The challenge for insurance brands has always been, who wants to hear from their insurance company outside of a claim? 

When you add in the challenge of reaching a younger demographic who either haven’t interacted with insurance yet or feel unfairly penalised by it, this becomes a huge hurdle to overcome. However, it is important for us to be able to speak to this target audience so we can meet their insurance needs in the future. 

We have spent a number of years creating campaigns for 17-34-year-olds in order to learn more about them, but as someone who sits outside of the demographic, I know there is still so much to find out. What we do know, however, is that insurance is not easy for this audience. They feel the costs attached to it limit the freedom of hopping into their new car, that the process of buying insurance is time consuming and confusing and because of this, their decision can come down to price alone, and they can end up with an unsuitable policy because of that. 

Identity matters

We partnered with Wilderness in the middle of 2020 to add another layer of insight around what motivates this audience, and to enable us to find our shared values.  

What emerged from our process with Wilderness was the idea that insurance is completely tied up with issues of identity. Even the process of applying for insurance involves filling out forms with answers to incredibly personal questions.  

Identity is a central issue for this younger demographic, who are working hard to make the world a better and fairer society, so it became clear that the idea of identity and inclusivity was a strong creative direction. 

Roll forward a few months. We were deep into COVID-19 lockdown and Black Lives Matter was a significant focus for the nation and things had become even more difficult for young people. Lack of jobs, career opportunities dissolving, mental health challenges and the constant drip of negative news meant the future was looking bleak.

Generation Change 

However, among all this we had found some incredible young people who were making the world better for them and their communities. They completely personified our Direct Line problem-solving values and would provide some much-needed uplifting and inspirational stories which we completely prioritised as the world changed. These groups became the focus of our Generation Change campaign. 

The people and organisations we focussed on were Goal Diggers, an inclusive football club for women and non-binary people; Exist Loudly, an organisation that creates safe spaces for the young, Black, LGBT+ community and House of Cinn, a group that is using baking to help homeless people get back on their feet. Direct Line also supported the three groups and their members with a mentoring programme, ongoing wellbeing and safeguarding support, provided by Beatfreeks and additional funding.

The output became a social partnership with Channel 4 which gave us access to this target demographic. As did a digital audio partnership with Bauer Media and a newly relaunched Direct Line Instagram hub. This has become a destination to showcase positive and uplifting stories from across the demographic where we are supporting even more great young problem solvers. It is also a place where Direct Line as a brand can be open and honest about both our achievements and our areas of growth and focus. 

It has been a campaign with lots of twists and turns on the way and all our partners including Wilderness, TCO and Mediacom have worked hard and in tight timeframes to adapt as the world changes. In the end, seeing our final pieces of content and stories has been heart-warming and emotional and we have all felt so positive about what these young people can achieve. We hope we can continue support them as they make the world a fairer place both now and in the future.