AMI Kindness Puts Emotion at the Heart of New Zealand Insurance
AMI Kindness is a 2019 manifesto-style brand film campaign created by Colenso BBDO for New Zealand insurer AMI, positioning kindness as the emotional core of insurance across television, online video, out-of-home, newspapers, and radio.
AMI released the campaign in August 2019, deploying it across multiple channels to reach New Zealand consumers at scale. The campaign's central argument is direct: the instinct to protect people from harm is, at its root, an act of kindness, and that instinct is what insurance formalises. Rather than lead with product features or price comparisons, the work invites audiences to see insurance as an expression of something they already believe in. This is a meaningful strategic pivot for a category that typically competes on rational grounds.
AMI is a consumer brand within IAG New Zealand, a group that, according to interest.co.nz, held approximately 47% of the New Zealand general-insurance market at the time. The IAG New Zealand portfolio also includes State, NZI, and Lumley, making AMI one of several brands under the same parent competing for share of a market that, according to KPMG, recorded gross written premium of approximately NZ$6.96 billion in 2018/19. Operating inside that dominant group does not insulate AMI from competitive pressure; it intensifies the need for distinct brand identity. AMI Kindness is the answer to that need, staking out emotional territory that product-led advertising cannot easily replicate. The Clapboard Score for this campaign is 63 out of 100, reflecting the strength of the creative concept against the absence of publicly verified performance data.
AMI operates in a crowded New Zealand insurance market where emotional differentiation is rare. The general-insurance sector in New Zealand is dominated by two Australian-owned groups: IAG, AMI's parent, and Suncorp, according to interest.co.nz. Tower is identified as the primary locally listed challenger. In a landscape where the two largest players share structural similarities in ownership and product range, brand character becomes the primary differentiator available to any single consumer-facing label within those groups.
Colenso BBDO identified kindness as that differentiating character for AMI. The strategic insight is grounded in the nature of insurance itself: people buy coverage not because they expect to use it, but because they care about outcomes for themselves and others. That latent motivation — concern, protectiveness, the desire to make difficult moments easier — is functionally indistinguishable from kindness. The campaign makes that connection explicit rather than leaving it implicit, as most insurance advertising does.
The New Zealand general-insurance market grew at approximately 5% in 2019/20, down from approximately 9% in 2018/19, according to KPMG. Slowing premium growth increases competitive pressure on brand loyalty and consumer switching behaviour, which raises the stakes for campaigns that build emotional attachment rather than simply driving short-term acquisition. AMI Kindness is structured for the former: a manifesto film is not a direct-response vehicle. It is designed to shift how a brand is felt rather than to move a metric in a single cycle. Media planning by PHD extended the film across channels suited to both broad reach and contextual resonance, placing the message where New Zealand consumers encounter moments of stress and decision.
AMI Kindness takes the form of a manifesto film, a genre that demands economy of language and precision of image to avoid sentiment becoming sentimentality. The film was directed by Ric Cantor of Scoundrel Films, a production company with an established track record in long-form brand storytelling across the Australasian market. Cantor's approach to the material shapes the campaign's emotional register: the work moves through a sequence of recognisable human situations — moments of anger, fear, shock, and despair — and identifies kindness as the force that intervenes in each.
Steve Cochran, executive creative director at Colenso BBDO, described the campaign as an exploration of those raw emotional states, positioning kindness not as a soft or passive quality but as an active response to the hardest moments people face, as reported by Ads of the World. That framing is essential to the creative's credibility. Insurance brands that reach for warmth without acknowledging difficulty tend to produce work that feels evasive. AMI Kindness earns its emotional ground by moving through difficulty first.
Still photography for the campaign was handled by Alistair Guthrie, whose work extends the visual language of the film into static formats across out-of-home and print placements in New Zealand. Consistency between moving and still assets is a production discipline that many campaigns sacrifice when managing multi-channel delivery; the decision to document both under a unified creative direction reflects the considered craft infrastructure behind the work. Writer Ben Baker and creative director Mahuia Bridgman-Cooper are credited as part of the Colenso BBDO team that shaped the campaign's voice and visual identity, contributing to a finished body of work that holds a singular point of view across every format it occupies.
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BLOGNo verified performance data for AMI Kindness is publicly available. No sales lift figures, brand-tracking results, market-share movement, customer acquisition numbers, or return on advertising spend have been documented in publicly accessible sources. No verified Cannes Lions, Effies, One Show, D&AD, Clios, Webby, or WARC awards are associated with this campaign.
Structural analysis offers a framework for assessing the campaign's likely effectiveness in the New Zealand market. The decision to deploy across television, online video, out-of-home, newspapers, and radio — with media planning handled by PHD — reflects a commitment to broad reach rather than a narrowly targeted activation. That channel mix is appropriate for a brand-building objective: manifesto films require repeated exposure to shift perception, and the multi-format approach maximises the number of touch points at which the core idea reaches New Zealand consumers.
The creative concept itself is durable. Kindness as a brand territory is not trend-dependent, which means the campaign retains relevance across a longer effective lifespan than executions tied to a seasonal moment or a product launch. In the context of a New Zealand insurance market where, according to KPMG, gross written premium reached approximately NZ$7.30 billion in 2019/20, the ability to sustain brand salience over time has measurable commercial value even when that value is not expressed in a single tracked metric. AMI's subsequent work with Colenso BBDO, including a 2025 community-focused brand campaign, suggests the emotional positioning established in 2019 has informed the brand's ongoing creative direction.
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