Client: Hiscox
Hiscox underwent a strategic shift, moving its budget away from brand advertising and towards lower-funnel acquisition comms. While this move initially supported short-term sales, it came at the expense of long-term brand building. The consequences were far-reaching, impacting internal morale and leading to three years of declining brand metrics and increased acquisition costs. Hiscox had to reverse this situation, but in a very low interest category where it’s hard to create stand-out, and not having the lofty budgets of the big-name high street insurers, how could Hiscox make its campaign unmissable? Introducing the most disastrous campaign ever. Our research uncovered that Hiscox's customers and their competitor's customers weren’t attitudinally or behaviourally different. We ran a campaign that reached the whole small business insurance market with ads that were impossible to ignore, purposely peppered with contextually relevant mistakes. Orchestrating an OOH campaign with the biggest use of special builds in the UK ever, creating a bespoke Metro cover wrap, hosting an interactive multi-day takeover of WeTransfer and a takeover of WeWorks across the country, we wanted to dominate the insurance space. Although the campaign was completely disastrous, the results weren't, leading to improvements in spontaneous awareness, brand search volumes, and sales.
.png)
