GIO takes its ‘safety mat’ to Sydney streets in new Leo Australia work

GIO is taking its red “safety mat” off the screen and onto the streets of Sydney, with Leo Australia creating a series of outdoor installations built around things going spectacularly wrong.

The work extends the insurer’s recently launched ‘Great Insurance, Obviously’ platform, which turned the “I” in GIO into a red safety mat designed to represent the brand stepping in when accidents happen.

This time, the mat has been worked directly into three outdoor environments across Sydney, appearing beneath a fallen power pole crashing into a house, between cars in a nose-to-tail collision and below a group of would-be thieves scaling an apartment building.

Rather than treating the executions as conventional billboards, Leo has designed each around its physical location, using the surrounding streetscape as part of the creative.

The installations are the latest iteration of ‘Great Insurance, Obviously’, which GIO launched earlier this year as a new long-term brand platform.

“We wanted to take our Great Insurance Obviously platform into the real world to have some fun with these installations, placing our red safety mat into everyday situations where things can unexpectedly go wrong and bringing our promise of protection to life in a way that's relevant, memorable and unmistakably GIO,” Mim Haysom, EGM brand and customer experience at Suncorp Group, said.

Leo Australia executive creative director Tim Woolford said the outdoor work was designed to push the safety mat device beyond the original campaign.

“We launched ‘Great Insurance, Obviously’ with the intent to create a distinctive long-term brand platform, and position GIO as the safety mat for life’s mishaps. These billboards are a continuation of that mission, showing that storms, fender benders, and ladder-climbing thieves are no match for the service GIO offers,” Woolford said.

The campaign is running across three Sydney locations through the remainder of September, with media handled by WPP Media OpenEra and production by Publicis Production.