Thinkbox
Go.Compare swapped its mascot, re-recorded its jingle and rebuilt its media team with Hearts United. Inside the Grand Prix winner at the 2026 Thinkbox TV Planning Awards.
Go.Compare had a problem most brands would envy: everyone knew its name so well that they could sing it. The trouble was what the fame was built on.
Despite being an opera singer, brand mascot Gio Compario was more car alarm than music man: great for remembering your brand, but problematic when you’re also trying to earn trust to sell people insurance.
"We were famous," says Paul Rogers, VP of Marketing at Go.Compare, "but consideration was iffy and patchy." Behind the noise sat a team he describes as genuinely passionate about insurance (a “grudge purchase” most people would rather not think about), and a nagging sense that the advertising was getting in the way of the expertise. The job, Rogers explains, was to "pivot away from just being annoying to being helpful". Not to go quiet, but to grow up without turning the volume down.
So, in a splintering media landscape, how do you move a brand from famous to trusted without throwing away two decades of hard-won distinctiveness? Solving that challenge – turning fame into preference – is what won Go.Compare and its media agency of six years, Hearts United (then Hearts & Science), the Grand Prix at the 2026 Thinkbox TV Planning Awards, alongside the trophy for Best Ongoing Effectiveness. It took four years and a new brand platform, built around savviness and launched into a cost-of-living squeeze that made "are you sure you're not overpaying?" the most useful question a price comparison site could ask.
And so a channel Go.Compare already trusted, television, was put to work to do an entirely different job.
What changed, what stayed
The most visible change: Gio Compario was benched for supersub Ian Wright, the star football pundit.
Rogers is candid about why: while the larger-than-life tenor was a character audiences enjoyed but didn't quite believe, Wright is "relatable, a bit of a national treasure – and he doesn't try to bullshit you." The trusted everyman does the job a "shouty Italian opera singer" never could.
What's striking is how much else of Go.Compare’s advertising moved at the same time. "We pretty much changed everything," says Joshua Tumbridge, Go.Compare's Head of Brand and Campaigns. "We had to evolve all our brand assets, all at once, quite quickly."
The craft was in engineering continuity out of the few things they kept – what Rogers calls a "wealth of riches" in codes: the green, the moustache, the music. The moustache is the clearest example: detached from Gio and handed its own life, the 'tache became less a character's prop than a portable feeling. "Whenever you make a good decision, that 'tache is personified on anyone's face," says Tumbridge. It appeared across organic social content, on the cast of the brand's ITV idents, and in the ads themselves.
The sonic mnemonic – the sung "Go Compare" signature you only have to start humming for people to finish – got the same careful update. It was re-recorded, for the first time in years without the mascot's voice, to move it from something sung at the viewer to a "community choir feel" sung with them. "It sounds really homemade," says Rogers, "but it feels like a natural evolution."
One team, one plan, every screen
None of this would have counted for much if the work had aired in silos, and the planning is where the award was won.
For years, Rogers explains, the set-up was conventional and fragmented: the brand team ran media and creative through two separate agencies, while YouTube sat off to one side, treated as a performance channel. So Go.Compare created a "mirror" media team in-house – a two-person unit that shadows Hearts and plans across every channel at once – and pulled YouTube buying out of the performance silo and into the agency, through Omnicom's Omni system.
"We absolutely love working with Hearts – it's an amazingly symbiotic relationship," Rogers says. Tumbridge, himself a former agency Commercial Director, adds: "The phrase ‘an extension of your team' is completely overused. But [Hearts ] genuinely do deliver it."
Unifying the plan also changed what TV was asked to do, Rogers says. While the 30-second spot is an ideal format for Go.Compare’s linear TV buys, its scope is limited to one key message: keep brand top of mind. "You might have 10 objectives, but you don't want to confuse the consumer," he explains. So Go.Compare leaned into sponsorship on ITV – This Morning, The Voice, Family Fortunes – for the "longer dwell opportunities" that let the brand talk about range and value, and nudge people who only think of Go.Compare for car insurance towards pet, travel and home.
From TV performance to TV plus
TV has worked so well that it created a challenge for Rogers, who joined Go.Compare six years ago:
“One of the most difficult jobs I've had since I've been here is trying to wean people off ‘just TV’,” he says. "For a long time we were a TV performance organisation.”
That meant: advertise on TV, harvest the results through organic and paid search. It's a tidy loop that built one of the most sung-about brands in Britain, but it was also a cage.
The crowbar was econometrics. For years, Go.Compare has used a model, developed with an external consultant and now run through Omnicom, that is reviewed quarterly. It measures each channel's individual footprint, then a nested version on top – television plus search – to see what happens to searches and organic traffic when the brand is on air.
"It's hard to separate those things these days because we do tend to be on 365 days a year," Rogers says. The workaround is to treat the periods of heavier investment as benchmarks, and read the difference.
Tumbridge describes TV as still one of the highest drivers of ROI and the cornerstone of the brand's advertising, but he also describes a bell curve. "There's an effectiveness cliff," he says – a top to the curve, beyond which the next pound buys less. Invest up to it; spend the rest where it works harder.
The clearest evidence of this was in a Q1 campaign, where Hearts' AV Reach Connect analysis found that adding BVOD, SVOD, and AVOD (and YouTube) on top of linear delivered an additional 11.3% reach against Go.Compare's ABC1 adult target.
The econometric model is delivered out of Hearts, but Tumbridge is careful to note it's built in isolation from the agency's own media team – there to evaluate the buying, not defend it – which matters when finance is asking.
What’s next
TV, for all the change taking place in media, is here to stay for Go.Compare.
“There's an authority about TV that some of the other channels don't have yet”, Rogers says. ”TV has a brand equity all of its own that we borrow every time we advertise."
The appetite now is for something richer than a spot: immersive, ad-funded content that lets the brand show its expertise rather than just shout its name. Rogers points to the branded strands M&S, Aldi and Habitat have built around passion points like cooking and the home.
The challenge, he says, is "finding the right vehicle for insurance that doesn't scare people" – something that elevates it and puts Go.Compare's specialists, people who have spent careers in a category most would rather avoid, at the front of it.
Go.Compare spent 20 years making Britain remember it. The last four have been about making Britain trust it – using television to earn trust as well as stay top of mind.