Haven Life Head of Acquisition’s Philosophy on TV?

It Powers Growth
 alking to Matt Myers, head of
customer acquisition at Haven Life,
an online life insurance innovator, one
can’t help but be reminded of the butterfly
effect. Popularized by Ray Bradbury in his
short story, A Sound of Thunder, it’s the notion
that subtle, almost imperceptible events can
make a big impact on the future.

For Haven Life, that butterfly effect moment

traces back to a conversation Myers had with
his mother when he was an undergraduate
at Temple University. In response to learning
that her son had chosen philosophy as his
major, she asked, “So how are you going to
make money?”

If she hadn’t asked that question, Myers

might have taken a very different career path.
But she did ask, and lacking a satisfactory
answer, Myers changed his major to business
administration with a focus in marketing.

Haven Life is fortunate that he did. That’s

because he is helping the company achieve a
goal that challenges so many brands today:
generating growth from the elusive
Millennial parent.
Haven Life exists to serve this cohort, which
reportedly is having 9,000 children per day.
According to the startup’s website, when
co-founder Yaron Ben-Zvi and his wife were
expecting their first child, they recognized
the need for term life insurance, but they
couldn’t find a provider that enabled them to
complete the transaction online, the way dig-
ital natives expect to be able to acquire just
about everything. The alternatives required
paperwork and weeks of time. In other words,
it was an industry ripe for disruption.

Enter Haven Life. The online life insurance

agency has pioneered selling medically-
underwritten term life insurance online.
It’s also backed and wholly owned by Mass-
Mutual, giving it access to data and resources
most direct-to-consumer (D2C) companies
would love to have.

MATT MYERS,
Head of Acquisition, Haven Life

hile starting fresh has its
advantages, building a business
in this market has had its
challenges. “We’ve had to start from scratch
with everything we do, including acquiring
customers,” Myers said. “There were no
best practices. We had to rethink a market
that has been ‘sold’ not ‘bought.’”
Like so many D2Cs, Haven Life uses
data and data science to help inform
their marketing decisions. This includes
deciding which channels to dial up or down
and building custom audiences. Fortunately,
this structure allows them to move faster
than most of their rivals, enabling a
relatively quick approach to testing,
learning and scaling.
And like so many D2C companies, growth
is Haven Life’s top objective. Today, Myers
utilizes TV advertising, social and affiliate
marketing to scale, but it took time to figure
out the right combination of channels and
spend. He experimented with over-the-top
(OTT) TV advertising but found that relying
on OTT alone didn’t reach enough potential
customers, even younger digital natives
and cord cutters. Plus, campaigns struggled
with wasted frequency.
“ We worked with our data
science team to develop
insights that would help
in targeting and utilized
Simulmedia’s Transparent
TV self-service platform
As they looked for other ways to scale, they
for the actual planning.
knew two things: whatever they did had to
leverage their customer data, and it would have
to empower them to take on rivals with much
deeper pockets. Both considerations drew them
to Simulmedia and its Transparent TV product.
“A year ago, we were trying to figure out how
we could leverage TV to fuel growth,” Myers
said. “We worked with our data science team
to develop insights that would help in targeting
and utilized Simulmedia’s Transparent TV
self-service platform for the actual planning.
We utilize TVSquared and some internal tools
for attribution and measurement. We like to
keep things in-house as much as possible.” As
a result, Myers now has the capability to do
with TV many of the things advertisers expect
from search and social.
While he wouldn’t divulge specific campaign
outcomes, he was adamant that TV drove
measurable and significant results. “When we
turn on TV, we see huge jumps in our daily
numbers at all stages of the funnel, and it’s
attributable,” Myers said.
“ We’re constantly evaluating
our TV options looking for
ways to be scrappy and
compete with the big boys
in the space without
the nine-figure budgets
others have...
oing forward, Myers plans to continue
wearing the challenger brand status
proudly. “We’re constantly evaluating our
TV options looking for ways to be scrappy and
compete with the big boys in the space without
the nine-figure budgets others have,” he said.
“We’re still evaluating precisely what that means
for 2019, but I think that means continuing to
leverage data and analytics to find the needles
in the haystacks out there instead of buying
the whole haystack.”

Reflecting on his career and learning about TV,

he has a couple of tips to offer. First, leverage
your first party data to find the areas where you
can be competitive and cost-effective and apply
that to your media buy.

And regardless of a student’s major, he recommends

getting practical experience. “My advice is to go
out, get an internship, go hands-on, and work at
a startup where you can get ownership of the
products,” he said.
Hard to argue with that philosophy.
To learn how Transparent TV can help you use
your data to buy smarter media that drives
measurable results and lets you compete
against bigger rivals, click here or give us a call
at (646) 201-5352 to schedule a consultation.
Whether you’re ready to launch your very first TV campaign or you’re looking to drive
more efficiency and performance from your existing TV strategy, Simulmedia can help.

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