Project Overview
In the face of the insurance industry’s focus on the uncertainty and fear of tomorrow, the MetLife Infinity app was launched to drive familiarity and trust for the brand by making the act of planning for your future a social, sharable and enjoyable experience you can feel positive about today. Infinity was the most successful insurance app launch in Hong Kong’s history in terms of downloads generating earned media 5 times the actual media spend and increasing branded term search queries on Google & Yahoo by 8 times
Organisation
Team
Sunshine Farzan, Andrea Wang, Danny Lam, Becky Lee, Emily Mak, Mandy Wong
Proximity Hong Kong - Charles Tatham, Joy Ng, Brian Tang, Kogi Ko, Tomic Lee
Project Brief
MetLife sat a distant 12th in terms of overall awareness and were suffering from negative net promoter scores based on a lack of familiarity with the brand. The 11 insurance providers ahead of us in terms of awareness were outspending us by 3 to 20 times.
In a category driven by familiarity and personal recommendations, how do we get people to start to know and trust us?
We targeted two industry conventions:
Through communications that focused on death and worry and employed somber visual treatments, the insurance industry in Hong Kong was acting as a mirror to people’s uncertainty.
So while our competitors focused on preparing for an uncertain future, we realized the most tangible meaning of insurance is actually how it makes you feel today.
Armed with this insight we started thinking about how MetLife could help people feel positive today.
The second convention was the overwhelming focus on ATL media, despite Hong Kong being one of the most heavily penetrated internet markets in the world. 10% of spending was online even though people spent 64% of their time with media there. 2/3 of that time was on mobile and tablet where 96% of people were going online but only 1% of spending was taking place.
Everyone had this data, but no one had acted on it. So our brief was to help people feel positive today through mobile and other digital channels.
Project Need
Existing mobile apps in the financial services and insurance space focus on expediting business functions claims, applications, quotes, etc. We wanted to use this engagement space to create a customer-centric relationship and bond instead.
In essence, Infinity makes thinking about your future and that of your loved ones – something that people find stressful, scary and intimidating - a social, sharable and enjoyable experience people can feel positive about. This approach creates valuable data gathering and relationship deepening opportunities for MetLife, as we were able get to know about our customers’ entire lives, not just their financial ones.
The choice to not allow consumers to buy insurance on Infinity was deliberate, as we wanted to focus on the emotional engagement. This approach makes it easier to sustain the 2-way dialogue that was so important to us and made it easier to soft cross-sell products and services.
As messages are sent out by current policy holders to friends, family members and other important people in their lives, Infinity will help recruit the next generation of MetLife customers as well
User Experience
Infinity is a virtual time capsule and legacy creator in one simple interface which is privately shareable.
It allows people to securely capture, host, organize & share important messages, photos and videos with designated people of their choice either now, or at a predetermined time in the future.
All you need to do is assign friends, family, and loved ones as ‘designates’ and schedule delivery of your message at a specified date, for example Chinese New Year 2040 or your 30th wedding anniversary.
Users can also upload practical items that their loved ones may need to access now or will need in the future, such as important documents and details for accessing accounts and policies.
Project Marketing
In a world where instantaneous communications are the norm, the notion of a “delayed delivery” is attention grabbing, so every element of our marketing campaign pushed people to download and experience Infinity. We started with eDMs introducing the app and explaining how capturing heartfelt feelings and moments today can be even more meaningful if they’re shared in the future. We followed with mass SMS, banner ads and search engine marketing to draw people in to find out more. Lastly, we rewrote call center and online help scripts to reflect our focus on getting people to share tomorrow what’s important now.
The marketing campaign combined with the functionality of Infinity created engagement.
We drove TOM awareness: branded term search on Google and Yahoo increased by 8 times
We drove action: 40% of Infinity users opted to receive promotional information
We engaged consumers: Infinity was the most successful insurance app launch in Hong Kong’s history as people downloaded Infinity at twice the rate of apps from AXA, Bupa, Manulife & AIA
We created positive word of mouth: Top tech sites gave positive reviews
–“An App better than Facebook/Whatsapp” ePrice
–“(MetLife Infinity) is a rarity in today’s market. An intersection between innovation and tenderness, Infinity is definitely worth downloading.” Ring HK
–“Top 5 coolest app” Tech Cocktail
Online Buzz increased 9 times and we averaged 4.12 clicks per share on Facebook
We generated earned media 5 times the value of our total media spend
Project Privacy
Infinity leverages an API to access the Azure environment which hosts Cloud services, SQL DB and Blob storage. An external email service manages auto-generated emails via a password protected REST API, which is then used to verify the user and complete the registration process.
As users engage with the application, they can view a brief tutorial, which provides an overview of Infinity before completing registration. They can then begin uploading digital assets, which are housed in Windows Azure Blob Storage, and create designates and trusted designates.
By leveraging Windows Azure enterprise level security compliance and certification, MetLife Infinity provides users with the comfort that their memories are safe and secure. The Azure environment offers a variety of controls such as firewalled and partitioned environments and data encryption. At the user level, security is further enhanced by ensuring that passwords are stored only as a hashed value, have complexity requirements and coming soon, will prevent re-use of the past six passwords.
Best Mobile Marketing Campaign
This category recognises campaigns that use elements such as competitions, promotions & messaging to engage customers on the mobile channel exclusively.
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