Why Nationwide tapped Peyton Manning to sell more than insurance in new ads

Nationwide has re-teamed with long-time brand spokesman Peyton Manning for a campaign that focuses on the financial services that the company provides outside of its well-known insurance offerings. “So Much More” kicks off Thursday with an ad that will debut during the 2024 NFL season opener between the Kansas City Chiefs and Baltimore Ravens.

The new 30-second spot features Manning in an art class, explaining that Nationwide is so much more than an insurance company in the same way he is so much more than a Hall of Fame quarterback, toying with the homophonic words “Peyton” and "Paintin.’”

Nationwide is set to invest the bulk of its annual ad spend to leverage its official partnership with the NFL, a relationship which began in 2014. That’s the same year the company enlisted Manning, who has since appeared in over a dozen ads for the brand. A memorable 2015 spot saw Manning hum different phrases to the familiar melody of the brand’s iconic “Nationwide is on your side” jingle. Both slogan and jingle were created in the ‘60s by Ogilvy, the same agency behind the new work.

“As I like to say, when we take the family photo, Peyton Manning is in the family photo, and he’s been there for a long time,” said Nationwide CMO Ramon Jones.

Additional “So Much More” spots will air during NFL broadcasts and related programming throughout the upcoming season on NBC, CBS, Fox Sports, ESPN/Disney, Amazon, Bleacher Report, YouTube and more. Marketing Dive spoke with Jones about the impetus for the new campaign, how he balances brand building and performance marketing and more.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

MARKETING DIVE: Tell me about the “So Much More” campaign and why you decided to use Peyton Manning in this way.

RAMON JONES: Peyton Manning happens to be one of the most recognized icons in American media these days, so we’re lucky to have a 10-year relationship with him. [In the campaign] we look at Peyton Manning, his career trajectory and his life since he’s retired as a nice parallel for where it is that we’re going as a company. Just as Peyton Manning is so much more than an NFL Hall of Famer, Nationwide is so much more than a home insurance or a car insurance company.

The name of the game here is to help Americans, financial advisors, those who buy and need financial products to understand how comprehensive of a company Nationwide is. We’re one of America’s largest financial services providers — most people don’t know that. That’s our creative challenge, and so the goal of this campaign is to start that conversation around helping people understand how we’re way more than just home and car insurance.

It just made sense for us to partner with him to help share this message in a creative way, and it also makes sense for us to use our partnership with the NFL. You got a message that resonates with such a large platform, it makes sense to bring them together to do so.

What’s behind the decision to invest the bulk of ad spend around the NFL?

It makes perfect sense. Advertising is a full contact sport, as I like to say, and if you’re going to be successful here, you’ve got to play to your strengths. Some of those strengths look like the 10-year relationships we’ve had with the NFL and with Peyton.

With a message that we believe needs to be heard by as many people as possible, live sports and the way NFL are the way to go these days. So we’re bringing that all together to concentrate our investments into the NFL. Our goal is to leverage these partnerships to deliver a message that we think makes a lot of sense for Americans as they look to a safer retirement.

With that kind of investment, how do you safeguard the brand and make sure consumers are getting the message, but not getting hit over the head with it?

There will be different iterations of this campaign over the course of the next several months. We’ll seed it heavily with this first version, both a 15- and a 30-second version, and then we’ll move into other versions. You’ll see it unfurl in a creative manner over the course of the next several months.

We’re running a campaign, but our partnership with the NFL is way more extensive than just that, going back years and helping them to shine a light on the good stuff that the athletes are doing [via Nationwide’s sponsorship of the Walter Payton Man of the Year Award]. That’s just another example of how we hope to extend the favorability of our brand through the widespread awareness of the NFL with this campaign. But it’s not new for us.

We continue to see a pendulum swing from performance marketing back to traditional brand building. How do you balance those needs as a chief marketer?

The role that I have here as the chief marketer for Nationwide is relatively unique in that we have certain businesses — car insurance, direct-to-consumer life insurance — that are very heavily driven by what we would typically describe as performance marketing. But we also have a variety of other businesses that look very different — retirement planning, an annuities business, a specialty commercial lines insurance business — and it is in those spaces where our brand has to stand out from a trust and reputation perspective.

So yes, we have to make sure that we’re driving the performance element of what we’re expected to do as marketers, but my global responsibility is to maintain a trusted, well-known, favorable brand that allows us to extend our platform into a variety of different businesses. All of these businesses are very different, some of which take a long time to build equity in. I have a unique challenge in that I am responsible for managing that.

I’m also fortunate in that I get the opportunity to manage what in 2026 will be a 100-year-old brand. The goal is to make sure that, as steward of this brand, I am helping to extend it into places that create value for the people that sell our products and end consumers that buy them. This campaign helps us to narrow the gap in one of those spaces.