In a year characterised by tariff-related uncertainty and geopolitical instability, a large number of advertisers have looked to digital and social channels in pursuit of shorter-term returns on their ad investments. But even in this period of economic turbulence, there are plenty of brands looking for longer-term growth, and still discovering or rediscovering the power of TV advertising.
And as marketing strategies go, it doesn’t get much longer-term than Shepherds Friendly, a UK insurance company founded in 1826. While TV advertising was unavailable to the business for the first century of its existence, Shepherds Friendly waited until this year to run its first TV campaign, as the financial mutual seeks to ensure sustainable growth for the next hundred years.
Despite its age, Shepherds Friendly was primarily invested in performance-led channels over the past few years, including paid social and search advertising. But after a significant period of growth, reaching 150,000 active policies in January, the firm looked to build a brand funnel and marketing plan based on member insight and market data.
“That led us to a place where we knew that we needed to run a wider brand-specific campaign that doesn’t just focus on those performance-based marketing channels,” Zac Chetwynd, Head of Marketing at Shepherds Friendly, tells VideoWeek. “And TV is probably one of the most important channels out of the brand-building media that exist. It’s probably the gold standard in terms of a channel that allows you to build reach, but also gives you that leverage to tell a brand story through video in a way that other performance-led channels can’t.”
Hitting targets
The strategy meant not just rerouting performance budgets into brand-building channels (which also include out-of-home activations), but bringing additional investment for this new piece of the marketing plan. However, Chetwynd notes that broadcasters’ own investments into their advertising products have lowered the cost of entry for new-to-TV brands, with Sky sharing tools with the brand and its agency partner TrunkBBI. The company used Sky AdSmart to target segments built on Experian data that aligned with its own target audience, while also enabling regional targeting and measurement.
“What we can essentially do is put more of our brand advertising budget into a specific region, and then track the success specifically in that region,” comments Chetwynd. “That then gives us the data that we need in the future to say, we know we’re able to increase our brand awareness from X to Y in the South East region, and if we wanted to do that in the North West as well, then we know what we would need to invest in the future in that specific region.”
That capacity for advanced audience targeting was also key for another insurance company, Allianz, which revamped its TV strategy in 2025. Ten years ago the UK side of the business was heavily invested in TV, before pivoting away from personal insurance into commercial lines, and shifting from TV ads into sponsorship of the Olympic and Paralympic Games on Channel 4. But now the company has returned to personal lines, and has recalibrated its TV strategy to promote its consumer-facing products.
“In a sense we’ve returned to TV, and in another sense we’ve never been away,” says Carolyn Rich, Director of Brand at Allianz UK. In any case, much has changed in the intervening decade; Rich notes that advertisers have generally shifted to focus on driving consumers towards sales, while the media landscape has undergone significant fragmentation.
With WPP’s Mindshare handling the company’s media buying, that fragmentation is reflected in Allianz’s current marketing mix, which spans linear TV, BVOD, SVOD, radio, digital radio, display, YouTube, PPC and social. Rich explains that TV plays a core role in building trust and awareness, while the brand is also measuring day-to-day quotes and sales as the campaign goes on.
“Allianz is a massive global brand, but it’s been less known in the UK in comparison to our competitors, because we’ve been in the commercial space for a while,” comments Rich. “TV is really important for us in terms of driving trust as well; we know that if your ads get seen on TV, people ultimately trust you. TV is also important for pushing people into the top of the funnel, so it’s always quite a key part of our mix, because it gives us that that reach. And then the performance marketing further down the funnel is what converts people, so that’s where we’re using social, display and PPC.”
Measuring success
That said, TV can also drive more performance-based metrics, as second-hand fashion marketplace Vinted has discovered. The e-commerce company started advertising on TV in 2017, and has found over the years that TV is particularly effective for converting customers to download the Vinted app.
Annie Masciavè, Head of Creative Production at Vinted, says this almost seems counter-intuitive, as many tech companies “seem to have more luck with digital than TV.” She adds that TV processes tend to be “a bit more long-winded” than digital channels, with red tape causing friction for some younger brands. But Vinted has used TV for functional ads that explain how to download and use the app, and has found TV effective for this approach.
“It seems a little bit of an anomaly,” comments Masciavè. “I’ve always worked digital-first, so when I came here, I was like, why are they doing TV? But we seem to be able to get this entry point with a mix of both TV and digital content.”
Part of the reason for this apparent anomaly is that Vinted is used by a wider demographic base than some digital or fashion brands, so the broad reach of TV fits the company better than it might for other companies in the space.
“I think if we were more focused specifically on Gen Z, we would focus much more on digital,” says Masciavè. “But our target audience is the broadest it can be from an age point of view, including both men and women. So we need to use channels that are used by everyone, and that’s why, for example, we can speak to a lot of Boomers and Gen X through TV.”
And Shepherds Friendly has also seen strong results from its first foray into TV, both in increased website traffic since launching the ads, and uplift in brand awareness in the regions targeted by the campaign. The brand targeted the South East (excluding London) most heavily, as the company’s brand tracking study showed the region to have the lowest level of brand awareness. The firm then ran another brand tracking study post-campaign, and found the South East now has the highest level of brand awareness.
Zac Chetwynd says this spells promising early signs on the TV front for the 200-year-old company. “There are really good indicators that the TV campaign is having a positive impact from an awareness perspective.”
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