LifeDirect is New Zealand’s leading life insurance aggregation website. For almost ten years, the face of the brand has been their obscure mascot ‘Simon the Sloth’ – a lethargic, animated character who, not surprisingly, had lost relevance. We were tasked with reinvigorating the brand for New Zealanders 25 – 35; a demographic with an ever-increasing responsibility to insure themselves for the benefit of their dependents. The problem is, they view death as a distant, irrelevant issue.

So we killed Simon. As a real-time demonstration of the unpredictability of life, and the significant benefits of life insurance, we pushed him off a cliff on ‘live’ TV, leaving viewers with nothing but unanswered questions. As intended, this whipped up a social media ‘WTF’ storm. The following day, we published a full-page obituary in the dailies, announcing that Simon had died, but he’d failed to specify his life insurance beneficiaries. Kiwis who ‘knew’ Simon were then invited to share brazen stories about their relationship with him, in order to win a slice of the pay-out.

As well as sharing the stories via the entrants’ social channels, the microsite was essentially a hub for data collection, gathering email addresses and redirecting visitors to lifedirect.co.nz upon completion of entry.

Astute use of media was integral to the success of the project. We wanted to expose New Zealanders to a simulated version of suddenly losing someone important(ish) to them, across multiple channels. We used traditional media to show Simon’s demise and confirm his death, then social as a channel for people to share their grief and stories about their phoney relationships with Simon. We were also working with a very limited budget, so we had to ensure we made significant noise in every channel.