Pre-Testing with System1 Gives esure Confidence in Latest Campaign
Operating in a low engagement and highly competitive category, where 49% of audiences feel neutral towards insurance advertising, esure needed a distinctive way to cut through. The brand set out to reimagine its iconic ‘Calm Down, Dear’ campaign from the noughties for a modern audience, introducing ‘Dave O’Deer’, a character-led fluent device designed to drive engagement, memorability and distinction.
Together with independent creative agency Guy & Co, esure recognised the inherent risk in taking a more entertainment-led approach in a category that typically prioritises functional messaging over storytelling. It was critical that communications for both drivers and homeowners remained clear and impactful, while bringing the brand promise, “Be sure with esure”, to life in a way that actively reduced customer anxiety.
To balance creativity with effectiveness, esure and Guy & Co adopted an iterative testing approach. This ensured the campaign maintained strong brand attribution and message clarity, while building engagement and long-term brand equity.
“Creative bravery is at the heart of our latest campaign,” said Gareth Haggerty, Head of Brand and Marketing at Ageas UK. “We knew we needed something different to stand out in the category, but we also wanted to be confident that consumers would embrace this bold new direction.”
esure and Guy & Co engaged System1 early in the process to test and refine the creative, building confidence in its effectiveness from the outset. Two waves of testing were conducted, starting with an animatic, to optimise moments of happiness, refine the end frame, and assess the impact of Lorraine Kelly’s voiceover. Insights from each wave informed iterative edits, strengthening the creative ahead of launch.
System1’s Test Your Ad platform measures emotional response and provides three key metrics: Star, Spike and Fluency. Star predicts long-term potential to drive profit growth and market share, Spike indicates short-term activation potential, and Fluency measures the strength of branding. For esure and Guy & Co, understanding how the creative would connect emotionally and achieve long-term cut-through was a priority. With the introduction of new sonic branding as part of the revived campaign, strong Fluency was also a critical objective.
Alongside broad appeal, esure wanted to make sure the campaign resonated with its core family audience. System1 enabled this through additional audience sampling, allowing the team to compare performance among the general population and their key target segment. This provided a clear view of both mass and targeted effectiveness ahead of launch.
“At Guy & Co, we place a great emphasis on research as part of our Unfair Advantage™ agency system and early creative testing in-house combined with exceptional scores from System1, gave us and esure the confidence that the Calm Down, Deer campaign would be a powerful and ‘endeering’ way to create connection in what is traditionally a low-engagement category,” said Sean Mulholland, Creative Director at Guy & Co.
Initial System1 testing showed strong early potential, with the rough cut delivering +17% more happiness than the UK average. The teams at esure and Guy & Co gained confidence that the campaign could land as a more distinctive, modern and playful evolution of the original. However, they identified an opportunity to strengthen the story arc and push performance further.
Following the first wave, Guy & Co introduced an additional scene featuring Dave O’Deer’s “happy dance”, alongside more prominent and frequent brand cues. These refinements drove a significant uplift, increasing the campaign’s score from 4.6 Stars at rough cut to 5.5 Stars in the final animation. Brand recall improved by +4%, with strong fast fluency supporting short-term activation.
The Lorraine Kelly voiceover also tested positively, and both esure’s core audience and a nationally representative sample responded strongly to the final execution. This gave the team confidence that the campaign would achieve broad appeal, emotional cut-through and distinctiveness ahead of launch.
“We are advocates of pre-testing, especially when bringing bold ideas to market,” said Gareth Haggerty. “Using System1’s insights throughout allowed us to refine the creative and build confidence in its commercial impact.”
Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer at System1, added: “In a category where half of consumers feel nothing, this shows the power of doing something different. Distinctiveness builds memory, not playing it safe.”
"We leveraged the insights from System1’s testing throughout the whole process to finetune various elements of the creative and reinforce our confidence in other areas. Closely following System1’s guidance helped us to improve the overall scores, predicting greater commercial impact and reinforcing the benefits of applying consumer insights."
Gareth Haggerty Head of Brand and Marketing at Ageas UK
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