State Farm’s marketing head on ‘lightning-in-a-bottle’ Kelce-Swift stunt

NEW YORK — State Farm has been honing its media strategy to interact customers and foster loyalty with a young audience that may someday be out there for its insurance products. The company has placed the next priority on digital and mobile channels, including TikTok and esports, while expanding the roster of agencies it really works with, last summer adding High Dive into the combination. 

These moves have welcomed, and sometimes responded to, more marketing experimentation. The insurance giant just signed its first name, image and likeness deal with a school athlete, partnering with basketball prodigy Caitlin Clark. State Farm also recently capitalized on fan mania across the now-official relationship between pop star Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce, the latter of whom has appeared in ads for the marketer. 

During a football game early in October, Jake from State Farm, the brand’s khaki-wearing mascot, appeared alongside Kelce’s mother, Donna, and dropped multiple references that eagle-eyed Swifties were sure to acknowledge. The stunt generated online chatter while boosting the performance of TV spots around NFL games.  

Marketing Dive this week caught up with State Farm’s Head of Marketing Alyson Griffin, fresh off a panel discussion at Advertising Week New York. Griffin, who joined the firm two years ago, discussed how the Swift play got here together, marketing to Gen Z and what else is coming down the pike in Q4.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: Your Advertising Week panel Monday with The Home Depot was about “conscientious consumers.” How do you define that term? 

ALYSON GRIFFIN: The organizers got here up with that term and it was around younger consumers who care concerning the purpose of a brand. People who vote with their feet, meaning they align themselves and buy from brands that meet their values. 

We break our marketing into three distinct categories: Capturing current demand with whatever age or style of insurance. The second is generating future demand, which is a bit where the “conscientious consumer” is available in. These are younger folks for our business, they’re not our goal to sell the product, to purchase into policies. They’re within the category of generating future demand. And then the third is retention and customer loyalty. 

We’re partners with Home Depot. It’s an unlikely pairing. On the surface, you wouldn’t understand why State Farm would care, but we all know they know their customers thoroughly. That whole notion of retail as a knowledge source for brands, Home Depot is that. If we are able to align data, then Home Depot feels they’re offering their customers something essential, which is the State Farm brand.

Does that data relationship fall under Home Depot’s retail media network?  

GRIFFIN: Exactly. We are their first non-endemic partner. For an insurance brand, we expect that we’re on the leading edge from a marketing and media perspective. We’re recognizing that retail media and being smart about how we’re finding and fascinating our current and potential customers.

Your media strategy has shifted in other ways. You focused on TikTok across the Super Bowl this 12 months. Is the conscientious consumer underpinning the trend? 

GRIFFIN: Yes. We are an insurance company. We understand who the audiences are and are dialing up media in places that they already are in because they’re not going to come back in search of us.

That dovetails with the recent stuff you probably did with Donna Kelce and Jake from State Farm. Is that different from the way in which you’ve previously approached marketing around a property just like the NFL?

GRIFFIN: That was different, yes. We have already got a relationship with Travis Kelce. He’s in our spots. We filmed that long before any of this happened. It was funny because Taylor Swift someday shows up and the Twitterverse and the world go bonkers. 

We partnered with Ryan Reynolds and Maximum Effort. That was a lightning-in-a-bottle moment. We were in a position to say: Is Jake from State Farm available? Is this going to be seen by Taylor as anything inappropriate? Because Ryan has a relationship with Taylor, he talked to her and he or she thought it was phenomenal. That’s why it couldn’t be just any agency pitching that, but this was not planned in any respect. 

A thing happened and, inside every week, we were like, we either jump on this or we miss it, which can also be not a typical insurance industry timeline. The industry is just not quick. We had the best checks and balances in place and we had a relationship with Maximum Effort. We’d been talking to them for a very long time but hadn’t done an actual campaign together yet. We felt protected that, while it was a daring move, we minimized the danger.