MAPFRE’s “Live Insurance” Campaign & How It Revived a Stale Market

The Problem

MAPFRE is Spain’s largest and most trusted insurance carrier, offering everything from home and auto to life and health insurance. But being well-known in your home country doesn’t mean much when the competition’s always undercutting you on price. And that’s exactly where MAPFRE found itself.

In Spain, over 80% of buyers chose insurance based on price alone. It was a race to the bottom. Cheap was king, and quality was an afterthought.

For MAPFRE, this was a nightmare. They weren’t the cheapest option, and in a market where insurance had become a commodity—just paperwork and faceless call centers—people cared more about their monthly premium than what the company could do for them.

So, how do you shift that? How do you stop consumers from obsessing over cost and get them to see the value of real insurance? MAPFRE had to change the conversation. They had to prove that they weren’t just selling a policy.

The Human Problem

Here’s the real challenge: insurance is invisible until it’s not. People buy it, file the paperwork, and forget about it. It's hard to know the value of your policy when everything is going well. Until disaster strikes.

In a moment of crisis, insurance suddenly becomes everything. But by then, it’s too late for customers to realize the real value of their policy. All they care about in that moment is how quickly help arrives, how smoothly things get fixed, and if they will be taken care of.

That’s the core problem MAPFRE needed to address. Insurance is intangible and forgotten—until it becomes the one thing people rely on to pull them out of a tough situation. The shift they needed to make was clear: show people that insurance is more than just a future promise. It’s a lifeline when things go wrong.

MAPFRE needed to show people that insurance is more than a piece of paper—it’s a lifeline.

The Insight

Selling the future is hard. Insurance is a promise for "someday," but consumers live in the now. MAPFRE needed to collapse that timeline and make people understand the value of their service today.

The insight? Insurance matters when it’s live.

In the moments of crisis—those critical, real-time events—insurance becomes more than an abstract policy. It becomes tangible, immediate, real.

So how do you make that visible to consumers? You show them what it looks like in action.

The Strategy

MAPFRE did something different: Instead of focusing on pricing or product comparisons, they made the invisible visible. They launched MAPFRE Live Insurance, a campaign that showed their service in real time, raw and unfiltered.

No actors. No staged scenes. Just their teams on the ground, solving problems and handling emergencies as they happened.

They strapped GoPros and bodycams to their workers—plumbers, crane operators, rescue teams—capturing every moment of MAPFRE in action. Then, they broadcast it everywhere: billboards, social media, online ads, and even a documentary on one of Spain’s major streaming platforms.

MAPFRE didn’t just tell people what they could do. They showed them—live.

The Results

1. Sales exploded: +131% in policy volume, with a 49% lower cost per acquisition.

2. Brand awareness surged: +56% growth in awareness and +29% in brand searches.

3. Trust soared: A 5-point jump in quality perception and a 2.6-point boost in consideration.

4. ROI outpaced competitors: An 80% higher investment yielded 400% more efficiency than direct competitors.

By showing insurance in action, MAPFRE didn’t just boost its numbers—it changed people's perceptions of insurance.

Why It Worked

1. Challenged Perceptions: Live rescue footage disrupted the conventional view of insurance as a passive, distant service, repositioning it as an active, real-time solution.

2. Benefits Over Features: By focusing on real-time impact, MAPFRE shifted attention from the granular details of its plans to the immediate, functional and emotional benefits of their service.

3. Disrupted the Category Playbook: While competitors remained locked in price-driven battles, MAPFRE made a strategic pivot, taking an approach that grabbed attention and redefined the conversation.

MAPFRE’s "Live Insurance" campaign didn’t just improve their bottom line. It redefined how people think about insurance's role in their lives. Bold, transparent, and human-focused—that’s how you break free from a race to the bottom.

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