Mortgage company AmeriSave has chosen Havas Group's Arnold as its creative agency without a competitive pitch. While the company hadn’t engaged a creative agency of record prior to this, it had most recently worked with The Martin Agency on a project basis. That assignment wrapped up in March, a spokeswoman for The Martin Agency told Ad Age.
The decision comes five months after AmeriSave brought on Jonathan Beamer as its chief marketing officer, who says the company will be looking to become the “Pepsi” to rival Rocket Mortgage’s “Coke.”
“Clearly what Rocket is saying is right,” Beamer says, referencing Rocket’s “Certain is Better” Super Bowl ads. “Anytime you're banking and dealing with your most-important asset you want to make sure that you're dealing with somebody who's trustworthy and reliable. The unsaid message in that is apparently their view is the rest of the players in the marketplace are shady in some way or taking money from consumers. We need to prove that AmeriSave is trustworthy and then point out what's the cost of being ‘certain.’ If you go with Rocket, you will find that our rates are lower than Rocket’s consistently. This category needs a Pepsi if Rocket is Coke.”
It won’t be easy for the mortgage company to reach the same level of brand awareness as Rocket Mortgage, given Rocket’s 2021 Super Bowl ads from Highdive starring Tracy Morgan ranked first and second place in USA Today’s Super Bowl Ad Meter, which asks the public to rate ads online with a score from 1 to 10.
According to Ad Age Datacenter analysis of data from Kantar, Rocket Cos. had marketing and advertising expenses of $950 million in 2020. The company spent $374 million on measured media. Conversely, AmeriSave Mortgage spent $3 million in 2020 and under half a million dollars in 2019 on measured media, according to Kantar.