Congratulations to our 2022 Sammy Award Winner!

The SAMMY Award is given to the entry voted to be the best overall work among the Award of Excellence and Best of Show candidates submitted for the 2022 IMCA Showcase. This truly elite award is recognition by your peers of the highest standard of professionalism - thus the name SAMMY, "Special Award from Members".

Our finalists received the top 10 overall Showcase scores. We asked each finalist to submit a 200-word summary of their entry, which you'll see below; you can click through to see the full entries, just as the Showcase judges saw them, including links to relevant material.

Proud sponsor of the 2022 SAMMY Award - Aartrijk

2022 Sammy Award Winner
Crum & Forster - Cfins.com Redesign



Submission Category : Media/ Public Relations

The driving force behind our redesign was to create a website for our audience (rather than a reflection of our internal organizational structure) – to provide a better user experience for brokers, producers, commercial customers and retail consumers and better highlight our expanding suite of products and solutions. Additionally, we wanted to connect with prospective employees through the addition of “Great Place to Work” pages, and to amplify our corporate social responsibility efforts. 

With a three-person, in-house team, we refreshed and wrote page copy from scratch – for 90% of the pages on the new website. This effort required a conversation with virtually every profit center head and service leader across the organization.

View site BEFORE and AFTER.

Highlights:
• We built 324 pages
• Reviewed, created, updated and loaded 401 PDFs
• Sourced and formatted 1,461 images
• Removed redundant pages
• Remapped the navigation
• Updated page names and created more than 200 necessary redirects
• Implemented SEO

Key metrics:
• Page views: 15% increase
• Average time on page: 12% increase
• Organic traffic: 5% increase

Percentage Increase Page Sampling
Excess & Umbrella 44.37
Directors & Officers 73.68
Captive Insurance 34.45
Errors & Omissions 56.00
Crisis Management 96.39
Misc. Professional Liability 51.52
Lawyers Professional Liability 16.03
 

View this submission

Sammy Award Finalists    

RiverSource Life Insurance - Insurance Basics Video Series



Submission Category: Audio/Visual Communication 2 Minutes or Longer

Clients and financial advisors alike sometimes struggle to understand how life, disability income and long-term care insurance can help protect financial goals. These products are too readily dismissed based solely on a lack of knowledge or preconceived ideas. Also, talking about what these products can help do can be difficult, as it means facing some of our biggest fears—death, disability, and chronic care. We felt there was an opportunity to educate clients and prospects, dispel myths, and provide a means by which our financial advisors can help clients understand the importance of protection. 

We chose video for it’s visually engaging and easily digestible format. In keeping with that, we knew they must be short, free of industry jargon and straightforward. 

Our desired outcome was two-fold: to increase the priority clients and prospects assign to insurance by providing this educational information; and to provide a means by which our financial advisors can help their clients understand the importance of protection. We feel we’ve been successful at both based on feedback from advisors, number of views and how many ways the videos are being used. 
This project brought back into focus the importance of keeping our messages simple and relatable. 
  
UFG Insurance - Return to the Office Video



Submission Category: Employee Corporate Multimedia Communication

In July 2021, UFG began to allow employees to transition back into some office buildings in five phases after having implemented a mandatory work-from-home arrangement at the pandemic’s onset. This would be the first time in more than a year that employees would have the opportunity to begin reuniting for in-person work again. 
 
This light-hearted, entertaining video was created as a fun way to educate those returning employees about the policies and guidelines in place at that time, so they knew what to expect in their new environment. In fact, watching this video was a required step in the return-to-office process—a training which all were asked to complete. 
 
It’s important to remember, COVID-19 was (and remains) a fast-evolving pandemic, and this video was created at a specific point in time, and based on expert health recommendations in that moment, to inform decisions. Policies and guidelines have since changed but, for all intents and purposes, rolling this out as a required training was a very effective communication method.
 
Though future phases were paused as the delta variant began to rise, phase-one employees returned armed with knowledge to interact safely thanks to the outside-the-box communication approach of this successful video. 
 

View this submission    

 RiverSource Insurance - Digital Long-term Care Guide
 
Submissions Category: External Website

Our team developed the digital Long-term Care Guide to help over 10,000 Ameriprise advisors lead productive conversations with clients around what long-term care is, potential costs of care and funding sources. The web-based tool allows advisors to easily access and share the content with clients during in-person or virtual meetings. The tool is intuitive to use so advisors can begin using it with limited to no training, and effective in helping clients consider their future long-term care needs from a different perspective.

The guide is designed for advisors to:
• Follow the guide’s navigational flow for the full experience or choose to jump to specific sections.
• Use the built-in survey and calculator to generate personalized results with easy-to-read visuals for clients.
• Easily explain the benefits, risks and considerations of key funding options by comparing sources within the flexible table format.
• At the end of the conversation print or save and email a customized PDF output to clients that summarizes what they discussed.

Since launch, we’ve received feedback from advisors that the guide is helping clients realize the importance of planning for long-term care costs and facilitating productive conversations around what they can do for next steps.

 

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The Cincinnati Insurance Companies - Insuring Something Good Campaign



Submissions Category: External Corporate Communications Campaign

The Insuring Something Good awareness campaign was developed in the midst of the pandemic, where companies were hyper-focused on communicating to their customers with safety procedures and policy refunds. 

In addition to the important operational communications, we wanted to further support our independent agents and inspire hope. Cincinnati's independent agents do great things in their communities and this was the perfect opportunity to highlight our customers’ local involvement.

