Content-driven Advertising: A Case Study

Independence American Insurance Company (IAIC) had identified a great business opportunity – marketing short-term health insurance to recent college graduates. They developed a website to market to and sign up college seniors, but needed a low cost, results-oriented advertising program that specifically targeted this hard to reach demographic. Out-of-home digital media provided the solution.

IAIC saw that college seniors frequently face a gap in medical insurance coverage when they graduate and are usually no longer covered under their parents’ plan. It can take up to an average of six months for a graduate to get his or her first job and there may be an additional waiting period before they are eligible for health insurance. Further, going without health insurance is one of the leading causes of bankruptcy among young adults. IAIC’s offering, Healthegrad STM Insurance, was designed to bridge the gap until the college graduate is eligible for coverage at a new job. IAIC created healthegrad.com to provide information and facilitate subscription to the insurance policy. The company’s goal was to market the product and healthegrad.com to maximize enrollment with a limited marketing budget.

IAIC decided to take advantage of out-of-home digital media to market its product and began working with Zilo Networks, an affiliate partner of SeeSaw Networks. Zilo Networks provides an integrated entertainment and marketing “narrowcast” network, called Zilo TV, designed specifically for college students and young adults, and reaches 5.6 million college students. Using the highly targeted capabilities of out-of-home digital media was the most cost effective way for healthegrad.com to reach its audience with its marketing budget.

One of the biggest challenges was to develop an ad that took advantage of the interactive and engaging capabilities of the out-of-home media. A text-oriented ad would not have allowed healthegrad.com to capture the attention of this over stimulated, fickle target market. In addition, at a young age of 22, a typical college senior feels invincible and the last thing they worry about is getting sick or hurt, so it was critical that the ad came out got their attention. “Students get bombarded with a lot of messages day-in and day-out. We needed something that could rise above the noise level and speak to them directly, while using the power of a narrowcast media”, said Campbell McLaren, President and Creative Director at Zilo Networks. Since healthegrad.com wanted to allocate the majority of their budget towards the media buy rather than the creative, their alternatives were to adapt an existing ad (which they didn’t have for this particular age group) for out-of-home digital media or to create new content at a low cost.

Zilo’s in house production team proposed that healthegrad.com leverage Zilo’s production expertise (utilized both for their own on campus network as well as Court TV, BET, MTV and others) to create a compelling piece of new content at low cost. Simply put, Zilo proposed letting college students tell other students about the cost of injury and the value of health insurance.

After the client signed off on the concept, Zilo sent a production team to one of its affiliate schools, Connecticut’s Quinnipiac College. Students were asked to guess, on camera, the cost of treatment for a common injury, such as a broken leg. Then their estimates were compared to the actual cost of such an injury by the host (also a student) and the probability of getting such an injury due to their active lifestyle. The host then suggested the viewer go to healthegrad.com to get additional information. Due to the highly targeted nature of out-of-home digital and the spot’s humorous look at a typically unfunny topic, Zilo was able to use the spot to grab students’ attention and deliver very compelling results, increased traffic to the web site, with the ad campaign.

User generated content and the ‘Realty TV’ model are becoming effective ways to create brand new content for out-of-home digital media at low cost. If healthegrad.com were to advertise in traditional targeted media channels such as college newspapers or youth magazines, it would have been difficult for them to present such an interactive and engaging ad. If they were to go with other traditional media such as newspapers or broadcast TV or radio, the results again would not have been compelling since such media is not very targeted. Out-of-home digital media allowed healthegrad.com to bridge this gap.