1. For New York Life, Guarantees
Matter Both Online and Offline
AN INTERVIEW WITH:
Ken Hittel
Vice President, Corporate Internet, New York Life
Insurance Company
December 06, 2010
Ken Hittel joined New York Life in 1989. In his two decades with the insurance
provider, Hittel has spearheaded the development and maintenance of the
employee intranet and the public-facing NewYorkLife.com site. He also leads
New York Life’s social media and mobility programs. Hittel spoke to eMarketer’s
Lauren McKay about how the company uses online marketing tactics to extend
its role as a trusted provider of premium insurance products.
eMarketer: At New York Life, how important is the web as a marketing tool?
Ken Hittel: It becomes more and more important every year. New York Life has
always really believed in the web. We started creating a website back in 1995
and launched in 1996. We’ve grown to where my team will have 23 people next
year. There has always been support from the executive suite, the previous
CEO, Sy Sternberg and our current CEO, Ted Mathas. I report to the senior
advisor to the CEO, so there is a very strong recognition within the company of
just how important the web is.
eMarketer: How is this high level of importance reflected in your overall
marketing budget?
“The relative percentage of marketing dollars
spent on online has increased over the years, and
will continue to increase.”

2. Hittel: I can fairly confidently state that the relative percentage of marketing
dollars spent on online has increased over the years, and will continue to
increase.
eMarketer: How do you see web-based marketing efforts fitting into your
business model?
eMarketer: We do not market directly to consumers. We market through our
agents. What NewYorkLife.com is trying to sell is an appointment with a New
York Life agent. For years, people have assumed, with some justification, that
the internet cuts the agent out of the deal. Our strategy has always been to
reintermediate, or bring the agent back into the deal. We’ve been very
successful at that.
We are by far the number one sales lead generator within the company. We
have a dedicated budget that we get from the CEO to do lead generation
online.
We have to justify our results each year, especially if we want to ask for more
money. Certainly, for the past four years, I’ve asked for more money, and I’ve
been able to justify it based on our lead generation results and agent sales.
eMarketer: How does the online channel enable agents to better connect with
consumers online?
“A great deal of what we do online serves as a
resource for our agents.”
Hittel: A great deal of what we do online serves as a resource for our agents,
who are always able to point their prospects and clients to our web properties.
For instance, New York Life is very successful in what we internally call
“cultural” or ethnic markets. We’re usually either number-one or number-two in
the Chinese-American, Korean-American, Vietnamese-American and Hispanic
markets. We have dedicated in-language sites for those markets. So, our
agents who prospect in those segments use those websites to gain credibility
and show just how important New York Life thinks those markets are.
eMarketer: Are there certain demographic segments with which online tactics
resonate more?
Hittel: The high-income demographic is very interesting. We sell a product
called Guaranteed Lifetime Income that is essentially an income annuity meant
for people who are usually quite senior in age—the average age is 70. It is
designed to provide a guaranteed income stream for as long as the
policyholders live. We have produced more than 250 sales of that product
online through our agents with an average premium of $238,000. Offline with
no internet involvement, the average sale is $99,000. So, if an agent makes a
sale from an internet lead, it’s likely going to be more than two times the
amount of the premium.
So there is effectively a market of 70-year-olds using the internet to research
financial products. They research long and hard and eventually they come to
NewYorkLife.com or respond to one of our pay-per-click campaigns. They give

3. us their name, their address, their phone number, the best time to call—and
they end up writing us a fairly substantial check.
eMarketer: What is the reason for that?
Hittel: This happens with people who understand right off the bat that New
York Life is a premium provider. People don’t normally come to us looking for
the lowest cost term life product. They’re not going to get it from us. People
who come to us know that they want the services of a financial professional.
They are usually willing to pay a premium for the brand and they’re happy with
that. They trust us. They know that we are safe and secure. From that
perspective it’s not surprising that most of the sales from online leads are for
our permanent life insurance products.
eMarketer: How have insurance aggregator and price comparison websites
affected your online marketing strategy?
Hittel: If you do a search for “life insurance” on Google, you will certainly see
New York Life come up in the organic results, but also in the pay-per-click
results. You might also see AccuQuote, SelectQuote, IntelliQuote, NetQuote,
you name it, in the pay-per-click results. Name your aggregator; they’re pretty
much all going to be there.
Google may not necessarily be the best search engine, but really it’s the best
reputation management system. All the aggregators can, effectively, buy
themselves credibility to appear on the same level as New York Life or
Prudential or a MetLife. That’s why it’s all the more necessary for us to bring
our brand attributes and our value proposition of the professional agent
experience to the fore. The aggregators have basically framed the life
insurance purchase in terms of price. That’s not a battle that we can or even try
to win.
eMarketer: How has New York Life extended the brand across new channels
such as social media?
“We’re not just a gold-domed building on Madison
Avenue. We’re real people with real personalities.”
Hittel: We have been most interested in showing the “human side” of New York
Life. We’re not just a gold-domed building on Madison Avenue. We’re real
people with real personalities.
When we launched our Twitter channel, we did it in conjunction with our
company’s promotion of the Big East men’s and women’s basketball
championship. The channel launch wasn’t about life insurance. Instead we
designed it to showcase the seven New York Life individuals who were at the
games, tweeting in their own voices.
On our Facebook page, we joined with a company called Educated Investor to
offer basic financial education. Consumers can take quizzes and peruse a
variety of financial education materials. It’s basic information, like how to budget
your money. We’re not trying to hit people over the head with life insurance.

