion.
As one man tries to wrest a football from the other, they lay waste to the ground floor of a house, wrecking windows and furniture. “We’re just like any couple, really,” theCowboys fan declares as the men chase each other out of the living room and onto a patio, smashing through a pair of doors in the process.
Mr. Hong says of diversity casting: “It shouldn’t be a novelty. I look forward to the day it’s just natural, and standard operating procedure.”
Dan Donovan, vice president and executive creative director ofCrispin Porter & Bogusky, describes diversity casting as “very real” as well as “very cool.”
None of the people in the MetLife video clips are actors, saysMr. Donovan, who is based in the agency’sBoulder, Colo., co-headquarters. (The other is inMiami.) The videos were shot “in a few places in and around the metropolitanDenver area,” he adds, mostly inDenver andBoulder.
“I’ve done man-on-the-street before,”Mr. Donovan says, “and oftentimes it’s tough; people are busy.”
“But so many people were willing to stop and talk,” he adds, which was a testament to their eagerness to answer the questionMetLife posed and “reaffirm who’s important to them, who they live for.”
“Life Insurance Awareness Month is something people don’t talk about much, obviously,” Mr. Donovan says. “This is an opportunity to leverage it in an interesting way, a unique way to talk about life insurance differently than the brand has.”
“I’m a new father,” he adds, of “a little girl, my first,” and “it occurred to me, and research supports this, that a lot of people get into life insurance in these moments” of milestones in their lives, “when they have something, someone, to live for.”
“It’s interesting to express it that way instead of saying ‘beneficiary,’” Mr. Donovan says. “It was very personal for me.”
As for the campaign’s focus on social media, “the social space is a perfect place to engage people in this kind of conversation,” he adds, because that discussion is more emotional than the usual insurance sales spiel, which tends to be more rational.
“We saw that in the making of the videos,” Mr. Donovan says, as people gladly spoke about who was important to them, “sharing photos on their phones and writing down on whiteboards” word and phrases that are displayed during scenes in the clips.
Mr. Donovan says he believes the campaign “has a shelf life” and hopes it could continue beyond September.
Mr. Hong, for his part, says that the response to the campaign as it runs this month will be monitored to help determine whether it continues.
“That’s the beauty of social media,” he adds. “We’re happy to have October be a part of Life Insurance Awareness Month also.”
MetLife plans to follow up the campaign in the fall with ads “in some specific local markets,” Mr. Hong says, devoted to encouraging people to “make the most of employee benefits” in the realm of insurance for which they are eligible through their workplaces.
“Many people who are able to buy a dental plan through their employer choose not to,” he adds, and others do not “take advantage of employee discounts they can get on car insurance.” (MetLife Auto and Home sells that.)
“Additionally, we’ve got some new local work coming out,” Mr. Hong says, “supporting our sponsorship of MetLife Stadium” in New Jersey, home of the Giants and the New York Jets.
