• by Karl Greenberg , April 13, 2009

Nationwide Insurance has jettisoned its five-year-old "Life Comes at You Fast" campaign and brought its traditional "Nationwide is on your side" mantra to the fore in a new national push, "I am on your side." The effort launches this week with six 30-second TV spots starring Nationwide employees ranging from call-center employers to C-suite executives.

The new campaign, intended to highlight the company's personalized experience, is a far cry from the "Fast" campaign, which featured celbri-nots and wannabees like Kevin Federline, Fabio and Sanjaya Malakar of "American Idol" notoriety.

The integrated effort, via Dallas-based TM Advertising, features testimonial ads shot by Academy Award-winning director Errol Morris whose forte is unadorned, unscripted revelations, and who also shot the recent campaign for Kimberly-Clark's Depend brand.

In the TV spots, employees talk about how they have helped people by offering humanitarian relief following a natural disaster, being a human voice at a call center and being an aid to people in need.

One ad shows an insurance adjuster, Terry Medley, explaining that policyholders deal with insurance companies as if "they are getting ready for a prize fight. They've got their hands all taped up and their gloves on," he says. "They think it's going to be a big fight. The best thing about this experience, going out to check on a policy claim, is telling the client: 'I hope you never have to see me again.'" The ads finish with the employees saying their names and "I'm on your side."

Steven Schreibman, vice president of advertising and brand management for the Columbus, Ohio-based company, says the new work is intended to bring a message of personalized customer experience to light. "And who better to illustrate that than our associates, in very real way," he says. "Because [director] Morris has got such great skill at eliciting stories, we thought he would be ideal."

The company auditioned over 100 employees, and did video interviews of 20, with six initially featured in the campaign. "We are packaging longer-form stories on our Web site," says Schreibman. "We are being gutsy, putting stuff out there that many companies have been very hesitant to do: it's about transparency and engendering more trust."

Schreibman says that he never would have considered doing such a campaign a year ago, in no small part because of the risk such creative approaches carry of being treacly and insincere. "They tend to be very cliché, very hackneyed and not believable. I wanted to do something much more compelling and breathtaking, with more unexpected stories; you don't hear a company putting ads online, in TV and print, talking about things like how we handle customer complaints ... everyone has a complaint department but who talks about it?"

He says the campaign isn't about adjusting to address economic realities and consumer sentiment. "As the viewer, I don't want to be barraged with 'woe is you'; the solution for us was finding the best creative platform for demonstrating what Nationwide is about."