How People-Based Marketing Drives HNW Growth in a Complex Insurance Market

In a highly competitive and increasingly volatile home insurance market, PURE Insurance has achieved year-over-year growth exceeding 15%, even as many major carriers retrench or exit unprofitable markets. The company’s edge? A paid media strategy led by people-based marketing—prioritizing first-party data, smart segmentation, and control over reach and frequency to ensure media dollars drive the right message to PURE’s audience of HNW households.

Most insurers rely on broad-reach, high-frequency media strategies to capture in-market buyers. According to eMarketer, insurance industry digital ad spend is set to reach $14.03B in the US alone in 2026 – and was the fastest growing advertiser category in 2022, 2023, and 2024. 

But PURE, with its membership-based model focused on high-net-worth households, takes the opposite approach: it uses first-party data to de-risk media investments and focus only on the audiences most aligned with its offering.

This people-based strategy underpins all paid media investments and enables:

• Suppression of irrelevant impressions to reduce waste
• Advanced lookalike modeling for net-new acquisition
• Personalized, privacy-compliant targeting across platforms
• Tiered reach strategies for different customer lifecycle stages

Over the course of its media transformation, PURE Insurance has leveraged paid media as a business driver, not just a brand builder. Notable wins include:

1. 15%+ YoY Growth: Sustained new business acquisition despite challenges in property insurance underwriting nationwide.
2. Expansion into Canada: In 2024, PURE launched into Ontario with a media strategy built entirely on first-party audience modeling, not mass-market advertising.
3. Improved Efficiency: Lower cost-per-binding through progressive suppression and LTV-based optimization of audience reach, with average weekly unique reach increasing by 5.76x, or +476%, since January 2024.

Brand-Led Member Growth: Measurable increase in brand equity among high-net-worth households aligned to PURE’s values and underwriting criteria.

In PURE’s media framework, reach is intentional—not an indiscriminate pursuit of volume. The team calibrates reach and frequency using channel-specific benchmarks and member behavior data:

• High-quality TV media buying strategy is paramount: we’re not focused on the quantity of impressions, but on making an impression. This is why premium inventory is prioritized on TV devices in-home, and where we see the highest brand equity impact and direct response as measured in site activity using time decay and regression measurement.
• Reach-focused buys are tightly constrained to ensure minimum overlapping frequency and maximize reach. 
• Multi-touch testing is used to validate the optimal number of exposures 

This “premium”-centered approach balances cost control with brand resonance—especially critical within the HNW market in which PURE specializes.

The campaign ultimately drove:

• 34,000+ video applications from 197 countries
• 8.6 million website visits in 8 weeks
• Over $200 million in earned media value
• Invitations to speak at global tourism events and unmatched brand awareness for Queensland

But these results were not the product of luck or virality alone. They were the result of:

• A brilliant idea (from Cummins)
• Strategic paid execution (by Criterion Global)
• Timed placement across trusted media environments

In a world governed by algorithms, paid media offers the only real control over when, where, and how a campaign begins to scale.

For an insurer, risk is everything—and that extends to marketing. PURE’s people based marketing approach, guided by a disciplined paid media strategy, reduces marketing inefficiency, controls exposure, and builds a brand that grows as methodically as it underwrites.

By flipping the script on reach—from a race for scale to a tool for precision—Criterion Global helped PURE build a smarter media model that sets the standard for brands in regulated, high-consideration categories.