There are few brand mascots more symbolic of advertising in the 21st century than the Aflac duck, who was first introduced in the insurance company’s advertising in 2000. A symbol of humor in the face of stressful situations like accident claims and unexpected medical bills for more than two decades, the duck was one of the first brand pillars Shannon Watkins turned to when she began pivoting the brand’s messaging to adapt to the new market conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — albeit with a slightly different approach.
“The duck’s role is to still be that helpmate to humans during their time of greatest need, and as we thought about that during the pandemic, the role of humor changed,” says Watkins, who was promoted from senior vice president to Aflac’s chief brand and marketing officer in August 2021. “But during the first year of the pandemic, we changed the tone and tenor of our advertising with a campaign called ‘Aflac Is There,’ and we put people at the center of the campaign to bring to life the fact that even if you have health insurance, it was never designed to cover everything. There will be a gap, and Aflac will be there to help you through that gap with our duck.”
It was the first campaign in a long time where Aflac pulled back on its humorous tone, and helped lay the groundwork for subsequent campaigns that made real-life policyholders a focal point of the storytelling under the umbrella brand strategy “Care On Purpose.”
But we also know there’s a different way to reach the hearts and minds of consumers, and that’s through real-life storytelling. In the late part of 2020, I believe it was October, we started to seed our master brand strategy of “Care On Purpose” by putting policy holders at the center of our campaign.
“Our duck is an amazing icon and spokesperson for our brand, but we also found that policy holders who have experienced the Aflac promise can be just as powerful of an ambassador because they can bring to life how Aflac really stood for them in their time of need,” Watkins says. “What you’ll see from us moving forward is more content for more areas, more content that’s humorous and designed to make you laugh featuring the Aflac duck, and a separate stream of content featuring our policy holders and real-life stories designed to warm your heart and reach people in a different way.”
The dual purpose-driven and humor-led approach has helped Aflac rebound from the many challenges of 2020, when the company’s full-year revenues dipped 0.7% year-over-year to $22.1 billion. For the first three quarters of 2021, Aflac reported a 2.7% increase in total revenues, to $16.7 billion (compared to $16.2 billion during the same time period in 2020) — including a 35% increase in U.S. sales during the third quarter, to $299 million, as face-to-face sales activity picked up steam.
Brand Innovators caught up with Watkins from her home office near Aflac’s headquarters in Columbus, Georgia, to learn more about the consumer insights behind its current “Close The Gap” initiative, producing Aflac’s first animated short for the Sundance Film Festival and the importance of representation on both sides of the camera. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did the COVID-19 pandemic initially impact Aflac’s business in spring 2020, and what are some pivots or innovations you put in place to adapt to the new market conditions?
We have continued to pivot in ways I could have never imagined. I told the team this morning, “This is our time. We’ve never been in a place or space where the urgency for our product has been more clear.” So that is a good place to be in.
And even before the pandemic, I think the industry was seeing a pretty macro pivot from linear TV to online, OTT and digital. But the pandemic really fast-forwarded streaming media, in a place that I think none of us were quite ready for and the outcome of that was just fewer ads for sale, fewer places and spaces to show up from a branding perspective. And then you couple that with 2020 and 2021 — we had social unrest, we had the pandemic and a byproduct of the pandemic was that consumer debt went to an all-time high. A lot of people struggled for work and to find steady employment, and even if people are employed, many are still living paycheck to paycheck.
So with all those dynamics in mind, we saw an opportunity for our brand to evolve and to better meet the changing consumer dynamic, but also align with where consumers’ heads and hearts are. And we know that consumers are placing their bets with their wallet, based on a brand’s alignment with their purpose. Just a couple of stats that we have been anchoring ourselves on: 94% of consumers globally said they want to purchase a brand that has a clear and strong purpose. But less than 40% of consumers today believe brands have a clear and strong purpose. That was the anchor for us to align to where the consumer dynamic was going, which was a moment and a time of care.
Tell me about the “Close the Gap” initiative that Aflac recently announced. What consumer insights inspired this program, and how did you identify Deion Sanders as its ambassador?
