#251 2023 · Partners Life (agency: Special NZ) · Insuranceenter-their-reality
Partners Life, unable to get New Zealanders to picture their own death long enough to buy life insurance, resurrected the freshly murdered characters of the country's most-watched crime drama each week to complain, in character, that they'd left no coverage behind
the problem
Life insurance ads fail because people avoid confronting death
background
New Zealand has one of the lowest life-insurance uptake rates in the developed world, and insurers like Partners Life faced a structural category problem: any honest life-insurance pitch has to ask viewers to picture their own death, which is precisely the thought most people change the channel to avoid. Direct mortality-focused advertising reliably triggered avoidance rather than purchase intent, leaving the category chronically under-bought.
Special NZ, Partners Life's agency, noticed Kiwis already invited death into their living rooms every week via The Brokenwood Mysteries, New Zealand's most-watched murder-mystery drama, in which a new character is killed off each episode. Instead of competing with that appetite for fictional death, the campaign borrowed it: rather than a stranger's hypothetical death, viewers were confronted with a character they already knew and had just watched die.
the move
At the end of every Brokenwood Mysteries episode for a season, before the credits rolled, Partners Life aired a short in-character sketch in which that episode's just-murdered victim was 'brought back' to lament, ruefully and often comedically, that they had died without life insurance and left their family exposed. The ads used the show's own actors, sets and tone, so the pitch arrived inside the fiction viewers had already opted into rather than as an interruption to it.
the payoff
Special NZ's official case study cites a +6% lift in brand awareness, +5% in brand consideration and +12% in stated interest in life insurance in the New Zealand market; no independent policy-sales or revenue figures have been publicly disclosed. The work won the Health & Wellness Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2023, a WARC Effectiveness Grand Prix, and further recognition from D&AD and Effie — an unusually wide sweep for a single insurance campaign, though award wins are a creative-industry signal, not an audited business result.
what came after
The Last Performance became one of the most awarded insurance campaigns globally in 2023 and is frequently cited in ad-industry case libraries as a reference example of embedding a brand inside an existing fictional property to sidestep a taboo topic.
references
- [1]Special NZ wins Health & Wellness Lions Grand Prix for Partners Life 'The Last Performance'Campaign Brief, 2023campaignbrief.com
- [2]Last Performance — case studySpecial NZ (agency official case study), 2023nz.specialgroup.com