Malaysian Media Awards Winners Showcase

The Challenge
AIA wanted to recruit young enterprising salesmen and saleswomen but there was a huge reluctance amongst this target audience to join an insurance firm as they felt an insurance agent’s job was looked down upon.

The Solution – Insight & Idea
Insight: A Randstad job report found that 65% of professional graduate employees planned to leave their jobs in 2013/2014; marking an all time high turnover rate of 13.2% in Malaysia. This target audience was using the Internet to look for new career opportunities that could bail them out of their current job where they found themselves stuck. One big barrier for this audience to take up an insurance agent’s job was the negative perception of the agents. Strategy: We microsegmented the audience profiles of job seekers based on thier content consumption to arrive at four different audience profiles. We studied each profile to identify their need states and devised triggers which were laser sharp and strong enough to create the motivation for change. We deliberately wanted to stay away from the insurance salesman recruitment pitch. Idea: Our biggest barrier was to successfully break away from the negative perception of insurance agents. We decided to overcome this by leveraging the master-stroke AIA had conceptualized; that of rebranding the much loathed insurance agent to someone more dynamic called a ‘Life Planner’. We decided to run first of its kind unbranded creatives which were laser focused on the need states of the segments.

The Execution
The four segments identified were: 1. Stuck Familyman: Heavy consumer of family content 2. Stuck Influencer: Heavy consumer of social media 3. Stuck Scientist: Heavy consumer of financial data 4. Stuck Entrepreneur: Heavy consumer of start up data Highly tailored unbranded ads were targeted to the four segments. These ad banners were strategically ad-scheduled to be more prevalent during the second half of the day where disillusioned corporate employees would feel that irresistible need to click these unbranded banners and understand the thrills of being a ‘Life Planner’. The creative messaging talked about relevance to them. For example to a stuck influencer it showed ‘Turn Your Influence Into Money’, to a stuck scientist it said ‘Turn Your Finance Knowledge Into Money’. Advanced strategies like prospective targeting, retargeting and sequential targeting using intelligent audience platforms ensured that the interested affinity clusters were being bombarded with repetitive messaging on the benefits of considering a career as a life planner. The entire messaging was fresh, vibrant and a complete opposite of the drudgery corporate life painted.

The Results
Our unconventional branding or ‘lack of branding’ strategy made an enthusiastic connect with the alternative career seekers. Our ad communication garnered 170million+ views from frustrated corporate white collared executives. Both our Search and RTB campaigns had CTR rates 4x and 11x above industry average which showcased the impact of the unbranded creatives. Search CPA was 800% lower than other channel buys. AIA’s rebranded Life Planner campaign was a thumping success!