Overview

Improving the lives of its customers has been part of Legal & General’s ethos since its conception inside a London coffee shop in 1836.

Until a few years ago, the majority of their marketing activity involved considerable direct mail campaigns alongside early digital marketing strategies. To strengthen its digital offering – and in a bid to deliver more targeted and personalised content powered by first-party data – with Merkle, L&G expanded its relationship with Adobe, specifically Adobe Advertising Cloud and Adobe Analytics within Adobe Experience Cloud.
 

The challenge

While using their previous advertising platform, L&G couldn’t easily attribute effectiveness across any of its digital media channels. Its first-party data in Adobe Analytics just wasn’t tying up, making it impossible for Merkle to integrate the optimisation of ad spend across different channels.

They needed to find a platform that possessed one, centralised platform to work from, enabling more effective media buying decisions, using less resource and effort than before.

The approach

Using Adobe Analytics with Adobe Advertising Cloud, L&G and Merkle were able to create a single source of truth derived from an integrated and aligned platform, forming a cohesive, fully optimised approach to advertising.

With 1st party data now flowing freely between Adobe Analytics and Advertising Cloud – and spend automatically adjusted in real time – L&G experienced a significant uplift in results across their Generic Life Insurance campaigns (Google & Microsoft combined).

More recently, L&G has used Adobe Analytics to align ad placement with changing behaviours brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as increased focus on fitness and health, while simultaneously avoiding the placement of advertising amidst sensitive content relating to the coronavirus.

By aligning its advertising strategy with data insights, L&G is solidifying its presence as a digital-first, data-driven financial services brand that wants to build a better society for the long term through financial well-being for its customers.

The outcome

L&G can now be infinitely more targeted and granular in their advertising approach, using weighted objectives across every L&G channel – search, display etc. – to ensure all activity is contributing towards the same metrics and business goals.

Weighted objectives allow the Merkle team to weight different analytics events by level of importance to customise and improve the automated bidding, powered by Adobe Sensei. This means they can customise L&G’s bidding algorithm based on whether a prospective customer has already visited their site, and where they are in the sales funnel.  These automated optimisation tools in Advertising Cloud save time, dramatically reducing manual maintenance time from 45 minutes to 10 minutes per day.