Complimentary Cuban cigars, free-flowing Dom Pérignon and cocktail parties on super yachts have all featured as part of extravagant marketing activities at Monte Carlo Rendez-Vous (RVS) de Septembre – the global (re)insurance market’s largest event.
The five-day gathering, which unites the world’s biggest (re)insurers, brokers, insurance technology firms
and ratings agencies, has retained its reputation as the industry’s networking event par excellence. It is now in its 66th year.
Since the pandemic necessitated cancellations in both 2020 and 2021, Monte Carlo RVS has come back stronger than at any point in its illustrious history, with 3,160 registered delegates last year and more than 3,000 registered for 2024.
Aside from its setting, what makes Monte Carlo RVS matter is a near guarantee that decision-makers at the top of the food chain in property, casualty (P&C) and specialty (re)insurance will attend. CEOs know their counterparts at competitors and clients will be there too.
This presents huge opportunities for senior marketing directors, but it simultaneously poses challenges around ensuring a firm’s brand stands apart, timing events to avoid clashes with others, while diarising for meetings and roundtables to engage with targeted executives.
This all has to be managed amid delegates’ clamour to shake hands with specific executives in what is
effectively a speed-dating environment.
The whole event, which in 2024 runs from September 7-11, is a major undertaking for marketing teams at insurance firms and their PR agencies.
Put simply, Monte Carlo RVS is the one essential event at which to be seen.
A platform for aligned messaging
SCOR, the French (re)insurer, has a major presence at Monte Carlo RVS – hosting its own lounge that has become a popular staple of the event. The company deploys the wider events for several purposes, including as a platform to align its marketing messages before other conferences and follow-up meetings in the autumn.
Alixane Dauger, head of marketing P&C at SCOR, explained: “Even during Covid, it was important for us to stay in close touch with clients and capture the momentum of early September. In 2020, we were the first to launch a ‘virtual rendezvous’ week, suggesting to our clients to take this time to connect as usual.”
Dauger set out four marketing objectives for SCOR that apply to RVS – strengthening relationships, brand visibility, thought leadership and showcasing innovation.
Digging into the detail of executing these, the SCOR lounge has become an effective example of broadening and bolstering brand awareness. A modular space with more than 30 meeting zones, a restaurant and a terrace, it solves another challenge – networking logistics – because it acts as a focal point for scheduled meetings and spontaneous interactions. More than 600 meetings were scheduled in the lounge in 2023.
SCOR’s marketing objectives have remained fairly constant from 2023, Dauger added, but the messages conveyed are adapted to the context and market trends.
The thought leadership objective is common to nearly all other firms with a meaningful presence at Monte Carlo RVS, even if they’ve not taken a sponsorship package.
Debates and press conferences at the main venue, the Fairmont Monte Carlo hotel, determine the themes that dominate broader industry discussions for the remainder of the year. This is where effective PR activity that’s aligned with a broader marketing strategy is crucial.
Connecting an integrated marketing campaign
PR agencies are tasked with solving the diary equivalent of a constantly shifting Rubik’s Cube at Monte Carlo RVS, as they organise a week of meetings, hour by hour every day, between executives and journalists.
They are simultaneously crafting and distributing news announcements that insurance firms have planned for the event.
This is another challenge, as any press release competes with scores of industry news sent out on the trade media’s news wires and their daily newspapers at the venue.
Tom Blackwell, managing director in the strategic communications unit of FTI Consulting, said: “There is a lot of corporate ‘noise’ around Monte Carlo, so if breaking a big announcement, making sure it lands with impact around a busy news cycle requires careful thought and planning.
“In our experience, landing news on day one, or just ahead of the conference, can give people a strong message or talking point for their meetings – for example a company that’s raised new capital, or has made a significant acquisition.”
Caroline Klein, partner at Haggie Partners, a communications consultancy serving the global insurance market, explained that while there’s a captive audience ready to consume news at RVS, firms need to consider the real level of importance of their announcement.
“It may be significant to you but is that true for your target audience? There is a risk of being drowned out, and this can be mitigated by issuing your news earlier or later rather than just following the herd.”
Video interviews have become a popular channel to amplify targeted messages, with the location an appropriate backdrop to showcase CEOs’ profiles and expertise.
Klein added: “Increasingly, these channels are supplemented by social media campaigns, where companies feel they can control their own message and demonstrate professional capabilities very specifically. The most effective campaigns will combine both and be carefully targeted, in terms of content and audience.”
Digital interviews at RVS have become a useful tool for marketers to reshare and repurpose on their firms’ own channels – fulfilling various purposes of a broader marketing strategy.
This latter aspect is crucial to wider objectives for RVS.
Edward Berry, senior managing director in the strategic communications unit of FTI Consulting, said: “Communications and marketing can sometimes sit separately, so making sure they’re wholly integrated should be the starting point. Good PR outcomes can lend real credibility to, and help elevate, marketing activity – but this only works if there is alignment.”
The importance of being earnest
Monte Carlo RVS fires the starting gun on annual renewal negotiations between insurers and their reinsurers that largely culminate on December 31, meaning much of the news and opinion-based content emerging at the event hangs on how CEOs believe these talks will play out.
Because renewal discussions have been fraught in recent years, there’s often posturing from CEOs on panels and in media interviews, as they set out negotiating positions for the months ahead.
This can present a challenge for marketing directors who’ve targeted other topics for thought leadership, which can, for example, involve ESG activities – where insurers can show genuine social purpose and product innovation.
After a (generally) more orderly reinsurance renewal at the end of 2023, some CEOs have called for a more collaborative, sincere approach between insurers, their brokers and reinsurers, with negotiations that get to a price equilibrium earlier.
If this paves the way for less public jostling, it could give room for marketing teams to give other messages more oxygen.
A director at an insurance technology firm told this publication they believe generative AI and its impact on underwriting will be more prominent among the themes this year, as will how the industry manages surging losses from climate risks such as flooding in Europe, and political violence and terrorism, as the geo-political landscape deteriorates.
Branding – go largesse or go home
Given its location, Monte Carlo RVS has been the setting for opulent branding exercises.
Limousines have been used to function as mobile branding billboards while ferrying executives to meetings. Some have even opted for a helicopter to bring board members to the event, while cocktail parties on yachts moored in the marina have been effective for networking and brand visibility.
Other, creative branding exercises have been on a smaller scale.
Trade publication The Insurer used a London taxi cab to distribute its daily editions, which was a talking point, while Tokio Millenium Re used another industry magazine, Insurance Insider, to distribute RVS survival kits that included sun lotion, which proved popular. Elsewhere, reinsurance software provider Supercede will again host its podcast from a boat on the marina for 2024 – which attendees have noticed as a neat idea.
The more extravagant branding events have become less prevalent as executives have had to consider their carbon footprint.
Rob Hughes, business development director at Brandformula, an agency that works with global insurance and financial services firms to create and build brands, said: “A key trend for ‘24 is a focus on ‘sustainability targeting’. Nobody wants wastage or activity that cannot be measured.
“For one client, we have been tasked with curating a bespoke gift box featuring items that will be retained without worrying the company gift register.”
At Monte Carlo RVS, and every P&C insurance event, the industry can reasonably expect sustainability to grow in influence across all marketing activities in the coming years.