Work showcase: The 'vuja de' moment

In his New York Times bestseller, Originals, author Adam Grant introduces the idea of the ‘vuja de’ moment.

If déjà vu occurs when we encounter something new, but it feels like we’ve seen it before, vuja de is the reverse – we face something familiar, but we see it with a fresh perspective that enables us to gain new insights into old problems.

By putting old things in new combinations and new things in old combinations, we find innovative solutions with the power to change people’s behaviour.

Vuja de clients

We’ve placed the vuja de moment at the heart of our FoxP2 culture over the last thirteen years. In our life insurance client IndieFin, we’ve found likeminded partners who place innovation at the heart of their digital-first company.

It starts with their product. Instead of offering a traditional life insurance product, IndieFin recognised an opportunity to create a life insurance product for the living, with an investment component at the heart of its design. In the words of CEO, Peter Castledon, “Life insurance should be more about life, so we’ve reinvented it and designed a product that invests in you for investing in yourself. Indie gives you world-class cover plus an investment that generates wealth for your future. You can be responsible and selfish at the same time!”

With product innovation firmly in place, a similar level of innovative thinking needed to be reflected in the brand and digital media strategy, as well as the creative execution.

Vuja de in action

In a category that trades on the illusion of authenticity with its use of paid-for testimonials, our vuja de moment saw us turning the familiarity of the Life Insurance testimonial on its head. We introduced characters with magical mullets that showed you could be business in the front with life cover and party at the back with wealth creation.

We knew our millennial target market was generally cynical about the life insurance category and found the advertising almost invisible, with major players competing for attention by outbidding each other on search terms. Instead of adopting this approach, we used campaign collateral across digital platforms (Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, display) to not only build awareness, intent and conversion in top-down cross channels, but also in-channel. By making use of variations of the campaign collateral and ad mediums within channels, we could move users from low-engagement to higher-engagement touch points.

We produced campaign content in a modular way, with a focus on narrative video, allowing us to create cut-downs and engagement pieces and then stagger the deployment of these in each platform. We designed creative to adapt to the user’s journey, from awareness to engagement to hard-working retail to re-marketing for those who didn’t convert first time round.

We allocated spend against achieving a certain performance in terms of impressions, views and visits, but also against the staggering of ad mediums, in the role it had to play to build intent. Secondary spend was then allocated against campaign page UI interactions indicating intent, which then set off phase two of targeting and communication.

Did vuja de work?

FoxP2 and Vizeum’s approach recorded record results for the brand:

• Total website traffic increased by 21%.

• The number of email leads generated spiked by 32%.

• Search cost per click (CPC) decreased by 98%.

• Sales over the same period soared by 39% and APE (the life insurance industry’s measure of revenue) was boosted by 69%.

• Significantly, 76% of IndieFin policyholders are under 40, the complete inverse customer base of established life insurers struggling to attract a millennial audience.

Expected approaches achieve expected results, but as our Indiefin case study shows, there are still companies who reap the benefits of refusing to follow the crowd down conventional paths. Instead, they champion a set of novel ideas that go against the grain and are richer for it. Long may they prosper.