"KILB became part of insurance lexicon"

Why it is my best campaign
The Kum Insurance Lene ki Bimari (KILB) campaign stands out as my best work so far because of many reasons. First, the financial services category is not seen as a sector where path-breaking work usually happens. Second, Aegon Religare was the 17th entrant in the segment and the task was to create brand awareness, salience and consumer response in one go. Third, the life insurance category already has formidable players like LIC, SBI Life and ICICI, and compared to them, our advertising budget was much lesser for the campaign.

This was the first campaign for a newly acquired client. So, the margin of error had to be very low. Our creative response to these challenges was KILB, a campaign that went on to become a case study in financial advertising. It created massive consumer connect as seen by the staggering number of phone calls, which were made to the Aegon Religare call centre. The acronym KILB remains popular even today with the consumers, nearly five years after the campaign broke.

Interestingly, this was the first financial services campaign to start off with a teaser ad. Even its media planning was quite different. By using bus-shelters, digital media and select television channels, Aegon Religare sparked a nationwide curiosity on how the campaign managed to get the eyeballs despite its low advertising budget.

Brief to the agency
The best thing about the campaign was that there was no rigid brief. We had the clarity that our campaign had to be based on a solid consumer truth. At one level, all of us, including the client, were also consumers of the insurance product. The final brief was the result of collaboration between customers, the agency and the Aegon Religare think-tank, including Rajeev Jamkhedkar, Pradeep Pandey and Subhrangshu Neogi.

Problems & challenges
One of the creative challenges was that the communication had to lead to enquiries. The client had clearly stated that it would judge the success of the campaign based on the number of times it received feedback on its call centre number. This meant that we had to design the response device very carefully. This also meant lopping away valuable seconds from the 'plot'.

The second challenge was not 'informing' the audience but 'persuading' them to act. These were two very different actions. It meant that we needed to create a 'sales pitch' and not just another advertisement for the brand.

Then, again, the sales pitch couldn't be too long but yet needed to give adequate time to the response device.

Route chosen and why
Roughly 99 per cent of the consumers in India are under-insured. Shockingly, not many are even aware of this fact. This has turned out to be one of the most chiselled financial services insights that I have ever found out.

Based on this hard fact, we took two important creative decisions: one, we broke down the sales pitch into a series of pithy dialogues instead of making it a monologue; and two, we decided to cast someone who could speak fast and with clarity so we could fit in more words per second.

Actor Irrfan Khan became the protagonist (he has a staccato style of dialogue delivery) for this reason. We couldn't have chosen someone like, say, the late actor Rajkumar, whose 'rendition' of a single word like Jaani would have taken nearly five seconds. This ad was as much an act of engineering as it was about creativity.

Outcome
The campaign resulted in 55,000 phone calls in the first three weeks of the advertisement's launch. During the teaser phase, it created unprecedented curiosity. KILB was the sixth most searched term on Google in India during the week the teaser ran its course. Some websites used fake 'KILB revealers' to divert traffic to their sites. There was speculation that KILB is the name of Karan Johar's new movie as it started with 'K'. Most importantly, it led to KILB becoming part of popular lexicon.

Will it work today?
It will work today as the fundamental truth of people being under-insured still hasn't changed. If a brand tells the customer to increase the worth of her life insurance in order to make it more useful, she will pay attention.

The campaign also works because it stays away from making fuzzy promises. It keeps the context of the current reality, be it inflation, the unsystematic approach towards insurance, while talking to consumers about the future. The tonality of the ad is of a family elder advising another member rather than trying to be over-smart or overbearing.

Raghu Bhat

Founder director, Scarecrow Communications, & Founder, Fungus Designs