4. eMarketer: How have agents responded to social networks?
“Our agents are by nature social networkers.
They make their livings by meeting people and
building up their social circles.”
Hittel: Our agents are by nature social networkers. They make their livings by
meeting people and building up their social circles. It was no surprise to us that
so many of our agents just naturally gravitated toward online social networking.
That was the major stimulus behind realizing that, as a corporation, we had to
be there, too.
eMarketer: Any goals to use social media for more product marketing?
Hittel: Without a doubt. But first, in social media you’ve got to establish who
you are. That is what we’re trying to do at this point. Ultimately, if we can show
we are genuine, people will trust us. When the time comes to deal with a life
insurance company, if they trust us, they’ll be willing to talk to us.
eMarketer: What strides has New York Life taken in mobile?
“We’ve instituted click-to-call functionality, so you
can call an agent right from the agent locator on
your phone.”
Hittel: We created our first mobile site back in 2007 as a stripped-down version
of NewYorkLife.com. It’s mostly an action-oriented type of site and has turned
into a very effective lead generator. We’ve instituted click-to-call functionality,
so you can call an agent right from the agent locator on your phone.
There are service-oriented capabilities, as well. About two months ago, we
launched our Virtual Service Center, which is the mobile version of our online
customer self-service. That now is available to all of our policyholders and
contract holders.
eMarketer: Have you seen an increase in demand from consumers who want
to use their mobile devices for quotes and agent information?
Hittel: It just keeps growing and growing. In early 2010 we launched a microsite
called GuaranteesMatter.com, which was built entirely in Abobe Flash. Because
some devices, such as the Apple iPhone, do not support Flash, our content
was unable to be viewed on such mobile phones. Frankly, we weren’t really
thinking about mobility when we launched this site. But with our first month’s
traffic report, we noticed that a few hundred people had tried to access the site
via mobile, and that number kept growing each month. So, during the
summertime, we produced a stripped-down version of the
GuaranteesMatter.com site that works on all mobile devices.
eMarketer: Guarantees Matter recently hosted a video contest. Can you
share details of that campaign?

5. Hittel: Our CEO had the idea for a video contest on the Guarantees Matter
site. Just before launching the microsite, he said, “Wouldn’t it be neat if we
could produce a YouTube video that would show the difference between
promises people make and very casually throw out, and the guarantees that
New York Life makes and keeps?”
We decided to crowdsource a video and we are committed to pay $7,500 for
the winning entry. We also retained the rights to buy any of the other videos
that we like. We wrote a creative brief with Poptent with the goal of producing a
commercial that will live within the social media world—to drive people to
Guarantees Matter.
eMarketer: What new metrics have you added to keep on top of the changing
online landscape?
“A lot of the old metrics still are valuable.”
Hittel: I wish I could say that we’re just replacing old metrics with new ones, but
a lot of the old metrics still are valuable. We still want to know how many people
visit our Facebook page. How many page views do we get on an average visit?
Those old statistics still remain relevant.
But now, on Facebook for instance, we’re looking at engagement metrics. What
are people doing on our Facebook page? Because if they’re not doing
anything on the page, then they’re not likely to come back, and they’re certainly
not likely to form any sort of attachment to us. How many people “Like” us, as a
company? How many people “Like” particular posts that we put up on our wall?
How many people are sharing those posts? How many people are commenting
on those posts?
On Twitter, it’s mostly the same. You’re looking at how many people are willing
to follow you. Retweets have become an important statistic. We also are at the
beginning of instituting social media monitoring tools from Radian6 and Nielsen
BuzzMetrics. We want to monitor and know, for example, where we should be
reaching influencers.
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