ahm launched 'The Simple Bit' with New Yorker illustrator Liana Finck

Private health insurance feels unnecessarily complex, and ahm's large youth audience finds life complex too; the brand wanted simplicity to become its identity, not just its product promise.

A new brand platform via Clemenger BBDO Melbourne with a hand-drawn illustrative style developed with Liana Finck — the New Yorker columnist — and Julian Frost, launching across TV, digital, social and OOH.

No campaign metrics in the source; ahm launched it as a continuing brand platform, describing itself at launch as Australia's fastest-growing health insurer (company claim).

ahm health insurance launched 'The Simple Bit' via Clemenger BBDO Melbourne on October 8, 2018: a new brand platform with a new visual identity, an evolved tone, and 'plenty of wryly observed truths about life today'. The simple hand-drawn style was developed with Liana Finck, the New York illustrator best known for her New Yorker column, alongside Julian Frost.

The strategic logic came from ahm's position. Peita Golden, director of digital and brand, said retail tactics and humour had made ahm the fastest-growing health insurer in Australia, but the brand now wanted 'a more sustainable, emotive connection'. Private health insurance 'often feels unnecessarily complex', and ahm's youth-heavy audience finds life complex too — any brand that remedies both tensions 'is going to do well'.

The creative ran as a suite of scenarios showing how life can be complicated, annoying, stressful, confusing, awkward and painful — 'exactly the things that ahm isn't'. Creative director Nicole Sykes said the category 'tends to be a little dry' and that health and life are 'filled with hilariously complicated moments' worth exploring 'in the most humorous and honest way possible'.

Growth had been bought with retail tactics and humour; the platform was the pivot from promotion to brand feeling.

The illustration casting does the arguing: Finck's loose, wry New Yorker style says 'human and simple' before a word of copy.

Complexity is the category's shared weakness, so owning 'the simple bit' attacks every competitor at once.

A challenger that grew on retail tactics eventually needs an emotional platform — and the fastest way to say 'simple' is to hire illustrators whose style is the argument.

The platform launched across TV, digital, social and OOH in October 2018, positioned by Clemenger BBDO as a continuation of ahm's legacy of challenging category norms rather than a one-off campaign.