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Company: Clarity, New York, NY
Company Description: Clarity is a global integrated communications agency focused on telling the stories of the brands that are driving change through technology. Serving clients ranging from seed-funded startups to industry titans, Clarity brings together teams of experts who solve communications challenges and drive real business results using earned, paid and owned strategies.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Financial Services & Investor Relations
 Nomination Title: ZESTY.AI: RE-SHAPING THE INSURANCE INDUSTRY
- Optional: Reference any attachments of supporting materials throughout this nomination and how they provide evidence of the claims you have made in this nomination (up to 250 words):
- Which will you submit for this nomination, a video of up to five (5) minutes in length about the nominated PR campaign or program, or written answers to the questions? (Choose one):
Written answers to the questions
- If you are submitting a video of up to five (5) minutes in length, provide the URL of the nominated video here, OR attach it to your entry via the "Add Attachments, Videos, or Links to This Entry" link above, through which you may also upload a copy of your video.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this first question: Specify the date on which this campaign or program was launched:
May 2021
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this second question: Describe the genesis of the nominated campaign or program: the reasons it was initiated, the challenges it was created to address, the problems it was developed to solve, etc. (up to 250 words):
Total 204 words used.
Worth an estimated $1.28 trillion, the US insurance sector has been slower than other industries to embrace technology-driven change. But this has a negative impact on millions of premium holders, and in particular homeowners in those parts of the country affected by climate events, such as hurricanes, hail storms and, increasingly, wildfire. Insurance carriers calculate premiums and may deny coverage, based on out-of-date maps, and zip code sized parcels of land that fail to take account of street-by-street variations, let alone measures that individual property owners may take to mitigate risk. ENTER: Zesty.ai, a tech startup that uses Artificial Intelligence to provide property-level analytics, enabling insurance carriers to calculate premiums more accurately, and home owners to reduce those premiums by taking appropriate preventative measures.
Zesty.ai had to motivate the notoriously slow-moving insurance industry to adopt this new technology, and do so quickly. With limited marketing resources at his disposal, Zesty.ai came to recognize that public relations would play a key role in raising awareness of the underlying issue, and open the door not just to the insurance carriers he needed to adopt Zesty.ai technology, but to the investment community who would enable them to invest further in new solutions.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this third question: Describe the development of the campaign or program: the planning process, the goal setting, the creative and media development, the scheduling, etc. (up to 250 words):
Total 250 words used.
The first climate risk model that Zesty.ai launched was Z-FIRE, an AI-driven scoring model that provides neighborhood-level and property-specific wildfire risk scores. And with wildfires in the Western States becoming a staple of the summer months, it was a strategic no-brainer to make this the focal point of our program, and our messaging.
It’s not that simple. There were a number of sensitivities to navigate:
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Don’t bite the hand that feeds: Zesty.ai exists because the insurance industry had a problem without a solution, but in our messaging and communication we could not be seen too critical; we needed to win over insurance carriers and any suggestion that we were insulting them would be a surefire way of ensuring that didn’t happen
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Don’t be an ambulance chaser: Wildfires are deadly. They kill thousands of people each year, injure thousands more and leave many more homeless, as well as doing untold damage to property. So while wildfire season provided a natural ‘hook’, we were extremely sensitive to any accusation that we were taking advantage of people’s misery for the purposes of pursuing commercial interests.
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Beware “Climate Change”: The evidence that climate change is real, and that the effects are being felt today, is irrefutable. But we had to take into account that our words directly reflect on insurance carriers, who have a diverse customer base. We carefully use the term "climate risk" because it ties our product to a problem that customers of insurance experience, not to the global problem.
- If you are providing written answers for your submission, you must provide an answer to this fourth question: Outline the activities and concrete results of this campaign or program since the beginning of 2020. Even if your initiative started before 2020, limit your response to activities and results since the beginning of 2020 only (up to 250 words):
Total 249 words used.
As we approached wildfire season 2021, we used data from the past decade to make informed predictions about what damage the summer’s sadly inevitable fires would inflict.
We used this data to negotiate briefings with insurance trade, business, and technology media, providing them with robust data to inform features, while also acknowledging the challenges faced by individual homeowners, caused by the ‘blunt instrument’ of the insurance industry’s math-based models, as distinct from the AI-led property-level analysis provided by Zesty.ai.
Then a piece of good fortune fell into our lap… In late Spring 2021, Farmers Insurance Group agreed to announce it had incorporated Zesty.ai technology, enabling them to offer fire insurance to thousands of Californians who would otherwise be denied coverage. With the agreement of Farmers, we negotiated an exclusive feature with the Wall Street Journal. This feature alone provided Zesty.ai with the visibility and the credibility need to open doors not just with other insurance carriers, who did not want to be left behind, but also with a fresh clutch of investors. The Clarity team’s single-minded focus on telling a positive technology story, while navigating a season of climate-driven disasters, not only enabled Zesty.ai to emerge as one of the hot ‘insurtech firms to watch’, but also delivered genuine commercial impacts. Overall results included:
- 40 articles in target media from May-September
- 100% of coverage includes key messaging. Many were standalone features
- 30k+ homes previously deemed too high risk now eligible for coverage (according to Farmers)
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