— Company
DeadHappy
— Sector
Life Insurance
— Job Title
Visual Designer
— Key Achievements
Growth of customer base
Disrupt sector
Challenge industry norms
Increased performance
Increased engagement
Develop brand style & tone
About My Role
At DeadHappy, I created disruptive multi-channel campaigns designed to challenge insurance industry norms and spark conversation. Working across digital, print, and national OOH, I developed provocative creative concepts that reinforced the brand’s rebellious identity and captured attention in crowded media spaces. By combining bold messaging with performance-focused design, I delivered campaigns that not only stood out visually but also drove measurable engagement across multiple touchpoints.
The Challenge/Problem
Given the intangible nature of Life Insurance, the challenge lay in devising concepts that defied convention, and to encourage people to join a revolutionary life insurance start up.
The Solution
We developed a brand archetype with a rebellious stance, designed to disrupt the stagnant life insurance market. The goal was to capture attention, stop the endless scroll, and challenge how people think about both life insurance and mortality. Each ad was crafted to spark a strong emotional reaction, encouraging people to not only consider life insurance but also rethink the way it’s traditionally presented.
RIP vs RIP-OFF: Life Insurance with a difference
A cross-channel campaign using dark humour and honest comparisons
Instagram Post
Billboard (OOH)
Newspaper Ad
Homepage Hero
About this campaign
This campaign challenges the overpriced norms of traditional life insurance through humour, visual simplicity, and brutal honesty, while taking aim at one of the industry leaders (Royal London).
Key takeaways
- One concept, adapted seamlessly across multiple formats
- Consistent tone and messaging
- Strong visual storytelling without needing much copy
- A disruptive idea that could be extended across web, social, and traditional media
Campaign Scalability
Future campaigns could be adapted to target other competitor life insurance brands like Aviva, by simply changing the colour combinations and wording in the advert to match the competitor.
The results
The campaign broke through the noise and drove results where it mattered. With engagement up 20% and CTR reaching 0.8%, the work was directly linked to a marked increase in policy sign-ups.
The Initial Scamps
The ideas that never made it (RIP)
Before landing on the final campaign direction, I explored a series of early scamps to play with the idea of overpriced life insurance being a “rip-off”.
Un-life-insurancey ads
Some of my best performing paid adverts
The below stand out as highly effective paid advertisements deployed on Instagram and Facebook. The creative leans into dark humour, irreverence, and bold visuals to break the mould of traditional insurance advertising. The tone is cheeky, informal, and provocative, it’s designed to catch you off guard. In short, the ads are designed to be as un-life-insurancey as possible, to cut through the noise and make people pay attention to something they usually avoid.
These examples were some of the most success ads we ran, which dramatically improved engagement and click-through rates across paid social.
“Stop” Social animation
This video takes a lighthearted approach to remove the stigma and awkwardness around planning for death.
By mixing humour with simple, bold visuals, it makes life insurance feel approachable, affordable, and surprisingly easy, showing that it’s something normal people can sort without stress.