Amy Hu, chief marketing officer of New York Life Insurance Company, is on a mission to transform what marketing can mean at a 180 year-old brand.
“We’ve been kind of a humble company,” says Hu. “We’re not braggadocious. We quietly do the things that we’ve been doing – helping families – but we’re at a place where we shouldn’t be the best kept secret. So part of it is how do we tell that story?”
Founded in 1845, New York Life has been operating for almost two centuries and their mission has been core since the beginning. “It is to be here when you need us most at that moment of loss,” says Hu. “The way we’ve accomplished that for years has been through relationships. Our agents really are your friends, your neighbors, your fathers, your mothers, your uncles. They’re in the community.”
New York Life is a Fortune 100 brand, ranking No. 69 on the list in 2025. Hu’s mission is to be more vocal about these accomplishments and the stability of the brand. She recently launched a new brand essence called “More Powerful, Together” to help tell this story.
“You do better when you have your financial best friend advocate on your side,” explains Hu. “I hired my contractor because he lived three doors down from me. He’s not some fly-by-night person who’s going to do a bad job, because if he does I’m going to knock on his door and say, ‘Eddie, you gave me a leak.’ It’s very similar at New York Life. It’s about relationships. We believe that you can achieve more when you have that relationship. We call that brand essence ‘More Powerful, Together.'”
Prior to joining New York Life, Hu spent more than a decade at H&R Block. Brand Innovators caught up with Hu from her office in New York to discuss how she is evolving the brand, the company’s approach to sports marketing and why she teaches her team to “doubt the doubt.” This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Can you talk about your brand purpose and how it shows up in your creative?
A couple years ago when the purpose-driven brand was all the rage and other CMOs were trying to find their purpose. I was like, our purpose is our purpose. That’s easy. I have an easier job. I don’t have to find the purpose. I just have to do the storytelling. That’s how it’s been shaping our strategy.
We don’t want to just have a campaign. We want to demonstrate it by connecting more with our community and with our agents to demonstrate what they’re doing. So we launched a new scholarship – the New York Life Financial Empowerment Scholarship. We’re giving away 20 scholarships ranging from $10-20,000. It’s a way for us to teach financial literacy but also to show and demonstrate that we have been helping people improve their financial literacy for 180 years and that commitment continues with the next generation.
Can you also talk about how you are leaning into sports marketing through partnerships with United States Soccer Federation and Major League Baseball?
Baseball is more our traditional audience. We are very kindred to the MLB. They are a 100+ year-old brand trying to reinvent the way that people are watching baseball. Millennials and Gen Z were not watching it because it was so long, so they’re trying to revolutionize the game. We feel very, very kindred with them. We wanted to be with a partner that pushed us and had that spirit of innovation but also is beholden to their legacy and to who they are. We just love them for that. They are trying to make sure that they give the best fan experience and revolutionize with the times. They’re so smart and scrappy and we learn a lot from them.
With soccer, we’re there because of that diversity, that youth, that growing love of soccer in the States. That’s a growth curve. Soccer is on the up and up and up. There’s more and more excitement, especially around the World Cup.
Do you have any special plans for the World Cup next year?
We’re working on our World Cup plans right now. It’s too early to share, but it’s an exciting moment for the United States and for New York City.
Will we see you at the Super Bowl?
We haven’t bought a Superbowl ad since 2020. It just happened to be our 175th anniversary and that was the right strategy, but unfortunately the world didn’t quite cooperate. We still have a little bit of a COVID hangover from that because it was such a strange time.
How are you engaging different audiences in the marketplace?
We are definitely looking at things that are more out of our traditional market. One of the reasons we went into soccer, in particular, is that we wanted to diversify our target market. We knew that soccer was younger. It’s more demographically diverse and it also supports women in a way that we want to support women. What we’re seeing in the market is that you can’t reach them in the traditional advertising ways. You have to be much more authentic. We were at She Believes with Deloitte and US Soccer. We did a financial empowerment series to educate women about financial literacy. It’s shocking. Women are the most educated and yet the financial literacy is still lower than what you would like. We’re trying to reach them in ways that will help them, not just advertising to them, but doing things in the community.
