Esure’s TV campaign, ‘Calm Down, Dear’, which was directed by and starred Michael Winner, became a cultural reference point for everyday exasperation and reassurance in the noughties, even famously being used by David Cameron in Parliament.
With that level of impact, it might seem surprising that the insurer then spent the next 20 years largely avoiding the medium that put it on the map. Instead, Esure reflected the trend and stepped away from brand-led media to focus heavily on performance marketing.
But recent changes in the UK insurance market, including rising car insurance costs and increased competition, have prompted a renewed focus on differentiation and brand awareness. Now, Esure is now back in television, and its comeback campaign reworks the ‘Calm Down, Dear’ creative that originally defined the brand.
‘Calm down, deer’ introduces a new animated character, Dave O’Deer, alongside Lorraine Kelly, aiming to recreate the same sense of warmth and reassurance that underpinned the original work. The brand message, ‘Be sure with Esure’, sits at the centre of the campaign, positioning Esure once again as a calm, dependable presence in moments of insurance anxiety. It was developed by Guy & Co with media buying handled by VCCP Media.
Speaking about the brand’s previous approach, VCCP Media CEO James Shoreland said the category had become heavily weighted towards short-term efficiency. ‘Brands can become quite addicted to performance metrics because they look efficient upfront,’ he said. ‘But if you only do performance, you can end up going down a bit of a cul-de-sac of just optimising media spend.’
Shoreland said the shift is not about returning to brand at the expense of performance though, rejecting the idea that the two sit in opposition altogether. ‘We don’t believe in a division between brand and performance,’ he said. ‘Our mantra is “everything that brands performs and everything that performs brands”’.
The idea, he added, is that performance activity still builds brand memory, while brand activity improves performance outcomes — with both working as part of the same system rather than competing disciplines.
Esure first began working with VCCP in 2024, though the project was delayed following the insurer’s acquisition by Ageas, before resuming in 2025 ahead of launch. Shoreland explains: ‘We started dating in 2024, went on a bit of a hiatus and then actually on our second in late 2025 to get ready for the launch of the campaign’.
That campaign finally launched earlier this month with media placements across some of the UK’s biggest shows, including Coronation Street and Gogglebox, supported by a significant VOD rollout.
It will continue to roll out in the coming months through audio, across linear radio, podcasts and music streaming. It will also be supported by digital out-of-home ads, including large-format sites, strategically positioned in key geographic hotspots.
Shoreland said the opportunity was to reintroduce Esure into the market at scale, with a clearer focus on brand recognition and recall.
‘In a category obsessed with share of voice, the real opportunity was to win share of attention,’ Shoreland said. He added that traditional effectiveness models often rely on correlations between spend and market share, which he argued can oversimplify how media contributes to outcomes. ‘What we’ve always said is that it’s not just about budget levels,’ he said. ‘It’s about how media is used and how it influences outcomes.’
VCCP has worked with behavioural and attention data to inform media planning, including research from Amplified Intelligence, which analyses how audiences engage with different formats. The work distinguishes between what it describes as active attention environments, such as television and cinema, and more passive attention contexts, such as social media browsing.
The media strategy for ‘Calm down, deer’ was therefore designed to place creative assets into environments where attention is more likely to be actively engaged, inserting Dave O’Deer into high-disruption, high-attention media contexts, where his ‘scream’ is used as a pattern-breaking device before resolving into a calmer message.
Shoreland described the approach as treating media as part of the creative system rather than a separate function, adding that it was designed to support long-term brand recall as well as short-term response. ‘What we’re trying to do is maximise memorability,’ he said. ‘Because if a brand is remembered, it performs better across both short and long-term measures.’
With the campaign now live for a few weeks, Shoreland said early feedback has been broadly positive. Business performance is still too early to assess, but early indicators are encouraging, while public and press response has delivered a clear reputational boost.
But for Shoreland, the most telling signal hasn’t come from consumers or commentators at all. ‘When media owners who didn’t get the campaign start bombarding you with calls and emails, you know it’s working,’ he said.
