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Black Friday 2026: how to avoid wasting marketing budget
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Earlier this year, Insight by Confused.com launched Connect, a commerce media proposition developed with Epsilon that lets brands reach audiences built from anonymised Confused.com signals across connected TV, online video, display and audio.
It opens up those audiences to insurance advertisers reaching people at the point of comparing or renewing, and to brands in automotive, retail, telecoms, travel and consumer goods, who can buy against the segments the data reveals with no need to be relevant to insurance at all.
A purchase on its own is only a record of what someone bought, whereas a quote captures what they are actively asking about at a specific moment, along with the detailed circumstances behind the question. Because those details are declared by the customer and need to be accurate to produce the right policy, they make a sound basis for building audiences.
The same underlying signal reads differently depending on the sector looking at it. The way in is to stop thinking of a quote as an insurance event and to start reading it as a description of a household, a car, a pet or a trip. Three examples, across auto, home and travel, show how that works in practice.
Take someone who has gone through the car insurance journey. Knowing whether they drive an EV or an ICE car turns a broad "car owner" label into a much higher-value segment, and the value looks different depending on who is buying.
For energy suppliers, EV owners are strong candidates for EV tariffs, smart meters and home batteries, which is a much bigger opportunity than a standard switch. For automotive brands, the split separates people who need charging equipment and home installation from those who need conventional servicing and fuel-related offers, so spend isn't wasted on the wrong message.
EV ownership is also a useful proxy for affluence and homeownership, given it skews toward higher income and off-street parking. The signal works for prospecting as well, since an ICE driver showing signs of an upcoming change is a real target for EV and energy brands looking to win them over early.
Pet insurance quotes reveal breed, age and species, and pet food, retail and vet-service brands can use that to target by life stage rather than guessing from broad pet-ownership assumptions.
The quote also says a fair amount about the home. A large or working breed points to garden space and often a suburban or rural home, which matters to home insurers and garden retailers as much as to pet brands. A puppy or kitten policy often sits alongside a young family newly settled into a home, while an older pet points to a more established, routine-driven household. Both are useful life-stage signals for family and home-related brands.
Two travel insurance quotes can look similar on paper and still describe different people. Someone buying single-trip cover for a ski holiday is telling you about one discrete, dated event. Winter sports cover is a specialist add-on, so they are probably more risk-aware than the average traveller, and insuring an expensive, kit-heavy trip suggests real disposable income. It still reads as an occasional aspirational holiday, and says little about how often this person travels.
Someone buying annual multi-trip cover is telling you something more structural. They travel often enough to have worked out that multi-trip is cheaper than repeated single-trip cover, and that one decision points to higher household income, a lifestyle built around regular travel and a more price-optimising, forward-planning mindset. It is also a stickier signal, because this person is likely to keep being a traveller rather than someone who took one nice holiday.
The product is the same and the profiles are completely different, one an occasional, event-driven spender and the other a frequent, income-comfortable habitual traveller. The harder facts, such as the type of cover, combine with softer characteristics, such as how someone plans and spends, to give a fuller view of the individual. Neither has anything to do with insurance risk, but both are the kind of signal worth building a lifestyle or affluent audience around.
Renewal dates add a timing layer across all three examples. Campaigns can be planned months ahead of a known renewal moment rather than run as always-on activity, which is another clear reason this data travels so well beyond insurance.
What brands are working with is less insurance data being reused and more a continuous stream of declared life-stage and asset signals that happens to surface through an insurance comparison journey. Brands in any sector can use it without needing to sell a single policy.
The most useful first step is to be clear about the objective and the outcome the campaign needs to achieve, then identify the data that could help answer it, rather than beginning with a fashionable channel or data source. From there, it helps to choose a partner with the relevant data in its ecosystem and the pipelines to activate it easily, and to make measurement central so activity can be adjusted, increased or reduced based on performance.
If you would like to explore how Confused.com data could be directly applied to your needs, get in touch with our team and we can talk through where it might fit your plans.
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