Ethos’ advertising budget increases 50% as it pours dollars on its celebrity influencer strategy.

No one wants to think about needing, let alone buying, life insurance, said Dave Brown, Vice President of Brand and Creative at Ethos.

But it’s an important thing to take care of, even if you don’t want to, Brown said. The life insurance carrier is working to break down the barriers to talking about life insurance by using celebrity testimonials in its marketing. Ethos aims to normalize the conversation about the topic by having a well-known person share their story in a relatable way, Brown said.

Amanda Kloots Shares Her Life Insurance Story

Its most recent iteration of this is with TV personality and fitness entrepreneur Amanda Kloots.

The spot features Kloots, who is a widow, sharing her story about the benefits of having life insurance when her husband died unexpectedly of COVID. Ethos filmed Kloots in a fitness studio, which helped make her feel more comfortable and have the ad feel more authentic than being shot in a studio, Brown said.

“The beautiful thing about these partnerships is it allows the authenticity to come to the forefront and remind people why it’s so important to have life insurance,” Brown said.

Kloots joined Ethos’ growing list of celebrity endorsers including David Ortiz and Boomer Esiason. The brand recently announced it is working with Erin Andrews for a campaign later in the year.

The brand works to match the celebrity influencer with appropriate TV content, such as running its Boomer Esiason ads during sports. The Kloots spot is running on entertainment channels including TLC, National Geographic, IFC and the Food Network. It’s also running across broadcast channels on shows including The View, General Hospital and Jimmy Kimmel.

The brand measures effectiveness based on return on ad spend and conversion, Brown said without revealing specific numbers. So far, the Kloots spot is a “top performer” for the brand, and it is getting “a really high ROAS number” from linear cable spots.

“We’re looking at number of impressions, how many people are actually leading to our website, and then how many people from there are actually signing up for insurance — that’s the ultimate test for us for success,” Brown said. “That is our North Star metric is acquisition from a direct response perspective.”

Ethos Focuses on Celebrity Testimony

Ethos has tapped celebrities for about a year as a focus for its marketing strategy, after a successful testimony from an influencer. The social media post from the widow caught Ethos’ attention as it performed better than its other content. The brand then promoted the content on over the top media and it performed well there too, Brown said.

“We started investing there and it’s like, ‘Oh wow, this is also working really well here,’” he said. “OK, now let’s actually take a moment. Let’s think about a budget. Let’s go and reshoot this now for linear. And then we did that and then we put it on linear and it performed really well. And it set us up with a baseline.”

Now, Ethos’ advertising spend has increased by more than 50% in 2025 compared with 2024, allowing it to secure well-known talent and bigger media buys. “None of it is cheap,” Brown said, as its budget has to factor in both the talent fee and the production fees of flying on location to film the spot.

With 700,000 Customers, Ethos Says It Is Ready for Brand Marketing

Prior to this, its marketing focused on bottom-of-the-funnel performance marketing, including paid search and social. Ethos, which launched in 2016, didn’t want to invest heavily in brand marketing while it was in the early days of its company, Brown said.

“There was a massive emphasis on standing up the infrastructure and nailing down that the product is absolutely bulletproof,” he said.

Today, Ethos has 700,000 customers subscribed to a policy, he said. Now the brand is layering in linear and connected TV, plus YouTube on top of its performance marketing.

Brown says life insurance is “universally appealing” and women are a huge part of the audience Ethos targets and the influencers it works with.

In the past, purchasing life insurance skewed more male. Today, Ethos says the purchase is more gender-agonistic today with both genders carrying equal influence in making this purchasing decision. On the consumer-side of its business, 44% of the policies Ethos sold in 2026 were to women.