More and more people are buying their insurance through aggregator websites. Great if you want the cheapest price possible, not so good if you want to know you’re getting the insurance cover you need. We personified the ‘Nagging Doubt’ that our research discovered most people suffered from. Then showed if you wanted to completely get rid of, dispatch destroy and rub out that nagging doubt there’s only brand to get in touch with.
The initial launch featured a brand ad and two ads for Swinton’s most important categories, car and home. Each showed the appearance of a Nagging Doubt and then showed his ultimate demise as Swinton Insurance made sure he was nothing-to-worry about. Different demises then formed the hook for the campaign as it branched off into other channels.
It was key in each execution to create a doubt in consumers minds, it allowed us to highlight the different products or benefits of Swinton. We also wanted to create something that could enter popular culture, deliberately using an old school style of rhyming strapline. A dream was to see the Nagging Doubt appear on the front page of The Sun with the face of Boris Johnson or Liz Truss superimposed after a political u-turn. Forget the lettuce.
This campaign wasn’t just about the advertising, we wanted to create a brand platform that could energise Swinton and all of their colleagues. We rebranded them as ‘Doubt Busters’. It meant that everyone working at Swinton knew what their job was, to get rid of any customer doubt. This led to the creation of tools like the Contents Calculator and the call centre getting rid of the standard scripts, they just didn’t need them anymore.
We spent a lot of time in the design stages of Nagging Doubt himself. Trying to find the perfect balance of worry and fear without creating something that would give any children watching nightmares. A couple of the options below may not have got on TV before the watershed. The top left shows the very first sketchbook scamps, something we kept coming back to. The sense of the looming grey cloud of doubt.
It was key to us that the creature was not 3d but practical and physical. We wanted it to really appear in the world and be there for the actors. Robert Kurtzman, one of Hollywood’s top special effects creators (check out his IMDB) created and brought to life the fully animatronic puppet. This alongside a lot of other craft borrowed from horror films, such as unique instruments in the music created a real disheartening feeling of doubt in the ads.
Despite the lengths we went to creating a creature no-one would ever want to appear in their lives, we did somehow manage to make one that people loved. A cottage industry sprang up on eBay with homemade versions of Nagging Doubt selling at upwards of £60. I’ve no idea why anybody in their right mind would want to buy these? I have 3, including a Mrs Nagging Doubt and Baby Nagging Doubt, characters we’d not even come up. People were even finding and ringing up the agency to let us know their dogs, cats, guinea pigs looked like Nagging Doubt, a great story for PR and social.
