Takeaways for Leaders
Don’t default to scale when the real need is surgical.
When growth pressure rises, “more reach” feels safe, but it can create downstream capacity, brand, and operational problems. Start by naming the one outcome that matters, then build only for that.
Momentum is an audience-definition problem before it’s a creative problem.
Your best efficiency gains come from deciding who not to pursue. Use research to isolate true intent signals (behavior + emotion), then align strategy, media, and messaging to a single, shared “audience voice.
Use AI like a controlled accelerator—not a new operating model.
Experiment where the stakes are lowest and the guardrails are clearest. If authenticity is non-negotiable, keep human judgment in charge, enforce consistency, and let AI speed iteration, not replace leadership decisions.
Outcome Delivery System℠ — Stacks & Solutions in Play
This initiative moved through Saxum’s Outcome Delivery System as a Clarity → Vision → Momentum build—designed to create growth in one line of business without expanding demand everywhere else.
Clarity
Signal Solution
We grounded the work in audience and market truth. Quantitative research isolated a true auto-intender segment based on behaviors, needs, and emotional drivers—not broad demographics. Just as important, the work produced a shared audience voice (tone, values, motivations) that strategy, creative, and media could align around. Clarity also enabled the hardest decision: who not to pursue, protecting operational capacity in other lines.
Vision
GTM Solution
With the audience defined, we translated insight into a go-to-market approach built for control: channel roles, sequencing, messaging boundaries (no broad bundle pull), and a measurement posture designed to evaluate intent—not just reach. Vision ensured the campaign could deploy with discipline, not guesswork.
Momentum
Platform → Activate → Pulse Solutions
Momentum came from a two-speed creative system. A high-authenticity broadcast anchor established trust and human stakes. Social extensions continued the emotional thread in a controlled environment built for efficiency and iteration. AI was used selectively to accelerate exploration of mood and texture—never to replace authorship or brand judgment—so the work stayed cohesive and credible across touchpoints.
Overview
Why Broad Reach Was the Wrong Answer
Growth pressure has a way of flattening nuance.
When performance tightens, the instinct is often to widen the aperture: more reach, more impressions, more volume. In insurance, particularly in auto, that instinct is understandable. The category is crowded, customer acquisition costs are rising, and brand leaders are under constant pressure to justify spend.
But sometimes growth doesn’t require a wider net.
Sometimes it requires a sharper spear.
What happens when leadership resists the urge to scale indiscriminately and instead insists on precision? Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance, in partnership with Saxum, used data-led strategy to isolate a very specific growth opportunity in auto insurance, then translated that insight into creative and media that outperformed a broader, higher-spend brand campaign.
This is about the power of restraint.
Because while this campaign made use of emerging tools, including Artificial Intelligence, it did so deliberately, inside clear strategic boundaries. The result wasn’t experimentation for experimentation’s sake. It was momentum, built from scratch.
The Strategic Pivot
Why Broad Reach Was the Wrong Answer
The auto insurance landscape is unforgiving. Competition is intense. Media is fragmented. Consumers are saturated with messaging that promises savings, safety, or simplicity; often all three, and often all at once. In response, many brands default to broad demographic targeting and bundled offers, hoping scale will compensate for declining efficiency.
For Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance (OKFB), that approach carried real risk.
OKFB serves a deeply values-driven audience: farmers, families, urban and rural communities across Oklahoma. Their strength is trust. Their challenge, at this moment, was specificity. They needed to grow personal auto policies aggressively.
At the same time, they were already near operational capacity in farm, homestead, and equipment policies. A generalized brand push or bundle-driven message risked driving demand into lines they could not (and should not) expand further.
The leadership question wasn’t, “How do we get more customers?” It was, “How do we grow exactly the right kind of customer, without waking up demand everywhere else?”
That distinction wasn’t theoretical. It was operational, and it came directly from leadership.
As Greg Golden, VP of Sales and Marketing at Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance, put it:
“We weren’t trying to grow everywhere. We were already at capacity in several lines, so we had to be intentional about where growth made sense. Auto was the opportunity, and this approach helped us focus there without putting pressure on the rest of the business.”
