Theatrical, Storybook-Style Spot Eschews Insurance Tropes For Suncorp

Major Aussie insurer, Suncorp, has created a theatre-style ad, shot entirely in-camera and called ‘A Tale of Two Queenslands’, to prove its brand platform position, ‘Resilience Never Rests’.

Developed in partnership with Leo Australia, the spot was directed by Scoundrel’s Sam Brown, and acknowledges the dichotomy of life in Queensland, a state defined by natural beauty and extreme weather.

Styled as a storybook-style stage play, it explores the state’s wild weather through the eyes of a young girl.

The approach, Leo ECD Tim Woolford told LBB, intends to eschew the insurance category’s reliance on disaster tropes to create something visually arresting and unexpected.

“We were trying to really draw out that this place exists where you can be in the pool and the skies are beautiful and blue and you're swimming around having a barbecue – and then five minutes later, you're sheltering under the veranda as hail pours down on you,” Tim said.

“Then ten minutes later, you're back out in the pool like nothing happened. This is a place of extremes, it's a place of paradox.”

That paradox is both “gorgeous” and “really frightening”, Tim said, and Leo and Scoundrel wanted to capture those dual truths.

“It’s the paradox central to the experience of being a Queenslander,” Tim said.

“By holding both realities in the same frame, the work reflects what people experience every day. With Suncorp being a Queensland insurer, from Queensland, this was so important to represent.

“Both worlds exist side-by-side in that single space. The choice to chart a child's journey … lets you accept things that adults would question.”

Tim described the spot as whimsical and theatrical, and explained the creative decision to lean into this feeling was developed alongside the director.

“We wanted to give it a sense of being a whimsical, theatrical performance,” Tim said.

“We got to keep some of the edges on … like seeing the space, sitting around it, seeing the ropes where the backgrounds hang down. It just all plays into that storybook, theatre-play style we love so much.”

The work, he added, builds on Suncorp’s long-standing investment in resilience, through initiatives like ‘One House’ and ‘Haven’.

“This has been such a wonderful, rewarding project to be a part of. There is so much care in every frame in this film, and collaborating with Sam and his team on this has been a career highlight.”

He hopes the idea of Suncorp as “a partner in that journey with Queenslanders” lives beyond this platform, and the project gets “people genuinely resonating with the campaign’s truth, because that’s what we're always after … I hope people have that true, honest response.”

Suncorp CMO and executive general manager brand and experience, Mim Haysom, agreed ‘Resilience Never Rests’ reflects Suncorp’s commitment to protect what matters most.

“Our customers’ homes, families, and communities,” Mim explained.

“Queenslanders don’t experience nature in one way; they live with both its beauty and its risk, and therefore resilience is a necessary way of life.

“As Queensland’s largest insurer, proudly based here for over 100 years, no one understands better than Suncorp that Queenslanders don’t simply switch resilience on when disaster strikes, they need to build, prepare, and recover, and we are beside them for every step of that journey.”