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Travelers Insurance Reveals Who Actually Cares About Other People
Spoiler alert: It's not companies
Who cares about the ever-raging wildfires, the poverty, the injustices that accumulate like sand trickling over our already suffocating faces? Who has time for that anymore?
It turns out a lot of people do. Travelers Insurance’s latest work, by TBWAChiatDay New York, is a hope-brims-over manifesto about giving a damn and pitching in to help.
The work stems from CEO Alan Schnitzer’s observation that stuff is getting way too polarized. (Was a greater understatement ever made?) “Both common sense and history teach us that the best way to deal with big challenges—maybe the only way—is together,” he says in a press release, which includes distressing data: Per Vox, 6 percent of articles contain uplifting news; the other 94 percent just make us feel fear and sadness, hence the compulsion to doomscroll.
According to the ad above, though, in recent times, 563,000 people have risked their lives to fight fires; 1.5 million fed the hungry; 9.9 million delivered aid after disaster struck. By and large, 60 million Americans helped someone in need, and 200 million gave to good causes.
If nothing else, we’re soothed in the sense that we don’t have to actionably care about everything, because everything has its people. “Every day, millions of you are there to help one another. Because remarkable things happen when people care,” the ad concludes.
We appreciate that the piece resisted the temptation of answering the question “Who cares?” with “Travelers cares.” Insurance companies generally do little more than remind average Americans that if something bad happens, particularly in the realm of healthcare, their lives are about to change … and probably not for the better. Notably, one in three GoFundMe campaigns is for medical bills.
But Travelers isn’t in that kind of insurance business. It’s more about taking care of your stuff, and has a generally good reputation, at least for car insurance.
Further ads drill down on the company’s interventions in times of difficulty. These include one about a small business weathering a storm, and a woman losing her wedding ring.
These are mighty cute tales—indeed, Travelers notes that they are reenactments of true events—but you’ll forgive us if, in these times, we struggle to believe any insurance company has an incentive to behave on this folksy a level. Glad the TV lady got her ring back, though!
Angela Natividad is the European markets editor at Muse by Clio. She also writes about gaming and fashion, and whatever else she’s interested in, really. She’s based in Paris and North Italy, so if you’re local, say hi. She might eat all your food.
