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Direct Line Group on using TV as a full-funnel medium

Direct Line Group on using TV as a full-funnel medium

Direct Line Group, one of the leading insurance companies in the UK (with brands including Direct Line, Churchill and Green Flag), uses TV as a full-funnel medium, helping with everything from building demand to driving acquisition and retention.

In this interview, Sam Taylor, its head of customer marketing, explains how he and his team are pushing the envelope with data-driven AV marketing.

Brand-building is becoming more sophisticated, thanks to the ability to suppress unwanted audiences, and direct-response TV advertising has become more data-driven, with targeting of prospects who look like existing customers and efforts to engage existing ones.

Find out how Churchill used addressable TV to reach customers who had not downloaded the brand’s new app to encourage them to do so. This used first-party data matching “and is something we would never have done on TV before”.

Taylor is asked if Direct Line Group’s data transformation is making targeting more effective and so helping to justify the cost-per-impact premium associated with addressable. Hear his answer in the video.

Watch the interview

Darren Barber, Global Head of Performance Marketing, essencemediacom, on 03 Apr 2025
“Observations are: 1. There are still clearly differentiated ambitions in marketing, to create demand or hoover up demand (or both). It's semantics to argue what they are called (eg Brand and Performance), they are done differently to do them well. I noticed Sam wasn't dismissing either, instead stating that TV can do both, and the ambition should be audience-centric planning. 2. The question about whether DLG is starting to use TV to go lower in the funnel than it used to is relatively uneducated. DLG have been flagship exponents of DRTV (as Sam rightly labeled it) since maybe 1995. The misperception that TV has only just unlocked its "performance power" now it is more digitised is similar to Meta now talking about how MMM is the right thing to do. These things have been in-play, important, and correct for 25 years. Digital natives/platforms are only just discovering them (or pivoting on opinion to unlock new money when it suits). 3. It's brilliant that Sam and DLG are unlocking the 1PD benefits of digitisation in TV, and IMO is 100% correct that TV is still such a powerful tool for marketers. That is because it still has the right balance of engaging format = influence, price, and reach to generate a real behaviour change in audiences (be that long-term or immediate).”

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