‘The accountability for creativity stops with me’: Suncorp’s brand-CX chief Mim Haysom dukes it with Sir John Hegarty and Val Morgan Cinema’s Guy Burbidge on attention, entertainment, culture and marketing’s creative conundrum

Mim Haysom’s world-beating, Cannes-winning One House initiative at Suncorp in 2022 was a big bold bet on innovative, mould-breaking marketing that Suncorp’s executive leadership and board only saw days before a documentary on the initiative was set to broadcast on Nine. “The first time the board saw One House, I took them into the auditorium and played them the 26-minute documentary three nights before it was going live on Channel Nine,” says Suncorp’s Executive GM, Brand & Customer Experience. “The accountability for creativity stops with me … I set myself up that way from the get-go.” Haysom is also the person who tells the CFO she needs incremental money for performance media – and not to siphon it out of brand. “Insurance search terms [at peak cost of living crunch] were 50 per cent up year on year. They are about 35 per cent up now. With that there is opportunity to pump more money into search to capture demand. So, I've absolutely been doing that,” she says. “But what I've been doing is writing business cases to say … we don’t touch brand … because if you haven't got that awareness, consideration, if you're not building trust in your brand – especially in insurance – then people won't convert in the lower levels anyway.” Legendary adman Sir John Hegarty couldn’t agree more. “The trouble is we live in a bubble called commerce, and the people out there don't – they live in a world called ‘engage me, entertain me’,” he says. It’s a challenge Val Morgan Cinema’s Guy Burbidge has been wrestling with for cinema. There’s an "awful lot more measurement conversations” which Burbidge says is a "good thing ... but it’s an increasingly binary conversation about reach and cost and not the power of a [media] platform and creativity. “We've gone down too much science, arguably, with too many ones and zeros and cost and reach and algorithms. The next piece of work for us is talking to the creative community to understand how do you take advantage of those cultural moments created by movies and cinema as they come up.”See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.