2011 Silver Best brand building campaign

Client MORE TH>N

What is wonderful about this work? We dared to buck the market trend of shouting 'price' as if consumers were imbeciles. MORE TH>N Freeman is imaginative, humorous and playful - an engaging character that differentiated in a dry, cluttered sector. We drove lead growth of 10% while decreasing spend by 18%.

What details of the strategy make this a winning entry? Brand health is in decline in insurance - driven by lack of consumer confidence and lack of trust. MORE TH>N had lost a little of its lustre recently - plenty of potential, but in need of reinvigoration. Our research demonstrated that higher levels of trust would build on our core values: honesty, dependability and having customers' wellbeing at our heart. We knew that consumers used brands to navigate, using emotional factors to narrow choice and rational triggers to make the final decision. Our view is that all communications are brand building, and the best way for people to appreciate your brand is to experience it (buy the product!). We wanted our actions to speak louder than words - product benefits needed to have a role in mix. Finally, we injected longevity into the brief - consistent communications means the sum of the parts will become greater than the whole.

How did creativity bring the strategy to life? The original brief was to establish greater trust. So we invented MORE TH>N Freeman to be our brand spokesman - a creative vehicle with gravitas at its heart. We appropriated the important elements of Morgan Freeman to create an immediate shortcut to trust: his voice in particular embodies calm, care and wisdom. So our character spoke just like him, acting as a guide to the complicated world of insurance who reassures, comforts and entertains, and somehow just makes everything better. The executions were filmic, beautiful, involving. Different, in other words. We wanted a memorable sign-off - hence "I'm MORE TH>N Freeman, thank you for listening" - which was picked up and repeated.

Results We've moved from being one of the crowd to one that dares to be different through a campaign that's bold, famous and much admired. The central idea was felt to be audacious and intelligent, and generated goodwill. Tracking indicated that recall, salience, involvement and persuasion are all up against previous campaigns. Attribution levels are at their highest ever. Comprehension and desire to act are up and spontaneous brand awareness has increased significantly, and brand trust has surged hugely. Social media showed extremely promising signs of interest and engagement. We generated 35,000+ Facebook 'Likes', 520,000+ YouTube views and 1,000 Twitter followers.

Team Matt Conner, Karina Jaya-Ratnam, Neil Francis, Fred Rodwell, Andrew Parsons, Chris Ridd, Peter Markey, Nicola Carver, Tim Dixon, Clara Dennison.