As we looked at our landscape, there were a couple things that inspired us to start “Close the Gap.” The first is we know every single year, individuals and families across this country are hit with unexpected medical bills. And we know those unexpected medical bills disproportionately impact people of color and low-income communities, that’s the number-one fact. The number-two fact is Aflac was designed to care about what health insurance doesn’t cover so those we insure can care about everything else. Over the last couple of years, a lot of corporations have declared they would take a stand to help communities across the country, and we wanted to use this as a moment to create a movement for others to participate in closing the gap. That’s the heart and spirit of our Close The Gap initiative.
So we set out on a journey with three pillars to help progress this initiative. To number one, educate people on the gap and the fact that health insurance was never designed to cover everything. And number two, support by giving money to help those people with unexpected medical bills and then advocate because we believe this is not our problem to solve, there are a lot of people who can help be part of these solutions with both health and wealth. That’s really the vision and mission of what we’re here to do.
As we think about the launch of this initiative we wanted to start from a place that was data-driven. We initiated a research study called the Care Index to understand where the biggest need is across this country. We started with just understanding where people have insurance but the greatest area of exposure. We executed a custom research study with over 6,500 insured Americans nationwide and we found out a lot of interesting things. But our biggest nuggets were that nearly two-thirds or 65% of Americans’ savings are less than equivalent to their insurance out-of-pocket maximum, that was point number-one. Point number-two was nearly a quarter or 24% of Americans have zero in their savings account, and just under half, 48%, have less than $1,000 in their savings. And the third big point was only 26% of insured Americans say they have supplemental health overall to help close that financial gap. So that clearly pivoted us to the role we could play to help insured Americans close the gap.
We knew we needed to approach this issue in a different way, because if we just go out and start saying “Hey, there’s a gap” without the connection to the heart, that may fall on deaf ears. In the changing media landscape we have, we know traditional TV content is either very different to come by and doesn’t resonate the same way that a nontraditional piece of content could.
How did that lead you to animation as the best format for that nontraditional storytelling?
[Last] weekend, [we launched] Aflac’s very first animated short called “The Park Bench.” We’re super excited about this effort because we believe it will bring to life the hardship that comes along with any illness or injury in a very whimsical and relatable way. The role of Aflac is supporting any individuals through recovery. We believe when someone is sick or injured the last thing we want any individual to do is worry about their bills, we want 100% of their focus to be on recovery.
When we approached this film and short, we wanted to create a piece of work with African-American creators, animators, storytellers to extend the marketing legacy at Aflac. I’m not sure if you know this, but the very first spot featuring the Aflac duck was called “The Park Bench.” And during that spot 22 years ago, we had African-American actors alongside white actors, and that was kind of unheard of back then. So we thought, what better way to pay homage? The film was produced by Carl Reed of Lion Forge, which is the only African-American animation house in the U.S., and it was directed and written by Academy Award and Golden Globe nominee Rob Edwards with musical direction by Grammy Award winner Nas. We are excited to bring this group of creators together to tell the story of a family dealing with a medical event as the start of our “Close The Gap” initiative.
How did you pivot the project’s distribution after Sundance announced it was going virtual?
When we think about the changing media landscape, we compete in one of the highest spending categories in the media environment. So our ambition for this film was always to rely on earned media. We believe if we put a piece of content out there that is great, then people will want to watch it regardless of where it’s placed. So we’ve been extremely fortunate to have partners like Roku that will have this animated short on their platform, partners such as Twitch where we can show the animated short on Twitch.TV/Aflac, combined with a panel discussion with our creators like Deion Sanders. We’ve been able to thread the needle between earned and paid media to get the word out there about this short.
The pivot from Sundance, even though we’re in a virtual environment, we believe over the last two years we’ve learned a lot about how to connect in a virtual environment. And because a lot of our consumers are digitally connected, we see this as just another opportunity to reach a broader footprint. It’s our first time we’ve done a live panel on Twitch, too, so we are absolutely trying out new and different platforms and different ways to get our brand message out there.
Sports marketing and sponsorships have been a key part of your focus too. Where are you finding the most success in that arena currently?
