Zurich Life’s “Time Flies” video campaign wins award

Posted by Sarah Sheeran on 25 Sep, 2018

Video-first campaign scoops award for Most Effective Use of Data & Insights at the Irish Content Marketing Awards 2018

I’m delighted to let you know that our client Zurich Life has won the award for Most Effective Use of Data & Insights at this year’s Irish Content Marketing Awards.

Described in the Irish Times recently as awards recognising that “content marketing is playing an increasingly vital role in sales and marketing strategies,” Zurich picked up the prize for the “Time Flies” short-form video campaign that we worked on together.

How do you help audiences on social media care about savings?

For this campaign, Zurich came to us with a challenge: how to make savings interesting for an audience on social media that aren’t necessarily receptive to more conventional ways of communicating financial advice. So how did we get people to actually decide for themselves that they were going to start saving? We tapped into the idea that most of us can’t believe how fast time flies. Taking that as a starting point, we thought well what if you imagined saving 8 years ago? You’d have accumulated a significant amount of money in the interim – enough to get you to rethink starting.

We also know that Irish people love nostalgia. From the popularity of Reeling in the Years to all those Buzzfeed articles we read about 90s toys, not to mention our (unashamed) love of 80s throwback club nights. For the first strand of the campaign, #RememberThis, our creative really tapped into that, with funny internet memes and quintessentially Irish moments from the last 10 years.

For the #Milestones strand of the campaign, we created narratives for all of those key life milestones that make you feel like time is flying by… that journey from first date to wedding day, your kids growing up, your retirement suddenly upon you. Shot in studio using a stop motion style, the video ads were framed for square mobile browsers.

Did it work?

No doubt, the creative struck a note with social audiences. But the reason Zurich won this award wasn’t just about comments, shares, and likes. It was about how data and analytics informed the campaign to deliver commercial results. When we talk about this campaign, it’s the return on investment and the achievement of business goals that people find most striking.

To date, the videos have delivered click-through rates up to 1,000 times the industry average. For the ‘Big Freeze’ video alone, the client expected to achieve a pretty decent 20k video views and 1,666 link-clicks on Facebook. This video delivered a massive 290k video views, 4,152 link clicks and 42 conversions on site.

Across the 9 videos in the campaign to date, the videos have driven 839k views, 56k link clicks as well as significant on-site conversions and sales. So, if nothing else, this award demonstrates that strong creative, informed by data, can go far beyond vanity metrics to delivering solid business results.

With 9 videos published at the time of writing as part of this video-first campaign, and an additional 6 in the pipeline, it’s great to be able to celebrate winning this award while the campaign goes from strength to strength.

I’ll leave you with a few words from our fantastic client Emer O’Neill, Social Media Specialist in Zurich, “We have been absolutely delighted with the results of the Zurich Time Flies Saving campaign which have been incredible and way beyond what we had hoped to achieve. We really enjoyed working with Diarmaid, Sarah, Maria and the whole team in indiepics from the initial idea through to the completion of nine ‘Remember This’ and four ‘Milestone’ videos which form the campaign. With the nature of the campaign, we needed quick turnarounds but without any compromise in quality and execution and indiepics never failed to deliver.”  

Read more about the campaign in this overview.

Creative: Sarah Sheeran, Orla Doherty, Aileen Power

Production: Maria Gardiner

Design & Direction: Nathaniel Navarro

Graphics: Jordana Gomez

Graphics, editing: Karl Smith

Editing & colourist: Meabh Jones

Digital campaign management, clip licensing: Sarah Sheeran, Carden Kent

Camera & lighting: Michael Edge

Hand models: Karl Smith, Priscilla Heffernan

Executive Producer: Diarmaid Mac Mathúna

With special thanks to…. The guy who slipped on the ice, Chris Hadfield, Dustin the Turkey, the Poznan lads, Barack Obama, the Redhead Festival organisers, RTE Archives.