What you need to know:

• How Youi CMO Angela Greenwood helped re-fire challenger brand Youi to massive growth and profit gain via a 48-strong in-house team and brand refresh.
• Plus all the process sweat that went into that – and why copying the usual agency-client model doesn’t work.
• But with frameworks in place, Greenwood reckons the team is quicker than pretty much anyone on the market – agency, in-house or otherwise – in moving from bold ideas to media and PR execution.
• “Dull is death,” per Greenwood. Boldness is what she seeks in those aiming for senior roles.
• But how to measure creative is nuanced – and single frameworks and systems, she warns, are “dangerous”.
• Plus, what Greenwood learned from one of the AFL’s great philosophers, Brendan Fevola – and made it pay massively against her big footy sponsor competitor.

A lot of in-house agency operations still call creative hot shops when they need big brand firepower, inferring in-house teams handle the day-to-day, the bread and butter – but best leave the A-grade stuff to the ad A-listers.

Youi CMO Angela Greenwood claims that’s the opposite at the insurer.

“We keep all the big brand, big budget work in-house, and we outsource more of the grunt work.”

Likewise, many in-house set-ups call on the holdcos to do their big media buys. TV insurance clearance, negs and billings can be daunting for some. But not Youi.

“We’ve held our own TV negotiations for over a decade,” per Greenwood.

“The famous story is that our founding CEO [Hugo Schreuder] also wore the CMO hat for a while when Youi came to market here in Australia. He basically went to Channel Seven and Channel Nine and said ‘Whoever gives me the best deal gets all the money’ … and within a year, we were the most recognised car insurer in Australia.”

Life today is a little more complicated for brands, buyers and definitely for local publishers. But Greenwood claimed Youi is still able to secure value as a standalone advertiser versus the scale and negotiating heft touted by agency groups. “Our rates don’t suffer as much as the holdcos would like you to believe,” she told delegates at the In-House Agency Council conference in Sydney.

But Greenwood readily admitted that Youi – always in-housed since launching in Australia in 2008 – had lost its challenger edge. Which was probably one of the main reasons Greenwood was hired in 2022, following a major brand overhaul at Optus two years prior of which she was a co-architect (but also for major martech, analytics and performance smarts).

“It’s fair to say we’d lost our mojo a bit,” per Greenwood. “Things weren’t terrible, but they weren’t great either – and our business results weren’t going to set anyone’s world on fire.” So she got to work. “We had to challenge everything.”

It seems to be paying off. South African parent company Outsurance’s last financials show Youi’s FY25 performance was among the strongest in the group: Operating profit up 52 per cent to R3.0 billion (A$262.4m) and headline earnings up 45.5 per cent to R2.29bn (A$200.9m).

Which puts a healthy tailwind behind budget conversations.

Flexibility within frameworks = speed

In Greenwood’s opinion, the key to running a top-rate in-house agency is not to act like an agency, and not to stick too closely to the script.

“We believe that best practice can sometimes be the path to mediocrity,” she suggested.

“There are a lot of different ways in which an in-house agency can operate – and I’m not here to throw shade on any of them. But I believe that replicating the traditional client-agency dynamic in-house – where you have a marketing team sitting very separately from the agency teams – is not the way to go.”

At Youi, they don’t sit in silos. But with a 48-strong in-house team, Greenwood has necessarily spent a lot of time marking out “clarity around roles, responsibilities and decision making frameworks,” while making sure the entire team has “zero distance to data” – and licence to rapidly act on it.

She thinks that process legwork has enabled the combined function “to act as a united marketing force – and it also enables us to deliver at a velocity that we feel very few can match”.

Meanwhile, the framework means creatives have “more freedom, more experimentation, more ownership, more license to come up with bold ideas,” per Greenwood.

Likewise the media team can make decisions based on their expertise, data and insights, while the marketing and PR strategists “can focus on the work that’s truly going to move the brand forward, not sit there all day sweating over the minutia of creative feedback and endless approvals”.

