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A new advertising campaign featuring actor Dennis Quaid seeks to position Esurance Insurance Co. and its affiliates in a new way just as the Allstate Corp. subsidiaries have started to show the sort of momentum in certain key measures of growth to which management had previously alluded.
The "surprisingly painless" ads, which began appearing across a range of media Aug. 20, highlight the ease of doing business with the direct-to-consumer writer when it comes to everything from applying for a new policy to filing a claim. Esurance had long used the tagline "insurance for the modern world" in its advertising, which serves as a key driver of business growth among direct personal lines companies.
Allstate began to ramp up the relative amounts it had been spending on Esurance-brand advertising in recent quarters as financial results continued to show improvement. The contribution of advertising costs to the expense ratio for the Esurance brand bottomed at 6.7 points in the fourth quarter of 2017, then increased to 8.1 points in the first quarter of 2018 and 8.6 points in the second quarter.
Since Allstate acquired Esurance in the fourth quarter of 2011,...