Qantas Assure on target to be 5% of health insurance sector says agency boss
Qantas CEO Alan Joyce’s desire to have 5% of the health insurance market with its Qantas Assure product by 2019 is on target, one of the airline’s creative agencies has said.
Speaking at the Mumbrella Financial Marketing Summit on the agency’s Qantas Assure launch campaign which featured Christopher Walken, With Collective CEO Justin Hind admitted it was not a “natural fit for an airline to launch a health insurance product”.
Qantas Assure launched at the end of March and rewards members for being active with Qantas Frequent Flyer points.
“The business stat is Alan Joyce wants 5% of the health insurance market by 2019. To achieve 5% that is a very significant business. We’re well on the way and possibly just slightly ahead of that as a run-rate target,” Hind said.
“We’re on target for a new brand that launched earlier this year. We launched the brand in a very different, low-cost way. We’re acquiring customers, and people are enjoying the product and are earning points.”
Steve Coll, With Collective ECD, said Qantas invested in the Christopher Walken campaign, however it is “dwarfed” compared with the rest of the sector.
“There’s some good investment in this campaign, it is dwarfed by some of its other competitors in the business. For anybody that doesn’t have an oversight of that market, there’s some really heavy spending, with really great targeting that’s done really smartly.
“It’s a pretty hard industry to break into, particularly if you don’t have the capital to compete, you have to do something pretty newsworthy to get noticed.”
Explaining the creative idea behind the campaign, Coll said they wanted to sell the idea “that you could get Qantas points from the very basic movements you make every day”.
“We boiled that down even further and that’s what got us to the creative idea: Walken.”
On working with Christopher Walken in New York, Coll said it was the lack of a script and no voice-work that attracted Walken to the role.
“The short answer was Walken wasn’t talk’n,” Coll quipped when asked if Walken provided interviews to media.
“That was actually what attracted him to the gig. I think he’s shot maybe three commercials in the whole of his career and he just looked at this and thought it sounded like fun, he didn’t have to learn any lines.”
He quipped: “We just sat back and let him go, I don’t know how you direct Christopher Walken to do anything.”
Hind said: “The terms of the deal was Christopher would turn up and do his job for the day, and he came and did that very well.
The only public comment I’ve heard out of Qantas on it’s insurance initiative was that it was targeting 2-3% on a revenue basis in its first 5 years. I might need to start going to these seminars for some performance guidance!
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i was going to sign up to Qantas Assure because i need to get private health because of my age and i’m an idiot who wants the FF points but it is a rip off. Terrible value for money.
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Sounds like the effectiveness of the campaign might be a little overstated, and Cheistopher Walken has been in at least 3 ads in the last 12 months. But when you spend this much on a well worn idea you need to spin it somehow.
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No one generates better bullshit PR themselves then agencies and the With Collective is chief among them. The share of Qantas health insurance isn’t growing at the rate of competitors is that Australians are not idiots. While trust is an issue affecting health insurers today and customer choice is fragmenting, people won’t trust a brand like Qantas with their health in numbers big enough to deliver this agency the EFFIE’s they feel they’ve earned.
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