Health insurance advertising traditionally had a fairly predictable protagonist. The uncertainty of tomorrow. The possibility of an unexpected medical expense, a hospitalisation or a family suddenly having to deal with a crisis has often been used to establish why insurance matters.
ACKO’s latest health insurance campaign takes a different route. ‘Unke Liye Jo Compromise Nahi Karte’ looks at health before the hospital scenarios enter the picture. It starts with the little compromises people make for their health, from taking the stairs to resisting a piece of cake.
The three-film campaign features creators from different genres dealing with the customary temptations that we as human beings deal with almost everyday. It is, however, presented as larger-than-life romantic characters, set to the tone of ‘Baahon Mein Chale Aao’. The idea, Acko mentions, is that people who are trying not to compromise on their health should not have to compromise when it comes to their health insurance either.
For Nitin Khanna, Chief Marketing Officer, ACKO, the initiating thought was recognising that health is primarily shaped by small, sometimes unnoticed decisions rather than dramatic lifestyle changes. He illustrates, “With this campaign, we’re essentially trying to recognise that the trend amongst people, where they make meaningful choices regarding their health. It’s not always about heavy-duty gymming or running a marathon. There are small things that you do every day, like saying no to temptation, saying no to binge-watching, choosing physical activity, and getting good sleep.”
Those choices, Khanna believes, deserved a little more attention than it usually does. He referred to the moments as unnoticed and uncelebrated moments. The creative thought itself came from a somewhat self-aware moment in the brainstorm room. The team realised that while few people in the room looked like the sort who would wake up at 5 AM to train for a marathon, almost everyone had their own small health victories, taking the stairs, cutting back on dessert or ordering chai without sugar.
But there is another reading to the campaign. The protagonists are, after all, compromising. They are giving up the cake, the lift or the sugary drink. The closing line, “Unke liye jo compromise nahi karte. ACKO Health Insurance,” could also suggest that those who do not make these compromises at all, people who continue to give in to their everyday temptations, may eventually need health insurance precisely because of the health risks that come with those choices.
It is an interpretation that brings a touch of dark humour to an otherwise upbeat campaign. When asked if the line could also be understood this way, Khanna points back to the campaign’s intent to keep the choices accessible rather than make health feel like a test of extreme discipline. “We definitely don’t want to alienate people— the feeling that this is not really the brand for me,” he says.
The choices, he adds, are deliberately everyday and relatable, the kind of decisions people encounter at home or at work. “Whether it’s the choice of song, the creators, or the situations we’ve depicted, are very common, everyday, relatable situations which we believe, a lot of people will be able to resonate with.” It allowed ACKO to make a broader point about the role of health insurance. If consumers are making an effort to look after their health every day, the brand believes the insurance experience should reflect the same attitude when they actually need it.
The campaign marks a conscious departure from what Khanna sees as the category’s familiar communication codes. He says insurance has often been marketed through ‘fear-mongering’ and negative scenarios. ACKO, he says, has consistently tried to avoid that territory. “That’s really not our brand tonality,” he adds. ACKO has also previously used humour-led conversation with characters like Munna Bhai and Circuit to explain features.
The humorous tone extends to how the brand chooses its media and creators too. While the company remains strong with digital and influencer ecosystems, Khanna says its health insurance business is also focused on premium and affluent households across the top eight to ten cities, making CTV and OTT important parts of the media mix. Traditional media, hence, is not off the table. Khanna points to ACKO’s term-life insurance campaign, where the brand used a long-format print advertisement because the campaign required the medium to carry a more substantial message.
Creators, meanwhile, are not being treated as a single media bucket. ACKO uses different kinds of creators for different purposes. Financial and BFSI creators help explain insurance and guide consumers through decisions, while lifestyle creators can bring relatability to broader brand communication. On crisis control in a heavily regulated category, Khanna says, “Certain guardrails from a regulatory perspective are non-negotiable. But too much scripting defeats the reason why you hired the creator in the first place.”
Celebrity marketing, meanwhile, continues to have a place in ACKO’s plans. Its relationship with MS Dhoni goes beyond a conventional endorsement, with the cricketer also an investor in the company. “There are many traits of MS and ACKO which gel very well. The trust, the credibility, the sort of appeal that he has have definitely helped us take the brand to the next level,” he expresses.
Geography, too, is a factor that feeds into a larger issue for insurance brands: education. While ACKO remains largely focused on urban markets, with Tier 2 markets in consideration and Tier 3 not a current priority, Khanna believes financial awareness has to remain an ongoing part of the brand’s role. “Financial awareness and financial literacy is a responsibility that we have as an insurance brand. That’s something that we do on an ongoing basis,” he says.
For Khanna, the larger challenge is also about changing what consumers have come to expect from insurance communication. As ACKO has expanded across general and life insurance, its marketing has had to address different products and audiences, without losing the consumer-first thinking with which the brand began.
The interesting part of ACKO’s marketing journey, then, is not that it has found a completely new language for insurance. It is that, as the business has moved into more categories and a wider consumer base, it has continued to resist the language the category already knows too well. “We started off with the thesis of being consumer-first, as a direct insurance brand, and I think that, at the heart of it, remains consistent,” he concludes.
