ABOUT

Unum is the top disability insurer in both the US and the UK, and are one of the UK’s leading employee benefits providers with more than 40 years’ experience. Specialising in financial protection, including Income Protection, Sick Pay Insurance, Critical Illness cover and Life insurance through the workplace, the business has aggressive plans for growth leading to 2020. As a result, the brand has recently undertaken a thorough repositioning exercise to support their ambition. Through an animated brand film, We Launch were commissioned to tell the story of this new brand positioning and embed it in the minds and hearts of the Unum employees around the UK.

Telling the story of the brand and how it lives its promise everyday through the work of each individual, we developed an internal campaign to tell the story of the brand – how its values are already being delivered and how they can continue to do so through the actions and behaviour of their teams.

Working with the existing guidelines, we worked closely with the client to create an ownable and engaging illustrative world that both embraced the current brand whilst pushing it on further. Being sensitive and respectful to the master brand was an important consideration – as we were aware that this needed to work in parallel with both the current Unum brand collateral in the UK, but also with the US business too.

We defined the overarching tone of voice, copy platform and storyboard – ensuring that all aspects of the brand story was being told. With these foundations in place, we briefed a select number of illustrators to create test character samples to go into research.

The results of the research saw us commission the Somerset based illustrator Ben O’Brien to create the master Unum universe. Each of the frames depicted different parts of the Unum service offer, and would allow us to animate the whole piece in one fluid journey.

To create the animation, we set up a production studio at the Unum UK HQ in Surrey where we interviewed the various team members to document their experiences and points of view for inclusion in the final edit. After approval of the script, we then recorded the voiceover and music to compliment the illustrated scenes.

With all assets in place, we edited the master film together – creating an empowering and uplifting campaign that would embed the values of the brand across everything they do.