Publicis Media – Aviva
Aviva enjoyed market-leading awareness and consideration, but brand tracking was showing this was size-driven and not meaningful. The reality was that most people felt neutral about Aviva and the brand was punching below its weight for differentiation. It was losing customers at the crunch moment and had an ‘empty awareness’ issue. So, Aviva had to build meaningful difference, showing it to be distinctive from other financial services providers. However, it also had to grow affinity for the brand, moving it from neutral to likeable by building a connection with consumers.
Aviva discovered that its audience found taking action around their finances hard to do. But when they did get round to it, they felt good when things simply ‘clicked’. From this insight, ‘Making it Click’ was developed, a new creative that demonstrated the positive feelings generated by Aviva when it resolves a financial ‘puzzle’ and everything slots into place.
However, improved affinity would only come from creative and media working closely together. As Aviva needed an environment where people want to spend quality time, news brands were a perfect fit.
Audience analysis showed that puzzles were a go-to section in news brands and there was a clear link with the feeling that comes from cracking financial admin and finally solving that tricky crossword. So Aviva created a series of solvable puzzle ads. Over 30 different executions were made; the Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph, the i and Evening Standard all worked with Aviva to identify solutions. Where newspapers did not have standard advertising formats in their puzzle sections, these were created for Aviva.
The i even devised a slot where puzzles could be solved for readers by sponsoring the previous day’s solutions. Where titles had digital puzzle sections, the campaign was extended beyond the daily print title using contextual MPUs and skyscrapers around the digital puzzles and solutions.
By using multiple news brand partners together in one campaign, Aviva developed a concept that was bespoke to the medium, captured attention and made readers feel positive about the brand. The campaign was a resounding success, delivering significant ROI and a large uplift in incremental product lifetime value across Aviva’s business units. Kantar tracking now places Aviva number one for affinity in its competitive set.
It was a clever campaign based on a really neat human truth, with a smart creative platform designed and made specifically for news brands.
Kate Bradbury, deputy managing director, Wavemaker North