Can you talk about what drove you into incorporating sponsorships into the marketing mix?
ROI is one of the hardest things for a marketer. It’s incredibly difficult. I’m not your traditional brand marketer. I actually only took on brand marketing when I took this job as CMO. I have a product and performance marketing background. The first thing that we did was storytelling. Sports is a metaphor for how we work with our customers. We believe in the power of a coach. We believe in the power of a team. We believe that you’re very best when you have the support and the structure around you. There’s nothing like operating as one unit to achieve a goal. That satisfies the arts angle.
Now for the sciences. Sponsorships are notoriously hard to measure. You have to triangulate and trend. You have to show something three different ways over time to say, ‘Hey, this is worthwhile.’ We have a measurement framework that is both behavioral and attitudinal. Then we do causation. We test and control. We have reload metrics –like this buy is more efficient than if we bought linear, like sponsorship gives us more eyeballs.
Finally, we have correlation. You bring one good metric, that’s really nice. You bring two, that’s a coincidence. You bring three, then you might be onto something. You bring three persistently trended, then you’re really onto something. I just want the team to doubt their doubt. We’re trying to be as scientific as possible. But the storytelling and the arts still have to be compelling. You have to have a compelling brand narrative and then be able to show the business metrics behind it.
Can you talk more about how your background has helped shape your perspective now in this current role?
The measurement framework definitely comes from my performance background. I’ve spent a lot of time in the offices of CFOs talking about the marketing mix. I actually had the pleasure at one point in my career where I reported directly to the CFO. It was a terrifying time. If you were to ask me at the time, I thought it was the worst experience ever. I had to learn how to calculate the CAGR and the margin. But in hindsight, it was the best experience ever because it really taught me what marketing is really about. Marketing is about growth, brand storytelling and digitization, arts and sciences can collide. If every marketer could spend like six to 10 weeks reporting to the CFO (I spent two years), and you can survive that, you would be a stronger person for it.
Also having a product background, you tend to think about customers and experience. It could never just be advertising. It had to be something that drove growth, that we can measure, that we can build and we can drive the right type of customer interaction.
Are there any challenges trying to modernize a legacy brand?
When I got here, we made commercials and brochures and drove leads. That’s what they thought marketing was. But I think it’s really having people understand the true power of what marketing can be and how do you get that buy-in with people? Those two years working for the CFO are the experiences I have to draw on.
That’s why that triangulated and trended piece is still there. I bought myself time. Brand takes time. I’m 18 months in and I’m pretty sure by year three, they’re going to be like, what’s the ROI? Right now we’re still building. We’re in a period where we’re testing and growing. That’s where the storytelling and that brand ethos will hold people close until you can see the results. Sports really is a metaphor for how we work. The experience you’re going to have with an agent is like a coach who helped you play sports and you have to take that mentality and put it into your finances. You’re going to get someone who cares, who knows you, who pushes you.
What key trends are you thinking about heading into the new year?
AI is a game changer. I used to think about the existential threat, but now it is how do we reinvent ourselves for the future culturally? We just did an AI Shark Tank. I want the team to start thinking about how it can be used, not necessarily to make content, but we are exploring agentic AI in terms of design and product development. Can we do more front end software development and coding to lower the cost, produce great work and accelerate prototyping to be more efficient and still deliver great products and lower our costs?
Lately, I’ve also been obsessed with AI SEO and how it’s going to be changing what I’ve learned my whole entire life about SEO. I’m thinking about how we’re going to influence and get content in a new world. Is it a partnership with Reddit? Is it more journalistic? Is it more PR? What are the new tools that we need in order to be more on the forefront so we’re not caught flat-footed when our click-based SEO starts to decline gradually or maybe sharply.