This was not a brand exercise. It was a capacity decision.
Growth had to be selective to be responsible. And that meant any strategy that widened demand indiscriminately (through bundles, broad awareness, or generic reach) wasn’t just inefficient. It was risky.
The Strategic Pivot
Momentum Through Precision
Saxum approached this as a Momentum problem: one that required strategy, creative, production, and media to operate as a single system, not a sequence of handoffs.
Saxum’s role was end-to-end and deliberate: defining the growth objective, translating insight into a clear creative direction, and producing the assets that would carry that direction consistently into market. The scope centered on the development and production of tentpole campaign assets designed to do two things at once: drive near-term auto policy growth and reinforce OKFB’s long-term positioning.
Momentum, in this context, meant aligning insight, strategy, creative, and media around a single, disciplined objective: auto growth only.
The first move was to abandon generic audience definitions.
Age, income, geography: those markers are easy to buy, but increasingly poor predictors of intent. Instead, Saxum led quantitative market research designed to isolate a true auto-intender segment: people whose behaviors, needs, and emotional triggers aligned specifically with personal auto insurance decisions.
This work surfaced more than targeting parameters. It revealed pain points, values, and tonal expectations: what we came to define internally as an audience voice.
That voice became the spine of the entire campaign. It dictated:
- What stories could be told credibly
- What emotional register would feel authentic
- What creative shortcuts would break trust
- And, critically, what not to say
As this strategy was being refined, Saxum began the creative process.
“We weren’t trying to grow everywhere.
We were already at capacity in several lines, so we had to be intentional about where growth made sense. Auto was the opportunity, and this approach helped us focus there without putting pressure on the rest of the business.”
Greg Golden
VP Sales & Marketing
Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance
Strategy
Strategy Intertwined with Creative By Design
One of the real risks in modern marketing is treating strategy and creative as separate phases rather than parallel responsibilities. When insight lives in one room and expression in another, teams either over-theorize or over-produce. In this work, Saxum sat in the strategy conversation while building the creative at the same time, using each to sharpen the other.
Strategy defined the growth constraint, the audience, and the emotional truth. Creative pressure-tested those decisions early, revealing what would feel authentic, what would feel forced, and where trust could be lost. New tools, including AI, were evaluated inside that shared conversation, not bolted on after the fact. The result wasn’t guesswork or novelty. It was coherence.
OKFB needed a reboot of broadcast materials that could speak directly to both urban dwellers and established farmers and families (people who insured their land and equipment) and invite them to also insure their family vehicles. The message had to feel personal, not promotional.
At the same time, budget realities demanded efficiency. Social extensions were necessary, but only if they could maintain the same authenticity as the broadcast work.
This is where leadership discipline mattered.
AI was considered, but only as a test-and-learn component, not as a replacement for human judgment or on-set production. The question wasn’t, “Can AI make this cheaper?” It was, “Where can AI contribute without compromising what matters?”
The Creative System
Start the Conversation. Continue the Conversation.
The Broadcast Anchor: Human, Practical, Irreplaceable
Saxum produced a fully realized broadcast spot, shot practically with a crew, actors, and stunt drivers.
The story centered on a farmer’s wife driving a load of eggs to market. When she’s cut off on a rural road, she slams the brakes and turns to check her “precious cargo,” revealing her children in the back seat. A gravel-voiced Narrator urged,
“You insure your home, your equipment, your property. Everything required to make farming successful. But, when it comes to your most precious cargo – shouldn’t you protect what means the most? That’s why Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance covers more than farms. We are Your Protector for everything that really matters.”
The emotion works because it’s real. Nuanced. Human.
That kind of moment cannot be generated. It has to be felt, directed, and performed. Saxum treated this production accordingly, investing where authenticity was non-negotiable.
This spot’s role was clear: start the conversation.
The Social Extensions: Continuity at Speed
The social media creative had a different job.
