Why this insurance ad campaign is a complete and utter disaster

There’s a poster somewhere in the UK that looks like it was put up by someone having a very bad day. The installation is crooked, the creative is mis-sized and mud is splattered across the board.

Walk past it quickly and you’d assume the outdoor company made a catastrophic error. Look closer, and you’d realise the whole thing was entirely deliberate — and that you’ve just been sold business insurance.

This week a TV commercial from the same company will be broadcast to millions of viewers, upside down.

This is the world Hiscox and Uncommon Creative Studio have been building together since September 2023, when they launched what they called “The Most Disastrous Campaign Ever”.

It’s a body of work that’s now spanned multiple years, three brand partnerships, and some genuinely creative mischief.

And it’s worth taking a proper look at why it works.

First, the problem

Insurance advertising has a well-worn playbook. Blue skies. Beaming small business owners.

A reassuring voiceover telling you everything will be fine. It’s a category that has, for decades, sold the feeling of safety by pretending risk doesn’t really exist.

Which is, if you think about it for more than thirty seconds, completely insane. Insurance exists precisely because things go wrong.

The insight Uncommon pulled out is that small business owners aren’t naive. They know the realities. They live them daily. The anxiety of a missed invoice, a client complaint, an accidental data leak, a supplier who doesn’t deliver.

The gap between how the category speaks and how running a business actually feels is enormous. And that gap was the opportunity.

The strategic move — positioning Hiscox as the insurer that protects you against the things that can go wrong, not just the one that promises everything will go right — is sound enough on its own. But what elevates this campaign into something genuinely memorable is the creative expression of it.

If you’re going to prove you can handle disasters, you have to walk the walk.

So they made the campaign itself a ‘disaster’.

Season 1 | The original disaster

Mud splattered across poster sites.

Exposed wires dramatising electrical hazards. Ads that appeared to have been incorrectly installed, mis-sized, or duplicated.

Running across 17 UK towns and cities, the campaign felt less like advertising and more like a series of very public f*ck ups — which was entirely the point.

Lucy Jameson, Co-founder at Uncommon commented: “From typos to burst pipes — this playful outdoor work uses multiple special builds to bring to life real stories of the risks and challenges that affect business owners today. In the insurance category which usually plays it safe this message is bold and brave differentiating and elevating Hiscox’s people focussed offering, with a provocative new tone of voice.”

Each “mistake” illustrated a different category of claim Hiscox can cover – even misspelling the brand name.

The campaign includes purposefully disastrous executions across outdoor and press.

This included a blank newspaper wrap for the Metro accompanied by inside and back page ads that read ‘you missed the deadline to supply a front page for your client’s cover wrap and now they’re threatening to get legal.’

Fiona Mayo, UK Marketing Director, Hiscox UK said: “Hiscox is a different type of insurer. We are specialists, not generalists and our advertising reflects that.”

They took the message onto special builds and XL formats.

“In a category that’s often serious and cautious, we’ve created a campaign with a distinctive visual approach and intelligent humour that’s rooted in deep insight, to stand apart.” – said Mayo.

Since the launch of the campaign Hiscox saw a significant uplift in both spontaneous brand awareness and commercial metrics.

Season 2 | More catastrophic, somehow

The second wave pushed into digital territory, with an incorrectly coded DOOH screen.

There was poster apparently written by a small child, an upside-down billboard, and a ‘smashed’ screen.

The list of risks had expanded too — data leaks, coding errors, the kind of awkward human mistakes that feel painfully familiar to anyone who’s ever sent an email to the wrong person.

Season 3 | Copy infringement: Borrowing from the best

The next phased really showed the bravery of the campaign.

Hiscox “infringed” the copyright of Specsavers, Weetabix, and Cillit Bang — lifting their brand colours, their distinctive assets, their iconic taglines — to create posters that, at first glance, look exactly like ads for those brands.

Only on closer inspection they make the point about copyright infringement risks through the act itself.

Getting three established UK brands to play along is no small feat.

Nils Leonard, Co-founder at Uncommon said: “At a time when lots of people are playing with their own logos, we thought we’d play with everyone else’s. Long running ideas with such a clear and disruptive format are rare to find, and a mark of this campaigns’ power is a moment when even other brands are happy to play a role. Disaster as a creative idea for Hiscox may have started in a B2B world but it’s now disrupting pop culture in unignorable ways”

Season 4 | When the campaign pivots

November 2025 brought something different. The Collections campaign for Hiscox’s home and contents insurance was a gear change — refined, editorial, almost the aesthetic opposite of the chaos that came before.

Long copy. Stripped-back art direction. Print executions that feel more like magazine pages than advertising.

The campaign targets high-net-worth individuals who own fine wine, rare watches, art, antiques — people who are, the research showed, chronically underinsured not because they don’t value their things, but because they took out their last policy years ago and haven’t updated it since.

The insight here is quieter but just as sharp: this audience is turned off by the hard sell.

They want to feel that their insurer understands their world.

So rather than push a product, the creative celebrates the objects themselves — the obsessive, specific joy of collecting things — and positions Hiscox as a brand that genuinely gets it.

The same brand, the same underlying belief in seeing the people behind the policy, expressed in completely different creative registers depending on who’s being spoken to.

That’s harder to do than it looks.

The agency also turned their attention to direct mail.

Recipients found their letters ostensibly drenched in red wine stains and smudged text, driving home the idea that “even something as simple as a dropped Bordeaux could end up being more costly than you imagine.”

A lot of campaigns are built around a great idea.

Fewer have a platform — a strategic framework strong enough to keep generating new executions without running dry.

The central mechanic (the campaign itself goes wrong in ways that illustrate the risks Hiscox covers) is flexible enough to absorb almost any type of business risk, any level of absurdity and any medium…including the Financial Times.

That’s why it’s still running two-plus years after launch, and still finding new territory.

It also has genuine craft underneath the cheekiness. Outdoor advertising that physically interacts with its environment, wine stained letters take real production commitment.

And perhaps most importantly: it has a point of view.

Insurance is boring?

Fine — we’ll make the campaign an act of insurance theatre, proving our credentials by dramatising the very things we cover.

The category is full of vague positivity?

Great — we’ll be the ones who acknowledge that running a business is, quite often, genuinely terrifying.

That willingness to to sit with the anxiety rather than paper over it — is what makes this a lovely body of creative work.

It’s not cynical, and it’s not nihilistic. It’s just true.

And in a category where almost nothing is, that turns out to be a surprisingly powerful thing to be.

Campaign by Uncommon Creative Studio for Hiscox.