By no means perfect, nor complete, it beats Greenwood’s “vivid memories” of a previous role and “getting to a very unpleasant round 17 creative development with the external agency, and all of us are losing the will to live … So being in a place where my creative team, more often than not can land something great within two rounds is a really refreshing place to be”.

Though sometimes the big stuff takes a little more incubation.

Customer talk walked

It’s telling that a quarter of Youi’s marketing team “started out on the phones”, i.e. in the call centre.

“I think that is really cool”, per Greenwood, because it means marketing actually understands customer at a front-line level, and gives staff who have deep knowledge of those customers the opportunity to grow.

While putting customers at the heart of the business has become a trope, Youi made it central to the brand renovation now paying significant dividend (36 per cent higher than last year for Outsurance shareholders).

Build, don’t demolish

The first thing Greenwood did ahead of overhauling the band was a distinctive brand asset study – which strongly suggested the foundations built by the previous creative and marketing incumbents remained rock solid.

“’You Insured’ scored very highly on both recognition and direction attribution to Youi – it was one of the category’s most valuable assets,” said Greenwood.

“To discover this early in my CMO tenure was amazing, because that’s when you know you have something powerful – so don’t mess with it.

“Then we knew our goal was not to reinvent the brand, but double down on what has always made us great. So from there, we developed three key priorities that would unite brand strategy with really focused creative and media execution – and then we just went really methodically and systematically after it.”

It took months – documenting the brand DNA, adding to the distinctive asset-base, “audio was missing”, per Greenwood – but that legwork distilled a brand framework. The next part was to harness those guardrails to build “a powerful campaign expression of what we stand for”.

The creative team spent nine months nailing it. Nine long months.

“I was that terrible person that sent it back and back and back,” admitted Greenwood. “But when we got to ‘Insurance that’s a bit more you-shaped’, that is when it really slapped, because it struck at the core of what we are known for – that human-to-human approach.”

Youi then went wide with the campaign into places the brand had never previously been present, per Greenwood. Some of the old school stuff delivered in spades.

“Over the three years [I’ve been at Youi], the one thing I’ve done that got me the most text messages was the first light rail wrap we did through the Sydney CBD. It was a moment. It was ‘Youi is visible, and more visible than ever before’ – and that marked the first step change in our business growth.”

Footy fully flipped

Next Youi applied the same approach to its sponsorships of the NRL and the AFL’s Brisbane Lions. The answer was the same: Put the customer at the heart, literally.

“We’d been insurance partner of the NRL for seven years – and at the start of the season in 2024, only one in 10 Australians could tell you that,” per Greenwood.

Despite spending millions and millions of dollars, it wasn’t standing out. That had to change.

“We identified a really unique opportunity: Most sponsors focus on the players, the elite athlete aspect, the spectacle of it all. But as one of the game’s great philosophers, Brendan Fevola, said during Covid, ‘This game is shit without the fans’. 

“So we developed a way to amplify one powerful message across two codes … We went to both the NRL and the Lions and said ‘we want our role to be the official partner of footy fans’. They said, ‘Er… Wow … Yeah, okay, lets make that a thing’. So we created a new thing.”

The resulting creative platform was ‘Footy made by fans’ – and Youi went hard for the 2024 season.  By the end of it, one in three fans knew Youi was the NRL partner, per Greenwood, “a very meaningful step change in a small amount of time”.

Brand to demand

With preference and consideration on the up, it was time to convert. Hence a call to action campaign, ‘You haven’t shopped around until you’ve tried Youi’.

“Our favourite was a very honest kid wondering whether her aunty Kate was shopping around for a boyfriend. That might have got me into a bit of trouble with Ad Standards, but thankfully, they found in our favour, and aunty Kate was able to live on to make discerning judgements in both love and insurance,” per Greenwood.

Either way, “the launch of this campaign marked another step change in our growth story”.

Plus Youi’s CEO didn’t mind a few mealy-mouthed complaints being sent to the ad watchdog. “When it started getting a few bites at Ad Standards, I called him up. He said, ‘ooh, we’re getting attention. Great!’” said Greenwood. “I thought that was a great testament to him.”

