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How to Reach Millennials on TV with Haven Life

Mary Grace Scully
Mary Grace Scully
Published: Jul. 29, 2019

In our most recent episode of Simulmedia Live, Matt Myers, Haven Life’s Head of Customer Acquisition, joined us to talk about how Haven Life finds and acquires millennials via television advertising. Haven Life is a direct-to-consumer online insurance company backed by MassMutual. This backing provides Haven Life with over 100 years of customer data to inform their media and creative strategy, among other topics.

If you missed the full livestream, we’ve got you covered. Here are highlights of the main takeaways of the discussion.

Creating a lookalike audience for TV advertising

Myers explains the process behind creating a lookalike audience, beginning with a customer file, then appending attributes to enrich the file.


Defining a custom target audience for targeted TV advertising

Defining and locating these custom targets is a team effort made possible by years of recorded customer information and third party vendors.


Finding your target audience across linear TV and connected TV

Myers dispels the myth that everyone is “cord-cutting.” Instead he introduces another term - “cord-trimming” - to describe TV viewers that stream on over-the-top (OTT) platforms in addition to linear TV advertising, without replacing it.


Connecting marketing and data science teams for TV advertising optimization

Haven Life’s marketing team uses data and data scientists to optimize for future campaigns. Their interwoven relationship with data science allows Haven Life to receive back-end campaign insights that makes future campaigns more effective.


It’s difficult for start-ups to compete against insurance companies with large brand recognition known for characters like “Flo” and slogans like, “Are you in good hands?”. Myers says Haven Life has learned how to differentiate itself from the big names by taking a targeted approach to punch above their weight on every channel they’re advertising on. They know they don’t have a comparable budget so they place ads in specific spots on TV and digital where their emphatic message is more likely to resonate with the viewer.

Myers advises those interested in advertising on linear TV not to let creative production or steep budgets deter them from giving it a try. Instead, they need to test, learn, and scale.


Lastly, Myers candidly says it can take time to discover what works best for your brand, and to not allow misconceptions of minimum budgets on TV halt you from spreading your message.