Rather than replicate the broadcast narrative, Saxum designed two additional spots intended to continue the conversation, not by showing people or vehicles, but by inviting the audience to project themselves into the story.
Each piece placed the viewer in the perspective of the car itself, traveling Oklahoma backroads in the rain or at sunrise. The same gravelly, elder male narrator from the “Your Protector” spot reflected on memory, responsibility, and care.
“If these backroads could talk, they’d whisper stories of school drop-offs and hands held at stop signs. Because the truck that feeds your land…also carries your whole world. And who better to insure what’s most important to you than Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance. In all 77 counties, OKFB protects Oklahomans Best.”
This is where accelerated exploration entered the system.
OKFB and Saxum aligned early on what was sacred: credibility, tone, and the lived reality of Oklahoma roads and families. Only after those constraints were clear did we introduce an AI-assisted workflow to accelerate environmental exploration.
That approach expanded the creative surface area, roughly tripling the number of usable options, without outsourcing taste, truth, or trust. The work stayed authored by strategy and senior creative direction; the workflow simply made iteration faster and selection smarter.
That increased option-set wasn’t cosmetic, it contributed to stronger message-to-audience fit and materially better efficiency over the 9-week flight.
Editor’s note: The campaign wasn’t “made by AI.” It was made by disciplined strategy, senior creative direction, and tight client alignment. We introduced an AI-assisted workflow only where it could increase speed and optionality without compromising authenticity. With the audience defined and the creative constraints agreed, we could explore mood and continuity far more efficiently—then curate hard. The result was leverage: more viable options, faster iteration, and performance that rewarded the restraint.
The Results
Evidence of Momentum
Across a 9-week flight, the campaign outperformed a prior-year, higher-spend brand campaign on key efficiency and engagement indicators. On Meta, video-view and click efficiency improved by double-digit margins, while Meta-sourced website sessions showed a clear lift in engagement. The data indicates reduced waste and stronger message-to-audience fit, achieved through tighter targeting and a more disciplined strategy.
Paid media efficiency improved materially (Meta)
- Video view efficiency improved by 86% (cost per view down 7.3×)
- Click efficiency improved by 28% (cost per click down 1.4×)
On-site engagement strengthened (Meta-sourced sessions)
- Website engagement rate saw an approximately 15% lift compared to the same campaign period in the prior year.
These aren’t incremental shifts. They signal that tighter targeting and disciplined creative-to-audience alignment can reduce waste while driving more meaningful engagement, even with a narrower audience focus.
In short: less reach, more momentum.
Transformation Arc℠
“Trust is everything in this business. It’s built over time, and you don’t take shortcuts. This direction gave us confidence that we were growing in a way we could stand behind.”
Greg Golden
VP Sales & Marketing
Oklahoma Farm Bureau Insurance
The Insights
What Changed and Why It Matters
The immediate outcome was clear: the auto campaign delivered higher-quality traffic, stronger engagement, and materially better efficiency than a broader brand effort.
But the deeper outcome was confidence, and one that wasn’t abstract. It was about legitimacy: being able to look at the growth and know it aligned with how the organization operates and what it stands for.
The campaign didn’t just perform better. It respected the long arc of trust OKFB has built with its members, and proved that disciplined, data-led growth can reinforce that trust rather than erode it.
For OKFB leadership, this work demonstrated that:
- Precision targeting can outperform scale
- Creative effectiveness increases when strategy leads
- Emerging tools can be integrated safely without eroding trust
- Momentum is built through systems, not tactics
For Saxum, it reinforced a core belief: transformation doesn’t come from chasing what’s new. It comes from deciding what matters and building everything else around that decision.
Implications
If you’re responsible for growth in a complex, values-driven organization, this case offers a few clear takeaways:
- Decide what not to pursue.
Precision protects both performance and operations. - Separate strategy from execution.
Creative works best when it has a hand in developing the strategy. - Use new tools intentionally.
AI can accelerate momentum, but only within clear boundaries. - Measure what matters.
Efficiency and engagement tell a more durable story than reach alone.