‘Dull is death’

For challenger brands in particular, “Dull is death,” said Greenwood. “There is a great study out of the UK around the cost of being dull. It basically says that if your advertising doesn’t cut through, then you’re basically wasting budget.”

Greenwood is likely referring to this study, by Adam Morgan, Peter Field and System1. It also showed how dull most advertising is – “a cow just chewing grass for 30 seconds outperformed 50 per cent of the ads in the System1 database,” per Morgan, though that could equally call into question the metrics being measured by such databases.

Either way, the same study also quantified the financial losses incurred by dull advertising: “A single dull campaign in the UK had to spend £10 million more than an interesting and engaging campaign to achieve exactly the same commercial growth,” according to Morgan.

Bold, balls, goals

Being bold, never dull, is therefore one of the “key leadership traits we look for in our people,” said Greenwood. “I believe being bold should be an inherent benefit of an in-house agency model. There should be  – but we have to make it so – fewer complicated factors that get in the way of bold ideas being executed on. So we have to embrace that benefit.”

Which is the approach Youi took with the footy sponsorship.

“We thought ‘what is the furthest we could possibly go to show we are championing fans?’

So they handed over sponsorship of Brisbane Lions for round 21 to a super fan called Scott, even replacing the Youi logo on the Lion’s jersey with his name, which required special permission from the AFL.

“So it was no small feat, but the PR coverage was massive. We reached 1.7 million people during just two weeks, and we had 160 times the mentions of our major competitor, who sponsors the entire code.”

(Plus, Scott was pretty stoked – see below, and catch a certain CMO looking equally chipper.)

Measurement watchouts

Youi’s taken similar approaches to stand out in the crowded world of MAFS and Lego Masters – and Greenwood said it’s moving the needle.

But asked how she’s measuring that success, and particularly the impact of Youi’s creative, Greenwood was circumspect.

“There is no one answer – and I think it is dangerous to have one answer to that,” she said.

“For us it’s about how we find that triangulation of many signals – and there is always a lot of noise in those signals and always a lot of difference between what people say and what they do.

“Having said that, we work with Kantar … if we’re really passionate about it we might look at eye tracking … we use [market mix modelling firm] Mutinex and so at a campaign level we can see how things are being received. Obviously we get a lot of signals on what people are engaging with from the digital platforms.

“So there are a lot of signals. The challenge is then being able to bring that together into something that is meaningful. One of the ways we have done that is to be clear about the role of particular creatives – one of them might just be to bring pure enjoyment, versus another that we want to persuade and persuade hard,” said Greenwood.

“So I think it is important to set your own benchmarks … and run your own race.”

Money talks

By whatever benchmark, something’s working – as attested by Outsurance group’s results. Greenwood said there were growth numbers she couldn’t share, but indicated the fact she’s being given more money to spend when many marketers are fighting tooth and nail against deep cuts is a big clue.

“If we hadn’t been driving tangible results, the business wouldn’t have had more appetite to invest in marketing. But they did – and as a result, Youi entered Australia’s top advertising spenders for the first time in 2024.

Nielsen’s numbers suggest Youi is outspending its more established rivals – with no other insurers in the top 20 advertisers.

Amid fluidity within challenger playbooks and definitions, Greenwood suggested there is a single book that will benefit those across the spectrum, and a single line mantra that for most will hold true:

“If anyone hasn’t read Eat Big Fish, by Adam Morgan, read that, because it’s the challenger bible,” said Greenwood.

Putting that into practice?

“Your advantage is focus, your advantage is simplification, going after a small list of things and doing them absolutely brilliantly,” said Greenwood.

In-house, hybrid or outsourced: “Simplify, focus, execute … with velocity.”

Angela Greenwood was speaking at the In-House Agency Council forum in Sydney, and is an IHAC board member. Greenwood also ranked in the top 10 Australian marketers within the 2025 CMO Awards, powered by Mi3.