How MoneySmart encouraged Singaporeans to break old car-insurance habits

Background and aim

Financial services aggregator MoneySmart wanted to move Singapore’s car-insurance habits into the digital age. Surprisingly, considering how the city’s consumers already take a digital-first approach to banking, travelling and shopping, applications and renewals of car insurance are still done mostly offline. Research also showed that renewal was not a priority for Singaporeans, and many just re-signed with legacy providers without doing much research.

“People are busy, they’ve got other priorities and just want to get it over and done with,” explains David Harling, MoneySmart APAC CMO. “Pair that with how the category is extremely jargon-heavy, filled with agents that can be pushy and don’t always act in the interest of their clients, and it’s obvious why car owners succumb to the pressure, automatically auto renew and lose out on a chance to get a better deal.”

Execution

MoneySmart settled on a creative idea that aimed to show consumers they could save money by purchasing online. ‘This is Chris’ centred on an informative, relatable and humorous narrative, which Harling says was integral to making it stand out.

“We dialled up the dramatisation of the client-agent dynamic to 10, using a mob of agents to represent the pressures consumers go through during car-insurance renewal,” he says. This was then rounded off with a bespoke soundtrack that was written to represent how consumers typically understand their jargon-spitting agent friends (spoiler: they don’t). The work then delivered a value proposition—Save up to S$620 when you compare on MoneySmart. 

The campaign targeted 25- to 35-year-olds because more of them are digital natives and the customer lifetime value of a younger audience is arguably higher. The campaign launched with a YouTube video, digital ads and an expansive OOH campaign across Singapore.

Results

The campaign has delivered around 8 million views across Singapore's top video platforms, and a huge 48% VTR for a platform such as YouTube (the industry benchmark is 20% to 25%.

From a brand equity standpoint, MoneySmart saw:

• Brand awareness relative lift of 12%.
• Brand consideration relative lift of 27%.
• Tripled search intent for Moneysmart + Car Insurance keywords on Google Search versus the pre-campaign average.
• Four times more traffic to the company's comparison platform versus the pre-campaign average.
• Twice as many leads as the pre-campaign average.

Harling is keen to ensure MoneySmart capitalises on its success. “We drove a significant amount of traffic to our car insurance product, all captured as first-party data on our DMP [data-management platform]. Next is to re-target these audiences via performance ads to incite recall of our savings claim and drive conversions through to mid-2020,” he says.