In this campaign, our objective was to develop a video series to share our
appreciation and increase awareness of our appointed independent agents. Executed through a YouTube playlist, landing page, emails and social media posts (paid and organic), the goal of increasing awareness was measured by video views, landing page views, email open rates and social media engagement. A secondary goal was to achieve Find An Agency searches on the landing page, driving additional new business to our independent agents.

Overall, the Insuring Something Good awareness campaign exceeded our expectations. We set goals based on our current performance for each channel and we surpassed nearly every goal we set for this campaign but most importantly, we highlighted the great work of our independent agents.  

View this submission   

UFG - Agent Update



Submission Category: External Corporate Communications Campaign

Insurance marketing doesn’t have to be boring! Agent Update is a social-first video that’s turned into blog posts and email campaigns to take advantage of the video trend while also providing entertaining yet educational content to our audiences — think SNL’s Weekend Update meets the insurance industry, but with zero politics. 

Although there may be mentions of UFG and our services, the video series is focused on helping insurance agents and those in the industry by giving them tips, offering solutions to common problems and more. We wanted to create content that gave our social audiences a reason to stop scrolling and focus on UFG while gaining knowledge along the way.

Agent Update has produced great digital results across multiple platforms for UFG Insurance. Here are a few:
• 52,235 total video views on all social media platforms (to targeted audiences), including a 95.7% increase year over year in LinkedIn (our main social media focus) video views.
• Contributed to a 54% increase in LinkedIn followers from January 2021 to March 2022.

We confirmed what we thought would be true: There is an appetite for this type of content on our social media platforms (and insurance marketing is far from boring)!

View this submission    
Applied Underwriter Inc. - 2021 Workers' Compensation Almanac, Volume VIII

 

Submission Category: Magazines and Special Publications

The Applied Underwriters Workers’ Compensation Almanac has been produced annually since 2014. Our team of analysts, underwriters and marketers track and study workers 'compensation industry trends throughout the year and then present that information in a beautifully designed, easy-to-digest format to help keep our agents and brokers up-to-date on important legislation, statistics and industry trends. Along with a wealth of topical articles, data and interesting factoids throughout, our Almanac also includes delightful diversions such as word games, puzzles, cartoons and opportunities for readers to earn a prize by engaging with Almanac content via QR-coded quizzes. Our Almanac is provided on a complimentary basis to agents and brokers with whom we do business and has become an essential resource for them to stay informed on industry issues that matter. Year-over-year, the Almanac has not only grown in content but also in number of recipients and readers. In 2021 alone, we mailed out 31% more copies than the previous year and provided a digital version on our website which received 10% more download requests than the year prior.

Foremost Insurance Group - Foremost Signature Auto & Home Product Guides



Submissions Category: In-House - Print Communications

When our company acquired a new line of premier Auto, Home and Umbrella products – it came with a challenge to differentiate and explain the difference and highlights of these products. The Agent360 and ARS product guides were created as promotional marketing booklets to help independent agents understand the Foremost Signature products and the two systems (legacy and new) that they write that business on. These guides rose to this challenge and include detailed descriptions of the Auto, Home & Umbrella products on each system and also agency and customer selling points and talk tracks. 

We have received overwhelming feedback from other internal employees and agents that these booklets provide valuable information to help them write Foremost business. The survey garnered a 92% success rate in “providing valuable tools to agents” and a 89% success rate in “useful-ness in training agents in new products”. The open rate for the two emails we sent to promote the booklets was 32% (an industry high score) and the click-through rate of the digital pdf (to access the booklets) was a collective 42% (also high compared to comparable analytics we track internally.) These booklets have succeeded our intended outcome and are used daily within our organization.

 

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eHealth -  2021 AEP TV Commercials

 

Historically eHealth went to market with unbranded creatives, especially in TV. However, in 2021 eHealth showcased our brand and visual identity on TV for the first time. As with previous unbranded ads, the target audience for these 9 new eHealth branded AEP commercials were people turning 65 and new to Medicare, as well as people already on Medicare who may want to change plans to get better coverage. 

Among these audiences, the results of our first attempt to build brand recognition were impressive.

• Aided brand awareness grew 80% YoY.• 2, 3, 5, and 28.5-minute lengths beat legacy “direct response” controls.

• 2-minute “Graphics Confusion” beat all others by ~23%-55% (based on CPC response mechanism).

While response was generally even between the control and new creatives for the Medicare Myth Busters collection of ads (3, 5, and 28.5-min), the Myth Busters concept built trust with eHealth as a Medicare expert and thus sets up our agents for greater conversion success:

  • 28.5-min Myth Busters infomercial yielded a 23.2% improvement in sales conversion.
  • The Myth Busters mid-form lengths (3- and 5-min) enjoyed a 31.1% improvement in sales conversion.

Submission Category: Broadcast Media Spot or Campaign 

View this submission   

Fortegra - Base Camp Podcast



Submission Category: Employee Corporate Communications Campaign

The Base Camp podcast derives its name from the place where climbers come together to strategize prior to embarking on their climb up towards the mountain’s summit. The idea was born amid the COVID-19 pandemic when we recognized that as a global company an increase in corporate communications would be critical to ensure our employees felt secure and at ease during a time characterized by sudden change. Not only were massive changes taking place on a macro-level, but our company began to grow at a rapid pace and change at an organizational level became commonplace as well.

The podcast aims to humanize company communications and make conversations among top executives accessible to the entire organization. With topics ranging from quarterly business updates with the CEO to what employees can expect from Fortegra’s new career pathing program, each episode is crafted with our associates in mind. Our end goal is to create a company culture where employees feel they are seen, heard, and ultimately feel comfortable spending their entire careers with us if they so choose. 

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