When we think about this year’s college football campaign, we knew we wanted to do something different. We wanted to stand in the gap for those communities across the country that hadn’t been seen or heard within the college football landscape. Traditionally, advertisers and brands tell the story of a pretty monolithic college football experience, and we knew there was a whole other diaspora of the college football experience, which is the HBCU experience. So with our partnership with Coach Prime and Coach Saban both aligning to shine a light on that notion of a broadened football experience, and our partnership with Disney through both ESPN and Stephen A. Smith’s “First Take,” we hope to continue to build on a great year one and build that legacy into year two and beyond.
There are lots of industry-wide efforts this year to find better solutions for performance marketing (and cookieless targeting) as well cross-platform audience measurement. Where are you and Aflac on your journey in piloting some of those new efforts?
We’re experimenting away. We, like other people in these positions, are absolutely trying to do everything that we can to connect with consumers in the places and spaces they are with content that’s relevant and understand explicitly how they can engage more deeply with the brand, learn more and want to buy.
I’ve had the pleasure of leading brands in the traditional CPG space and now in the insurance space. In the traditional CPG space, you put out an ad, you can understand how that ad drove a store sale, a Nielsen scan and action. With insurance, you put out an ad, but the path to purchase is much different because oftentimes you have an agent or a broker and a benefit decision maker that is the gatekeeper to that employer or employee who ultimately chooses Aflac. So our ability to take the marketing and advertising we’re doing in a digital environment and be able to understand the actions that happen offline are absolutely our next frontier.
Within that, we’re continuing to learn a lot more about how to connect the two, which is giving us a lot of information around the content that we’re creating and how to make it more meaningful. We are absolutely pivoting more of our attention and need to scale within our Aflac studio and our in-house agencies. We believe the key to unlocking personalized and tailored content has to sit with our ability to be very fast, be very nimble and efficient in partnership with our above-the-line agencies like a Dagger or a Spark that’s creating more media buys. So we integrated our in-house agency the Aflac studio to enable us to be a brand that’s able to lead into the future.
Speaking of agencies, how important is representation from minorities and other under-represented groups when it comes to your supply chain of creative partners?
Extremely. Aflac is a partner with the ANA AIMM initiative. We believe that having work that’s built on cultural insight at its core and developed by a diverse group of creatives and brought to life by a diverse group of people in front and behind the camera is key. The number of African-American, multicultural, diverse or LGBTQ+ CMOs, there’s not a lot of us. So I feel an immense amount of responsibility to make sure we’re living that creed.
The other thing we do at Aflac is I’m on the board and we are a founding partner with the A Pledge. The A Pledge is an initiative within the Atlanta creative community for our marketing teams and advertising agencies to reflect the demographics of the city of Atlanta, because if we can’t do it in Atlanta shame on us. That’s another big part of our initiatives that we do to make sure we have great representation.
The last piece I’ll say is Aflac is in Columbus, Georgia, and we traditionally have hired Columbus, Georgia talent. And the pandemic has opened our aperture to staffing outside of Columbus, Georgia. So we’ve been able to extend the great leadership of our already powerful teams and we’ve been able to add on talent outside of the Columbus, Georgia market and make our teams much stronger. We’ve taken advantage of COVID and that is the shiny part of the story for us.
Beyond “Close the Gap” and “The Park Bench,” what are you excited about for the year ahead?
We had been on this journey of creating a master-brand strategy for about a year, and I just launched it in January. I’ve been talking to our president Teresa White a lot about, where do we go next? And we’ve landed on a notion and it’s a simple notion that the path to selling more is serving more.
We look forward to being able to use Aflac’s brand voice to connect with consumers in a more meaningful way that brings our brand purpose to life and demonstrate who we are as a company and who our culture is. And to serve more. Because if the last two years have told us anything, it’s that this country needs more love, needs more care. If we can run a business in a way that’s servant led then we will have a great future ahead of us.
Andrew Hampp is an entertainment marketing consultant for Brand Innovators and the founder of consultancy 1803 LLC, based in Berkeley, California.
