BANGALORE: Aegon Religare Life Insurance (Religare LI) has increased its ad spends to around Rs 250 million for this fiscal as compared to the Rs 100 million that it spent last year.

“We will be maintaining the same levels of spends for the next fiscal too", revealed Religare LI Chief Marketing Officer Yateesh Srivastava.

Srivastava was speaking with www.indiantelevision.com on the sidelines of a press conference in Bangalore held for the launch of a new online life insurance plan – iTerm by Religare LI.

Since iTerm is a product that we will sell only online, the thrust will be on online and mobile SMS promotions. We will be on portals such as yahoo and insurance products aggregator portals such as policybazaar and myinsurance,” said Srivastava.

Religare LI claims to be the first mover in the online term insurance place and has a 20 per cent of the online term insurance market share at about 1000 policies per month. There are other seven or eight private life insurance players that have launched online term insurance plans and Srivastava estimates the overall online term insurance size currently at 5000 policies per month, a figure that is growing rapidly.

Religare LI has a twin pronged ad spend strategy – its spends money to promote individual product plans or themes, and another one to build the Aegon Religare Life Insurance mother brand. It had Bollywood actor Irfan Khan on TVCs’ in the Bennett Coleman & Co (Times) Group channels exhorting people to ensure that they are not under-insured or have deficit insurance cover for pension.

Ogilvy & Mather handle the creative work for Religare LI, while MediaCom is handling media buying.