Insurance is not a product that consumers want to engage with. It’s mandatory to have, and once you have it, you hope to rarely think about it. Furthermore, once people have a policy, they rarely switch.

Given that people don’t want to spend much time thinking about it, if you’re not one of the top 3 insurance brands that come to mind, people generally don’t get a quote from you. Liberty Mutual was coming in at #6. If they wanted to breakthrough in a category that saturated, they were going to have to punch above their weight creatively.

Research shows that one of the most common times for people to shop for car insurance is while they’re actually buying a new car. Research also shows that smell is the sense most closely connected with memory formation. So instead of just telling people to think of Liberty Mutual when they decide to get an insurance quote, we used science to make them remember us.

Each ad not only told people why they should choose Liberty Mutual over the competitors, but also came equipped with a “New Car Smell” scented strip that would prime people’s associations with new car and Liberty Mutual.

The format itself was made to surprise people and invite them to engage with a category they previously rarely thought about engaging with.

The brief was clear: When consumers think “new car,” get them to think of Liberty Mutual insurance, and do it in a way that gets talked about.

To put the magnifying effects of talk value to the test, we took Liberty Mutual’s broader audience of those 18 and over in the general US population and focused on one market—Chicago and the surrounding area. The city had two advantages: First, and most important, Chicago is one of the country’s largest urban driving centers. Second, it has historically given a more balanced representation of the larger US population for Liberty Mutual research teams.

Within the span of two months, we developed and produced the scented print ad to be mailed directly to consumers within Chicago.

This campaign launched April 28, but the buzz has already started. This single-market campaign got picked up by the international trade press and garnered over 1 million impressions in the first month alone. A local direct mail piece targeted to 2,000 people amplified the conversation about Liberty Mutual to an international level because of creativity alone.