Insurance is one of the top-spending marketing categories inside and outside of sports. During Super Bowl week in Atlanta, Nationwide CMO Terrance Williams discussed category dynamics and larger marketing issues with SBJ Editor-at-Large Terry Lefton.
What’s Nationwide’s approach to sports marketing?
Our sports sponsorships are tied to three things: How they can help us from a community standpoint; how they can help entertain or connect with our [sales] producers or our customers; and brand. When you think about getting eyeballs on content, there’s nothing that compares to the NFL, especially live eyeballs.
Our brand has been enhanced in all of those areas. … We look at measures like purchase consideration, whether people can connect to our [NFL-themed] ads and whether consumers learn something new about us. We’re getting more product-focused, with ads that have Peyton Manning talking about life insurance — a lot of consumers don’t know we even offer that.
All of those metrics for us — awareness, consideration, learned something new, relatability — are moving in the right direction. We also love the demographics of the NFL fan base. Yes, it’s broad, but it also over-indexes in key areas that people don’t realize, including Hispanics and women.
Nationwide’s Terrance Williams says marketing is still “part art, part science.”nationwide insurance
How does your main NFL platform, presenting sponsorship of the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award, tie back to your business?
We’re trying to elevate awareness of what these guys do off the field. It’s a natural connection, because one of our early CEOs said we’re more than a business. That award is an authentic connection, in the same way our relationship with Dale Earnhardt Jr. started when he bought [auto] insurance from us when he was 16. It shows how we go about supporting communities and doing good.
Marketing spending for insurance has been out of control for some time. Is that growing the category, or has it just gotten noisier?
That has been true for at least several decades. The insurance business is very mature. The category is growing pretty slowly and we simply take business from each other. The thing I would say about that — and we actually call it “the arms race” in terms of overall [category] marketing spend — is that we’re never going to outspend some top competitors in our category [i.e., Geico, Allstate, State Farm], but we do believe we’re punching above our weight, and you really have to in order to be heard. But it’s more about meaningful content and having a spokesperson with the credibility and authenticity of Peyton Manning, so you can engage with consumers effectively.
How has media fragmentation changed your marketing approach?
You look at the dramatic shift we’ve made there: Over half of our media is now digital. When I became CMO four years ago, it was less than 30 percent. TV remains important, especially with something as far-reaching as the NFL, but it’s also important to connect digitally. For a lot of people, if they can’t binge-watch, they don’t watch. We have to reach that audience.
I’ve got a 17-year-old son who consumes media in a very different way than I do. So how do we connect with those people who are watching 30-second YouTube clips? The NFL is a way to do that. As for choice: Yes, there’s an awful lot of digital and social out there, so you try to segment well and follow the numbers. We are light years better today than we were even a few years ago in being able to evaluate our marketing spend. Obviously, a larger digital spend is easier to measure, but as important as analytics have become, it’s still part art, part science.
