Sentry Insurance
A different view of risk
Only 32% brand awareness: Roughly two-thirds of the audience didn’t know Sentry.
The need
A clearer reason to remember Sentry.
Sentry wasn’t breaking through with enough brokers and business decision-makers. Awareness alone wouldn’t move consideration. The greater opportunity was salience: making Sentry not just KNOWN, but KNOWN FOR SOMETHING.
The Category Barrier:
The category is full of credible, but familiar promises.
Business insurers tend to make the same claims: expertise, partnership, protection and trust. Sentry could credibly claim all four. It needed a more memorable point of view to make those strengths matter.
The Audience Insight:
Uncertainty makes risk feel bigger.
Business decision-makers are constantly running scenarios: What are we missing? If something happens, will our coverage hold up? Confidence comes from understanding, and from having a partner willing to look closer, ask better questions and stay with complexity until it becomes clear.
The Strategic Promise:
Sentry ensures you’re covered completely by understanding your business deeply.
Sentry’s difference was taking the time to understand each business, its risks and the gray areas others might overlook. We explored how that advantage could become something audiences could immediately see, feel and remember.
PLATFORM 01
Tending To Your Risk
BELIEF:
Risk doesn’t need to be fought.
The insurance category often portrays risk as an enemy, something to avoid, eliminate or overpower. But risk is an inherent part of running a business. When it’s understood and properly cared for, it becomes something you can plan for.
CENTRAL IDEA:
We tend to risk. Because when you care enough to understand risk, it stops being a threat and starts becoming part of the plan.
TENDING TO YOUR RISK: ANTHEM
A more human perspective on risk.
The anthem established the platform’s broader worldview through familiar moments of inattention: a puppy beside a chewed-up couch, a child with a newly decorated wall, and a car whose warning signs had been ignored.
The situations were grounded and recognizable, showing that risk doesn’t always require force. It requires attention, understanding and the right guidance.
Leave something alone too long, and it finds its own way of acting out.
Give it no boundaries, and it writes its own rules.
Ignore the warning signs, and you’ll end up stuck.
The anthem established the platform’s broader point of view:
When you know risk inside and out, you take away its power.
Tender Loving Coverage translated that belief into a distinctive launch system designed to build recognition.
Launch expression
Tender Loving Coverage
For the proposed launch, Tender Loving Coverage gave abstract business risks a tangible form: fuzzy blue characters that were particular, unpredictable and occasionally troublesome, but never inherently threatening.
Designed as a distinctive Sentry asset, they made invisible risks recognizable and could expand across industries without appearing in every piece of communication.
Each story placed the creatures inside a real business environment, where their behavior represented a specific risk and a calm Sentry expert helped guide it back under control.
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(:30 Script) – We open on a cluttered retail stockroom. Three tiny, furry monsters zip in and out of frame. Each one moving with cartoonish speed and gleeful disregard.
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One yanks the plug on a walk-in freezer. One builds a teetering tower of bleach bottles like it’s a carnival game. One cannonballs into a pile of cardboard boxes. A manager walks in, freezes. Then slowly places his hands on his head in silent, exhausted horror.
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Enter the Sentry rep. Calm. Unfazed. They kneel and begin laying down brightly colored floor tape, affixing inventory labels, and posting a tidy guideline chart. The monsters freeze. Look at the new system. Then, in perfect unison, begin cleaning, stacking, and sorting with military precision.
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VO: Some business risks don’t mean to create a mess. They just need structure, understanding, and a little TLC. That’s the difference Sentry can make.
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We open on a serene factory floor. A lone monster sits perched beside a large, humming metalworking machine. The monster is batting at a pair of loose bolts, amused by the satisfying clang they make each time they rattle. The machine shudders slightly. Footsteps approach. The monster freezes.
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A Sentry rep and the business owner come into frame, mid-convo. The rep’s eyes drift toward the machine. SENTRY REP: “That’s not factory spec, is it?” OWNER: “Nope. We customized it last year.”
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The rep kneels to inspect and points out the loose bolts to the owner, who kneels as well and tightens the bolts with a small wrench. The monster sighs — a little disappointed the game is over. The Sentry rep extends a hand to the monster, gently says, “come on,” and they walk away together.
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VO: Some business risks don’t mean to shake things up. They just need attention, understanding, and a little TLC. That’s the difference Sentry can make.
Beyond the Campaign
The platform extended naturally into two established Sentry experiences—bringing its care-over-force philosophy to both an external partnership and the people responsible for delivering it.
Golf Partnership
Care Is a Competitive Advantage
In golf, as in business, the people who care most often see what others miss. Through Sentry’s existing golf partnership, the platform could spotlight the players, caddies and decisions shaped by close attention to every detail.
Content and on-site experiences would celebrate the focus, preparation and steady guidance that turn risk into opportunity—on the course and in business.
Sentry Success Week
Tenders of the Year
For Sentry’s internal employee event, the platform could recognize the people who caught an early signal, asked the right question or guided a risk in a better direction before it became a larger problem.
Employee profiles would share the risk they identified, how they caught it, what they helped prevent and their personal philosophy for providing a little TLC.
PLATFORM 02
The Anti-Assumption Co.
BELIEF
Assumptions are where risks hide.
What appears settled can conceal gaps, overlooked details and new opportunities. Sentry’s expertise gives it the confidence to look again—and the curiosity to ask the questions that reveal what others miss.
CENTRAL IDEA
See what others miss.
By examining the assumptions surrounding a business, Sentry can uncover the risks, gaps and opportunities that might otherwise remain unseen.
Sentry blue used to reveal more.
The visual system gave Sentry’s blue an active role: illuminating the details, differences and potential blind spots that deserved greater attention.
Rather than placing the entire business “under a spotlight,” the blue focused on what Sentry’s expertise and curiosity helped bring into view.
Meet the Chief Question Officer.
A modern Socrates turned Sentry’s inquisitive mindset into a memorable creative device. Reimagined as a thoughtful guide, he could challenge assumptions, open better conversations and help uncover what others might miss.
PLATFORM 03
Sitting
With Risk
BELIEF
Understanding begins by getting closer.
Complex risks can’t always be resolved from a distance. They require time, honest conversation and a partner willing to stay with the uncertainty until the full picture comes into view.
CENTRAL IDEA
Sit with complexity until it becomes clear.
Sentry gets close to the realities of each business, listening, questioning and working through the most difficult what-ifs alongside its customers. Because the better risk is understood, the more confidently it can be managed.
Calm within complexity.
It gets close to the realities of each business—listening, questioning and working through complexity alongside the people who know it best. Because when you stay with risk long enough to understand it, uncertainty gives way to confidence.
THE VISUAL WORLD
Experts in your most complex ‘what ifs’.
A pair of Sentry-blue chairs made the platform literal—and immediately recognizable. Placed inside increasingly complex business scenarios, they brought the customer and Sentry expert together on equal ground to work through the what-ifs side by side.
LAUNCH EXPRESSION
THE TEAM:
Shelby Georgis (CCO)
Jaclyn Phenicie (Creative Director)
Kendall McDermott (Strategy Director)
Ben Pfeiffer (ACD-Copy)
Eddie Diazmunoz Martinez (Sr. Art Director)
Will Sharpe (ACD-Copy)
Maranda Ryser (Sr. Art Director)