Why New York Life shifted its marketing spend from linear ads to sponsorships

About a year ago, New York Life called an audible on its sports marketing.

The insurance and financial services brand wasn’t new to the sports sponsorship space, having experience with college basketball and understanding the power of a live sports audience, but CMO Amy Hu said she wanted to shift the focus from ads to more ambitious storytelling and experiences.

“We wanted to move away from spots and dots,” Hu told Marketing Brew. “It’s not just about the media coverage. We really wanted to use sports marketing as a metaphor for how we do business.”

Part of the reason for the pivot is that audiences have become “way too savvy to just take a commercial at face value,” Hu said. So New York Life inked deals with both Major League Baseball and the US Soccer Federation, opening the door for the company to engage audiences down to the youth and local levels. Hu said she hopes the efforts will help New York Life stand out in a crowded field.

Metaphorically speaking

Insurance and financial services companies like State Farm and MassMutual have long been in the sports sponsorship game, perhaps because sports sponsorships can provide an apt metaphor for communicating an otherwise complicated offering: Having a financial advisor is like having “a coach on your side,” Hu said.

Sports sponsorships also offer brands broad reach across many demographics, including some that have been historically underserved by financial institutions, like women. It’s a group that New York Life in particular is hoping to reach through its partnerships with US Soccer, Hu said, along with getting access to a “younger, more demographically diverse” audience, she said. The deal also presents an opportunity to tell brand stories tied to the US Women’s National Team, which has for years been a dominant force in international soccer.

Partnering with MLB was appealing for an altogether different reason. “When we met with them, we felt very kindred to them,” Hu said. “They’re a 140-year-old company trying to transform, revitalize. We’re a 180-year-old company trying to do the same thing.”

MLB may be getting up there in years, but the organization knows its way around modern marketing technology like data clean rooms, which was a plus for the New York Life team, Hu said. Ultimately, the company saw merit in working with both US Soccer and MLB.

“We couldn’t choose, so we bought both,” she said.

New York Life announced multiyear deals with both organizations last February, essentially reallocating its linear ad budget to sponsorships, streaming, and OTT, Hu said. It’s a move that she said has already paid off.

“Linear was not as effective for us,” she said. “This is proving already, in year one, to be a much more effective spend,” with brand sentiment, positive buzz, and earned media mentions trending up after the first year of the partnerships.

Fountain of youth

Both deals come with traditional sponsorship assets like official partner designations and opportunities to activate at community events, but they also both involve youth sports like Little League, which is seeing growth in big brand sponsorships. New York Life is using the youth sports connection in multiple ways, including leveraging its 12,000 agents to serve as community brand ambassadors and build brand connections at the local level.

“We have 12,000 brand ambassadors out there, and a lot of them are Little League coaches,” Hu said. “A lot of them have kids who play soccer. So we’re building these local community programs that will extend the storytelling, the fan experience, into a local area.”

Last spring, New York Life was the presenting sponsor of the Little League Community Heroes recognition program, which honors local volunteers, and holds the same title this year. With US Soccer, the company’s work has so far been more focused on the USWNT side, like supporting the international SheBelieves Cup, but Hu said “there’s more to come” in youth soccer soon. New York Life is the presenting sponsor of this summer’s US Youth Soccer Championships, which it also presented last year.

“The brand advertising is just a nice halo, but at the end of the day, everything’s local, and we have those 12,000 agents, and our agents are our best brand ambassadors,” she said. “They are literally in their community. So, ‘How do we unleash that?’ is really what we’re working on this year.”