Iconic Ads: Thai Life Insurance – Unsung Hero

Insurance companies have a bad name because people think they take your money for premiums and then use bureaucratic red tape to hold up your claim for as long as possible. On the other hand, their advertisements often emphasize their helpful staff and speedy response times. Of course, insurance companies don’t usually advertise by asking what the point of life is.

Successful digital marketing is all about blending the sales conversion process into a unified consumer-brand encounter, which is something that good marketing should do and which is also expected to make unnecessary. This advertisement does a good job of tying everything together.

For a long time, Thailand’s life insurance market grew at a rapid clip, sometimes reaching double-digit percentage increases in volume and premiums paid out year over year. The majority of that market consists of the young, urban, and increasingly middle class. Thai Life Insurance, which ranks second in terms of market share in the country, aimed to appeal to a wide variety of Thai consumers by developing unique policies. It is also the only major life insurer that can claim to have solely “Thai” beginnings. As so, this TV ad and its predecessors highlight the importance of ‘local’ knowledge to the corporation and its branding, presenting a picture of Thailand that is metropolitan but not citified.

The hero in the short film “Unsung Hero” seems to be a regular guy from a working-class background, and the people he helps via acts of kindness are either from similar backgrounds (like the street vendor whose cart he guides) or from the margins (like the woman and kid seen begging). And it is this background of “ordinariness” that gives the act of giving its heroic and amazing quality, almost giving the message of “Believe in Good” a divine air. The marketing message isn’t in your face at any point, but the ad’s strong emotional pull makes you watch to the very end in case it reveals its true purpose.

This ad, like all the others, that Ogilvy & Mather Bangkok has made for Thai Life Insurance, is meant to make people feel something. The company has done a lot to get people interested by using digital media. For example, it often posts the final version of a TV ad on YouTube before it airs on TV. Previous Thai Life Insurance TVCs, as well as this one, have proven to be a hit on social media, and “Digital-First” has been shown to be effective in reaching the target population of young, urbanites who are avid users of social media and cell phones.

Thanonchai Sornsriwichai directed the commercial, while Korn Tepintarapiraksa oversaw creative for the project as executive creative director with his team Rudee Surapongraktrakool, and Kris Garford Spindler.

Since its release on April 3, 2014, this TV commercial went viral, racking up over 2.5 million views in less than a week.