Wizard of Oz: Health insurer coaxes clients into 35% more exercise with Apple Watch incentive

It’s now official: when you can’t get people to get into shape for their own good, bribery will probably work. That’s what an Australian health insurance company discovered in making Apples Watches available to clients for free so long as they met exercise commitments.

The company, AIA Health, launched its Apple Watch Benefit deal as part of its existing Vitality program to get customers to live healthier lives by greasing their wrists into ditching the 55% of Australians who don’t meet recommended physical activity guidelines. What happened when participants got a Series 7 timepiece and realized they’d have to pay for it if they didn’t sweat a bit? Activity rates jumped an average of 35%.

Launched in July 2020, the Apple Watch Benefit was an extension of the previous get-off-your-tuchas AIA Health program offering partaking clients discounts at various retailers in exchange for regularly reporting their weekly exercise activity. Since there was no downside to blowing off physical effort for marathon bonbon noshing on the couch, however, AIA decided to create a pressure point. 

Adopting Apple tech as the carrot, AIA urged clients to sign up to receive the coveted watch – after leaving their credit info for use as a hostage if they failed to meet physical effort goals over the 24-month payment period. 

Four or five walks or workouts per week (depending on age) spared participants from paying even a penny on installations the AIA picked up entirely. Decreasing levels of effort, by contrast, reduced participants’ wallet weight down to the heftiest AUS $27 charge for those who adopted the couch as their second skin the entire month. 

Most people wound up being sufficiently committed to exercising (or just too cheap to pay), however, and regularly got out and about with their Apple Watches to record their efforts – producing big numbers for AIA’s tech baksheesh experiment.

“When comparing physical activity in 2019 and 2020, for those who took up AIA Vitality’s Apple Watch Benefit last year, we have seen activity increase by 35% on average,” a report on the program says. “The age group with the most significant improvement in physical activity was those 50 years and older, who saw a 51% increase year on year.”

AIA took pains to use only comparable people and figures from pre-Apple Watch incentive programs to ensure exercise rates tracked from one period to the next. Its takeaway, the report notes using a polite euphemism for greed, is that the initial scheme worked even better when bribery was added.

“The Apple Watch Benefit builds on the uplift we’ve seen in physical activity following the introduction of Active Benefits,” it says, “by building the theory of loss aversion into the product construct.”

Oz will be a nation of Olympians if AIA throws an iPhone in the deal.