Who: Mosaic Life Insurance, with Conflict for creative.
What: “Protect yourself from 2020,” an ad campaign that manages to joke about a really bad (like, so bad) year.
When & Where: The campaign started rolling out nationally online in July. That’s being followed by digital billboards in Toronto and Edmonton, running until the end of September. A new Instagram filter has also just been launched.
Why: Like a lot of businesses, Mosaic had a planned ad campaign that had to be shelved when the pandemic hit, forcing the agency to come up with something new.
Mosaic is a challenger brand that wants to get noticed, particularly by millennials, and getting noticed means avoiding category tropes, said Conflict partner and creative director, Niall Kelly. “What we did not want was to do the classic family hugging on a couch, saying ‘Protect the ones you love,’” said Kelly. “We need to kind of remind [millennials] that they are not invincible.”
How: Life insurance is about being prepared for the unexpected and unplanned, and 2020 has been characterized by weird, unexpected developments (like, so weird). Conflict decided to lean into the widespread conversations about all of the remarkable goings on. “We just kept sharing memes back and forth about how messed up 2020 was,” said Kelly (like, s-o-o-o-o messed up).
Simple display ads and billboards have headlines about some of the weirdness in the news, with the tagline “Protect yourself from 2020” underneath to remind people about the importance of protection. There is also a push to the website.
“The idea was to see something happening in the news and immediately write a headline,” said Kelly There was one about murder hornets, and another about drinking hand sanitizer, for example. Who saw those coming at the start of the year?
Anyone offended? Some people expressed their concern online, but that was inevitable.
“It is really just saying we are all in this thing right now and it is so messed up. Life is this most unpredictable thing, especially this year.”
And we quote: “This campaign is about humorously framing up why young people might want to think about getting some life insurance sooner rather than later, because the reality is that many of them are taking on more and more responsibilities in life and most are uninsured or seriously underinsured.” —Hafeez Kassam, COO at Mosaic Life.
