Aflac | From Tech Partner to Social Agency to Brand AOR
Paid Search & Paid Social Advertising
Social Media
Video Production
Project Overview
In 2018 Aflac engaged Dagger on a technology project in the marketing space, which gave us some visibility into their team’s way of working, the broader challenges they face as a brand, and how their approach might be keeping them from reaching their goals. We recognized roadblocks we had seen in other large, traditionally-oriented brands, and knew they were a prime candidate for Dagger’s media company mindset. Aflac was intrigued about Dagger as well, so in early 2019 when they decided to put their social business up for review, we were invited to pitch. Dagger won that pitch, and within six months of being live on social our work had moved the needle with tangible impact against Aflac’s marketing goals. When we were onboarded, Aflac’s social channels were characterized by a lack of differentiation and purpose. We re-architected Aflac’s social ecosystem to be more streamlined, with distinct channel roles, target audiences, and content strategies that provided differentiation and purpose to each channel. This resulted in less frequent but higher quality content creation, and better utilization of resources. Historically Aflac’s paid social media was inconsistent and centered around boosting individual pieces of content rather than flighting content together for cohesive messaging. Spend was not prioritized across Aflac’s marketing objectives, and social media had never played a role in driving the key priority set for 2019: an increase in consumer knowledge. Dagger established a rigorous media plan and testing agenda that demonstrated social media’s capacity to impact all three of Aflac’s marketing objectives: awareness, connection, and knowledge. We evolved the media buying model to reach/frequency to ensure effective messaging and reach, and used brand lift studies aligned to each flight of content to measure against our key objectives. One of the main hypotheses we had was that social content with a bolder creative tone would drive greater results. Through two tone tests in which we isolated tone as the variable, we demonstrated this was in fact true. Statistically significant results showed that our bolder creative tone outperformed the milder tone Aflac had historically used across awareness, connection, and knowledge. This learning allowed us to evolve all of our social content for maximum impact. Within six months we were able to demonstrate results across our three objectives: 1) Awareness: 214M Impressions and a 9.7% lift in Ad Recall. 2) Connection: 38K Engagements and 133M Video Plays. 3) Knowledge: 4.4% lift in Message Agreement. These results, and the creative that produced them, made a powerful impression on Aflac leadership, leading to Dagger being invited to pitch to be Aflac’s brand AOR later in 2019. In that pitch we were up against a deeply entrenched, multi-year incumbent brand agency as well as a couple other shops with strong ties to the organization, and Dagger emerged with the business. Television and social creative (not featured in this submission) that was developed by Dagger in the first three months of 2019 began airing in April.Client
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