Halo and Pineapple: How to disrupt a category and find an audience who don’t love insurance

The Halo Pineapple campaign extensively used Out of Home (OOH) as it took the mickey out of insurance and people loved it (Image supplied)

Founder and managing partner Dean Oelschig says they did not expect to win the Grand Effie, even though they knew how good the Pineapple campaign results were.

“What matters most is how well it worked for the brand and that’s what we showed in our entry,” he says.

A difficult category

Pineapple is a disruptor in the insurance category which is a difficult category already.

“The category itself has remained one-dimensional. Much of the work is the same and focuses on switch and save messages. It is price driven.”

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Building brand

He says internationally we are living in a golden era of marketing effectiveness. There is so much research and studies that show us the best way to do it.

“It is first and foremost about building brand in an emotional way.

Halo went through a long discovery phase with the Pineapple client to understand why they started the business.

“It came down to fairness. They believe that they have built a business that is based on fairness. We took that and created a campaign that was honest about insurance, honest about advertising and out-of-home (OOH)."

A market that does not engage with insurance

When it came to understanding who the market was, they found there is a generation that insurance companies do not speak to.

That market is online, and they engage with memes.

“We wanted to create something that spoke to them honestly - they do not love insurance, and we owned up to that."

"The result was an award-winning honest campaign that was self-deprecating and the client loved it. You know, there is a billboard that said, Never heard of Pineapple? Honestly same.”

Challenging the category

Oelschig adds, “We took the mickey out of insurance, we took the mickey out of everything.”

People loved it. They shared it and even made their own versions of the campaign billboards. And people started buying insurance from Pineapple.

“I don't think any insurance company had ever done anything that challenged the category to that extent before.”

He explains they looked at what the category was doing and tried to do something completely different. “I think the honesty was refreshing and people responded to it.”

The business received triple-digit growth in this economic climate and with a difficult-to-reach target audience.

Utilising OOH as it is meant to be

The campaign extensively used OOH.

Oelschig says the use of this medium is a credit to the clients. “We had a conversation on where the best place was to put this campaign.

Marnus van Heerden, CEO and co-founder of Pineapple has what he calls the volcano technique, which is that a volcano does not happen far and wide, but it is heard about everywhere.

They decided to create a campaign with many sites in a very localised, concentrated area, in the hope it would create enough traction and noise that people hear and talk about it as far as Cape Town and Durban.

And that is exactly what happened.

“In fact, Cape Town – where they have never run an out-of-home campaign - has been one of the most successful regions for Pineapple.”

The importance of scale

The campaign ran in Gauteng on 106 OOH sites, but each creative execution was unique.

“We had to write 106 lines. I think at the end of the day we just had fun with it.”

He points out that while there is nothing significant about the 106 it does show the importance of scale.

“You can do five great billboards, but few people hear about it or know about it. But if you do 106, people start taking notice.”

OOH really worked for the brand. A startup brand, like Pineapple, does not always have access to every media channel and you do not want to fragment yourself too thin.

Instead, they concentrated on a single media and then doubled down on that.

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Where is the humour?

He believes advertising has become far too serious in this country. “We have lost the fun," he says.

“South Africa is legendary for funny advertising, for using our humour to our advantage. But now we are tiptoeing around that a little bit now, scared to push the envelope that makes things funny.

He says you need to have some fun with the work.

“It is clear when the work goes out to the market that you had fun with it or you loved what you did, there's more chance people will love it back and then they will love the brand a bit more.”

He adds that in this fragmented digital market, traditional media still plays a role.

Great work takes conviction

“You can still do some amazing work in traditional media. At the end of the day, we are all vying for attention.

“We all need a bit more courage to push our work and earn the attention of an audience who is watching Netflix, Showmax, Amazon Prime, etc. We need to ask how we can create entertainment to get their attention.

Great work, he says, takes conviction.

“I do not like using the word brave. I do not think creative is brave. It is smart. Firefighters are brave. Doing creative advertising is smart.

“Pineapple was bold in their choice, and they trusted us that the work would work against the conventions of the category.

“They backed the work, they gave it scale, they gave it airtime. And it reaped the rewards.”