You're going to die!
Caldwell, Christopher
You're Going To Die! Advertisers Bring Back the Hardest Sell of All By Christopher Caldwell rT^HIS IS NOT A TV SHOW," I says a woman's voice. _JL "This could be you." Onscreen you see ambulances,...
...Life insurance," the voiceover says...
...Where would the money come from...
...The doctors are taking off their Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at The Weekly Standard...
...What Do You Do Now...
...There is a great vogue for frightening today...
...Aside from the TV commercials, the campaign includes print ads in Newsweek, U.S...
...At the F Street offices of the Life and Health Insurance Foundation for Education (LIFE) in Washington, they call this TV commercial "the ER spot...
...similarly appeal to fear...
...If I'm their agency," says David Young of Young & Larrimore ad agency in Indianapolis, "it does make sense to make people aware that we're all going to die...
...They say, 'If you talk to me that way, I'll pay attention.'" A number of insurance-company focus groups suggest Woods is right and that the world Garfield, Dolliver, and others know—in which bad news doesn't sell—may be disappearing...
...The patient is dead...
...What's more, a robust stock market has created marketing problems...
...Nobody's ever wanted to talk about death," he says...
...LIFE was launched as a tax-exempt foundation in 1995 with over $30 million from its member companies, and they're using it for a heavily focus-grouped media campaign designed by the New York communications firm Bozell Sawyer Miller...
...Unfortunately, with the proliferation of mutual funds in the 1980s, life insurance has come to be seen more widely than ever for the lousy investment it often is...
...A woman doctor swings open the door to the waiting room to break the news, just as the little girl—whom we now know to be the daughter of the deceased—looks up from her coloring book...
...After all, he says, "it's the only legitimate thing about life insurance...
...We're much less apt to have a brother who died at 18 or parents who keeled over in their 40s...
...you think...
...A woman in a mask massages the patient's heart...
...masks...
...They leave the room, the blue pump on top of the body...
...There are also high school "modules," media workshops, a web site, and a "real-life stories" contest...
...Insurance companies have always preferred to talk about the latter, says Bob Garfield of Advertising Age, and LIFE doesn't disprove the rule...
...On radio, ads for cardiac diagnostic centers ("I wish my father had been around for my graduation . . . but he didn't take care of himself") and bulimia treatment programs ("I'm fat...
...And then it dawns on you—someone's just had a coronary...
...Paddles and some kind of a blue pump are brought into play as well, to no avail...
...It isn't for the people who die...
...says a child at the gates of an orphanage in a 1920s Prudential ad...
...The LIFE spots may be fitting into a trend...
...You are going to die, and they want you to know that, but if you're like the majority of people, you tend not to want to do business with people who remind you of it...
...You might say that the Mediscare and enviro-scare campaigns of 1996 were a form of market-testing for the new LIFE campaign...
...An advertising tactic that may have been viewed as forthright 50 years ago is today viewed as a tasteless scaring-for-scaring's sake, the equivalent of jumping out of the closet and saying "Boo...
...What would happen to your family...
...It's for the people who live...
...The fact that they're back tells us a good deal about the industry's health and the country's mind...
...A consortium of 94 insurance companies and 7 trade organizations, LIFE has reintro-duced America to scare-all-hell-out-of-you insurance ads—which were, until the mid-1970s, the standard way of selling life insurance...
...Death is just much less visible, much less a part of normal life than it used to be," says Mark Dolliver of AdWeek...
...What would happen to my family if what...
...To live on...
...Life insurance has typically been a "blended product" combining inexpensive "term" insurance (which guarantees a payment in case of death) and a low-paying annuity for retirees...
...With the welfare state being replaced by the nanny state, there are plenty of government officials who make a living scaring the bejesus out of people and are constantly on the lookout for a pretext to do it...
...As the pool of likely insurance targets (parents between 25 and 54) has continued to grow with the aging of the baby boomers, life insurance has continued to wane in popularity...
...David F. Woods, LIFE's president, disagrees...
...They said father didn't keep his Life Insurance paid up...
...For your kids' education...
...The goal of the ads is to halt an industry-wide series of reverses...
...So now," says Garfield, "the companies are thrown back on selling insurance for exactly the reasons they don't want to talk about...
...You're Dead...
...News, People, Sports Illustrated, Parents, National Geographic, and Better Homes & Gardens with text like "It's 1999...
...Don't even ask...
...Onscreen you see ambulances, a girl waiting in a hospital corridor holding a doll, paramedics hurrying a gurney into the operating room...
...But we have tested this approach and people are receptive...
...These ads are being done by a consortium because none of the brands is willing to risk doing to its brand what bad-news advertising does to a brand," he says...
...For the mortgage...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 33
