Advertising firm Rocketer has launched a platform to ‘transform’ social media advertising of insurance products.
The platform uses artificial intelligence that learns and improves advertising results, based on past performance to predict the success of future advertising.
Rocketer says it expects the platform to improve the volumes of business acquired, as well as the costs of acquiring business.
Nic Gorey, CEO of Rocketer, said: “We can now analyse historic data at a level we’d not been able to previously and understand performance right down to the exact time of day to place an ad, the exact ad creative and copy to use and even what the weather needs to be like.
“By really understanding buyer behaviour, and the things that influence purchasing decisions, we can help insurers to get their messages in front of the right people at the right time”.
Keith Kropman, chief marketing officer at Vitality, said: “From a purely advertising point of view, one of the biggest differentiators to social media is the speed it works at, it’s a very fast way to learn more about your advertising audience and try different messages and campaigns, before rolling it out to other traditional marketing channels.
“In recent years the industry has done many creative and exciting things on social media, and there is much more to come.”
But Kate Astall, head of digital marketing at Zurich, warned a downside to advertising insurance on social media was the difficulty in ensuring messages "do not appear insensitive" when displayed with other content in the news feed and the "propensity for ads to attract negative sentiment in comment boxes".
Ms Astall said the coronavirus had “understandably heightened the sensitivity of certain content, particularly pertaining to life protection and critical illness which has emotional resonance for many people”.
But Mr Gorey said while early reactions had been to step back from advertising, the firm's global insight data showed now was in fact a good time to advertise insurance, assuming it was "done in the right way and with careful adaptation to the challenging landscape we’re currently facing”.
Ms Astall concluded the balance of providing a product that protects consumers whilst not pushing adverts at an inappropriate time was important.
chloe.cheung@ft.com
