1.
HISCOX and ESI Arts Partnership: ‘Where Product meets Passion’
Background
Hiscox are a specialist insurer, offering a high end insurance product that’s tailored for a
very particular audience – high net worth individuals with high value homes and high value
contents within them. The cover is excellent, and the service is just as good. However, just
because our audience have money it doesn’t mean they’re happy to pay more for a product
they never want to use.
Hiscox set us a difficult task when it came to marketing their specialist home insurance:
grow consideration for the product in a highly competitive and commoditised sector, and
make a very specific set of high net worth individuals feel like we’re “a brand for them”.
There was no creative route on the table, so we started from scratch.
This paper will show how Hiscox’s Home Insurance partnership with the Evening Standard
helped deliver on this challenge. Becoming their first ever Arts Partner across newsprint,
digital channels and events has led to strong levels of recognition and massive shifts in
consideration and brand metrics amongst our hard to reach affluent audience.
Insight
The first challenge was to find a way to even register on our audience’s radar.
Our start point was the product itself: gaining an intimate knowledge of the policy that
Hiscox offers, and why it’s different. We soon discovered that the policy was a perfect and
very specific reflection of the Hiscox customer and their very particular lifestyle.
Have a £6,000 Pinarello bike in the garage? It’s covered as standard without you even
having to tell us it exists. Want to take all your belongings and valuables with you on a two-
month holiday? All covered as standard.
Ultimately to protect the unusual things they love, and love to do.
Which in turn gave us our way in.
People don’t care about insurance, but they do care about the things that it protects. And
Hiscox’s policy uniquely protects the things that this audience love.

2.
A piece of internal Hiscox customer research that told us that our audience’s passions lay in
luxury travel; home and interior; art, jewellery and watches; theatre and the arts; wine and
cycling. All of which were well-served with unique and market leading cover within the
Home policy.
The idea
“Where product meets passion”
Finding the places where the specifics of Hiscox’s home insurance policies intersect with the
specific interests of our audience.
The Plan
Print was uniquely positioned to link us with the audience’s passions in premium and well-
loved brands - it was vital that the quality of the environment complemented the quality of
the product we were selling.
Alongside our broadsheet supplement plan, and our vertical passion campaign with
publishing experts in their field, (such as Rouleur (cycling), Decanter (wine), Conde Nast
Traveller (luxury travel), QP (watches)), we wanted to find one long term partner who
covered a number of our passion areas in one title, that we could build frequency and
association with over the course of the year.
This partner was ESI. The idea was to make Hiscox the first ever Official Arts Partner of the
Evening Standard, a thought that would cover a range of our audiences’ passions, exist in a
number of touchpoints, and drive implicit and explicit associations with the brand through a
constant flow of multiple platform activations across their Arts coverage.
Whilst we had great print coverage with high impact advertorials, daily signposting and logo
accreditation, our purpose built ‘Online Arts Channel’ lay at the heart of our partnership. A
beautifully designed hub that generated just over 215,000 views in its first week live.
The Arts Channel hosts weekly bespoke native articles around our passion areas, created in
collaboration with the ESI editors. From topics such as ‘Why it pays to buy art online’,
building from the Hiscox 2016 Online Art Trade Report for 2016; ‘How to custom build your
own racing bike and take on Mark Cavendish’; through to ‘How Sculpture in the City is
refreshing the London urban landscape’, we were able speak to the ESI audience across a
number of topics that both we and them were passionate about.

3.
To ensure our native articles achieved as much traffic as possible we had 250,000 co-
branded drivers per article and social activity (editorially supported tweets and Facebook
posts), existing as a blend of native editorial placements and Krux targeting.
The results
The average time per visit on our Arts Channel is 215 seconds beating the ESI benchmark of
50 seconds and our KPI of 60 seconds. An average of 2.43minutes has been spent with our
native articles, again beating the ESI benchmark by 21.5%.
“I wasn’t expecting these numbers, I had to check all of them. Twice. Well done!” (Insitas
research, 7th September 2016)
In only a few weeks, the campaign has generated significant reach amongst its readers, and
had a powerful effect on their perceptions of Hiscox and subsequent key brand and
consideration metrics.
Recognition:
• Print recognition up 19% vs 10% at previous dip
Relevance:
• 68% rate the brand fit ‘good or excellent’
• Recognisers say it makes Hiscox feel classy, high quality, specialist and interested in
supporting the Arts.
• Connection with passion areas grows from 27% (ES Readers) to 46% (Recognisers)
Brand drivers of consideration:
All seven of the key metrics that drive consideration have risen with statistical significance
versus non-readers since the campaign began, with the most important being:
• Brand for people like me: 63% of those who recognised the partnership (vs. 40%
readers and non recognisers)
• Provide right cover for my needs: (61% vs. 39%)
• A brand I can relate to: (59% vs. 39% )
Consideration:
All of these metric shifts would be irrelevant if they didn’t affect those which have strongest
impact on business performance, but they did.

4.
Brand affinity rose by 63%, or 17 points from 27% to 44%
Our key metric, Consideration, rose by 53%, or 8 points 15% to 23%.
Client quote:
“The Evening Standard Arts partnership not only represents a brilliant distillation of our
passions-based strategy, but the content that it has created has been widely and
enthusiastically consumed by their readers, and had a strong effect on our brand in a small
amount of time”