Farmers Insurance Punches Above Its Media Spend With A Concentrated Out-of-Home Buy

This summer, Farmers Insurance relaunched its brand with a color chosen to stand out from the rest of the insurance category. Honesty Is Our Policy, created with Dentsu Creative, gave the insurer an all-pink identity and new words for its long-running jingle. The campaign went live on July 13 across broadcast, digital, social, out-of-home, and experiential, with the out-of-home buy covering the insurer's priority markets. One of those billboards reads "No surprises, no plot twists, no gotchas" in bold type on the new pink. A format that allows a background and a few carefully-chosen words became the tightest test of whether the new identity could carry a message on its own.

Eleanor Solomon is Head of Creative at Farmers Insurance, where she owns creative execution across advertising, social media, sponsorship activation, and customer communications. She joined the insurer in late 2025 after more than a decade in client leadership roles at agencies including Ogilvy and mcgarrybowen. Andres Arlia is Executive Creative Director at Dentsu Creative, the agency of record for Farmers, where he has led creative work since 2024 following roles at Razorfish and Leo Burnett. Solomon set the channel strategy behind the relaunch, and Arlia's team built the creative the billboards carried.

"We don't spend a billion dollars a year like some of our competitors in media, and that's okay. We believe that's maybe an underdog advantage we have," says Solomon. Insurance is one of the heaviest advertising categories in the United States, and the largest carriers buy enough weight to stay in front of consumers on volume alone. Working with a smaller media budget, Farmers needed to introduce both an unfamiliar color and new message. Each placement had to earn its attention on one exposure.

Punching above the spend

In the relaunch plan, out-of-home sat alongside linear, connected TV, and online video. Farmers hadn't run a brand relaunch recently enough for anyone on the team to know how billboards would perform against a new visual identity, so the buy doubled as an experiment. "I can't say that it was the driver," notes Solomon. "It was a really important piece for us that we also candidly wanted to test out."

To choose a new color, Farmers mapped where competitors sat on the color wheel, narrowed the field to two or three colors it could own, and ran roughly three rounds of research combining focus groups with behavioral testing online. The results showed pink lifting unaided awareness for a brand that needed exactly that. "Pink has the potential to be maybe polarizing for certain audiences, and you're never going to make every single person happy," adds Solomon. "But what was really important is that we didn't see it detract from anything."

A new color only becomes recognizable after people have seen it repeatedly, and Farmers needed that to happen fast across whole markets. Boards reach commuters and pedestrians on routes they travel every day, without asking them to opt in. Arlia treats that as the channel's main advantage. "Out-of-home is unavoidable," says Arlia. "I may be able to avoid something in my scroll, but when I'm walking down the street or taking a bus, it's unavoidable for me to just be present and be there and see that piece of advertising."

The format also worked within Farmers' budget constraints. A billboard delivers the same audience to every advertiser who buys it, because the location determines the reach. Farmers bought fewer markets and got the same coverage inside each one. "We needed to figure out how we punch above our weight, and I think out-of-home helps us do that," explains Solomon. "It became a key channel and placement for us, especially across our priority DMAs."

Nowhere to hide

A thirty-second television spot can build an idea with music, actors, and a sequence of shots. A billboard has a background, a line, and one chance to be read. For a brand relaunch about transparency, Arlia counted those limits as an asset. "There's something very beautiful about a big out-of-home where all you have is a background and type, because there is absolutely nowhere to hide in that execution," notes Arlia. "You're just very straightforward, very simple, very clear, and obviously very transparent."

Farmers put every possible line through the same test, in paid and owned channels alike. Billboards were the hardest place to pass it, since a driver gets one look and no second chance to reread. "That was one of the filters that we consistently were coming back to. Is it simple? Is it straightforward?" says Solomon. "You get it the second you read it. You don't have to sit there and think, 'Oh, I know what they mean.'"

The color and the copy do different jobs on a Farmers billboard. A bright background gets a passerby to look, and the words are what they read once they do. The pink was new at launch, so the copy carried more weight than it would on a palette people already knew. "Yes, the background's this bright pink. You can't miss it," adds Solomon. "But our big, bold type is also what it's saying is the most important piece of it, of course."

No surprises, no gotchas

Solomon points to the moment insurance goes wrong for a customer, when someone files a claim and learns that the coverage they expected was optional all along. Farmers built a billboard line around that experience. "When we think of that billboard line of 'no surprises, no plot twists, no gotchas', that is exactly what we're talking about," explains Solomon. "We lay it out for you in plain language, easy to understand what is covered, what is not covered."

Farmers' reset strategy only works if enough people register it in the same period. Out-of-home delivered that at the start of the campaign, ahead of the channels that build familiarity more slowly. "There's something very interesting about that when you want to relaunch, doing out of home," concludes Arlia. "Obviously when you're introducing a very big change, which is a brand color at the same time, it's a very big way, an easy and quick way to say pink and honest."