2024 Silver Financial Services

Agency: Uncommon Experience Studio

Client: Marshmallow

Entry Title: Immigrants Wanted

Executive Summary

Many immigrants discover they’ve left something behind: their driving experience. UK insurers price newcomers as if they are new drivers. Enter Marshmallow, who value overseas driving experience and price accordingly. A great idea, but one that had failed to land.

Strategy

Marshmallow’s brand philosophy is valuing difference. It spotted an unfairness in the UK car insurance market: newly arrived drivers are quoted as if they’ve never driven before.

While Ipsos data shows more Britons are positive towards immigration than negative, and the National Centre for Social Research shows increasingly positive trends, The Migration Observatory reports 52% believe migrant numbers should be reduced.

Marshmallow appreciates there are many reasons people migrate to the UK: to work, study, start a family or perhaps start again. But one thing unites them all, they bring valuable experience with them, and for the brand this includes their overseas driving experience. It had a chance to stand out by being positively provocative, championing the audience.

Creativity

Marshmallow describes itself as ‘active but not activist’. Amid unwelcoming rhetoric it was important to be kind.

The team filmed migrants expressing joy, singing Five’s “Keep on moving”, and photographed them expressing pride. The awareness job in VOD and OOH was to clearly answer two questions: what does Marshmallow sell, and who for. The pink palette carried different messages further down the funnel. Consideration messaging explained further detail around accepting licences from all countries, and using overseas driving experience to offer savings.

Conversion messaging upped the ante putting a figure to the saving - on average, £300. With the Rwanda debate raging inside Parliament, the campaign hit the streets with a bright pink ad-van declaring “Immigrants Wanted”. A subversive statement, perhaps, but also true of an insurance company with success predicated on insuring them.

Results

Marshmallow posted 34% growth in 2024. It is now listed at number two on the Financial Times list of 1,000 fastest-growing European companies, and on CNBC’s list of the world’s hottest insuretech companies in 2024.

The Team

Marshmallow - Sam Knott, VP Marketing - Chloe Collins, Head of Marketing - Megan Elliott, Brand Manager - Francesca Bennett, Head of Creative Studio

Uncommon Experience Studio - Margaux Sloan, Managing Partner - Jamie Pettigrew, Business Director - Rose Charles, Account Director - Ben Golik, Creative Partner - Jacqueline Hedge, Senior Creative - Mark Dickens, Creative Director - Stephen Taylor, Senior Designer

Uncommon Creative Studio - Joel Goodhall, Strategy Director - Lewis Knoll, Editor - Manon Rees, Producer - Peter Horrocks, Senior Producer