Case Study: How Tata AIA sold life insurance using stand-up comedians

Tata AIA Life Insurance, in collaboration with Admatazz, adopted a stand-up comedy format to address the challenges of engaging audiences with life insurance advertising. The campaign featured comedians Kenny Sebastian, Atul Khatri, and Rahul Dua in a series of ten ads designed to present the benefits of Tata AIA’s term insurance plans through relatable humour. Drawing on behavioural insights that identified a strong audience preference for stand-up comedy on digital platforms, the campaign aimed to make life insurance communication more accessible and engaging. With its low-production aesthetic and informal tone, the campaign reported a 6.7% absolute brand lift, marking a departure from traditional industry advertising practices.

Brand Introduction

Tata AIA Life Insurance is one of the insurers in the Indian private sector, offering a range of solutions spanning across life, savings, wealth and retirement to help individuals achieve their financial goals.

Objective

BFSI as a sector is a serious and heavy sector. It requires knowledge and understanding before taking any insurance or policies. TATA AIA, wanted to create truly clutter breaking communication that people will pay attention to. Along with this, it wanted to ensure that the communication was memorable.

Challenge

Life insurance advertisements in India tend to be monotonous, predictable, and overly serious. The stereotypical image of the traditional Indian life insurance agent has made people resistant to engaging with the topic. The core challenge was to get the audience to watch the ads till the end. 

The Insight and Idea

Behavior studies showed that stand-up comedy is a favored content format among target viewers across YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and OTT platforms. As per an internal brand analysis, it was revealed that the company's core audience spends significant time watching stand-up comedy online, showing a strong preference for this format.

This insight sparked an idea: why not introduce life insurance plans through stand-up comedy, making the message entertaining rather than dull? Admatazz partnered with top Indian comedians Kenny Sebastian, Atul Khatri, and Rahul Dua to connect with diverse regional audiences and built a campaign with this research as the core base.

The Execution

Comedians like Atul Khatri, Kenny Sebastian, and Rahul Dua on board for a campaign, featuring a series of 10 ads. Each ad focused on a unique selling point of the term insurance plans, ensuring it resonated with the audience and was delivered, of course, as a joke.

The teams strategically re-aligned their approach and shot the videos with a deliberately low-quality look. They embraced the humor, the occasional slip-ups, and realistic camera movements and in one ad, they even went as far as omitting the brand name from the script.

The Results

The campaign achieved success, delivering a 6.7% brand lift. This was significantly higher than the average of 2% and set new records for the brand.

Girish Kalra, Chief Marketing Officer, Tata AIA Life Insurance said, "We wanted to break free from the conventional way of advertising life insurance solutions and create something that was engaging and appealing to consumers. By adopting the stand-up comedy route, we could communicate our term insurance plan benefits in a way that was entertaining and clutter breaking. Collaborating with top comedians like Kenny Sebastian, Atul Khatri, and Rahul Dua ensured that we get the full attention of our target consumers. The campaign's 6.7% brand lift, a remarkable achievement in our category, proves that taking creative leaps, backed by strong insights, can deliver exceptional results. We will keep experimenting with engaging creative formats to create a new pathway for life insurance communication."

Yash Chandiramani, Founder and Chief Strategist, Admatazz: "As Tata AIA's creative partners, our mission was to rethink how life insurance is communicated to an audience that often finds the topic uninspiring. Thanks to the razor-sharp brief from the brand team's end, we saw an opportunity to break the mold by incorporating humor through stand-up comedy, a format that our audience naturally gravitates towards on platforms like YouTube. For this campaign, we didn’t just create ads; we created content that felt native to the platform, replicating the raw, authentic feel of real comedy videos through subtle choices in set design, camera work, and sound. This approach was essential to ensure the audience stayed engaged with the message while enjoying the content. It’s been a great collaborative effort to bring life insurance into a space where it's not typically expected, and we’re thrilled with the overwhelming response the campaign has received."