William Tyree: Welcome to the Brand Intelligence podcast, the show where we pull back the curtain on some of the world’s smartest brands. I’m your cohost, William Tyree. And today we’ll speak with Dimi Bartolillo about a brand campaign intended to change the perception of lenders mortgage insurance.

Helia recently won a Brandie award for best brand campaign in the insurance sector. Dimi is the Head of Marketing and brand at Helia. Dimi, welcome to Brand Intelligence.

Dimi Bartolillo: Thank you, William.

William Tyree: It’s great to have you here. So before we dive into your great story we like to ask guests to give us a theme song. So if you were walking out to give a keynote speech, what would your theme song be and why?

Dimi Bartolillo: Look, this year I think my theme song would be I’m Still Standing by Elton John. This year’s been tumultuous. I started the year off with surgery. My 90 year old mother came to live with us, so hubby and our little Frenchie Lola. A grandbaby also born this year, and we had a significant death.

Look, life throws you miracles. It’s the circle of life of happiness, joy and pain and grief, but I’m still here standing and really savoring the beauty in life. It is precious.

William Tyree: I love that pick. That’s great. That’s definitely one of my favorite Elton John songs and I love that it has super like significance for you like that too. Listen I’d love to, to start by asking you a little bit about your company. It’s not a company that I think a lot of people need to know a lot more about and especially because you have such great marketing. So why don’t you tell us a little bit about what you do and who you do it for.

Dimi Bartolillo: So Helia is an insurance company. We’ve been around for nearly 60 years. We are Australia’s first lender’s mortgage provider. Essentially our, is about accelerating financial well being now and for the future. And if I really sum it up very simply, it’s about getting people into homes sooner.

So there’s a real noble purpose about what we do. Insurance may not seem sexy, But it’s absolutely pivotal and the fact it really lends itself to a social purpose and getting people particularly young people into home sooner and really start to build their, financial wealth, their security and their well being is something that really excites me.

William Tyree: That’s fantastic. I just love how simply you distilled it down into what, what almost sounds like a vision or a mission statement. I think one of the things that I thought was so great about your campaign was it seemed to be tackling something that potentially had a negative perception in the market. 

So do you want to tell us a little bit about, one I’d love to learn, like how did you come to the grips with the fact that lenders mortgage insurance, LMI, maybe had a public, some public PR work to do and how did you think of the campaign and how to approach it.

Dimi Bartolillo: Yeah, that’s a really good question. There’s probably two sides to that story. So if we think about Mortgage brokers here in Australia represent around about 74 percent of loan origination. So effectively more than three, three quarters of home buyers seek the services of a mortgage broker. So they’re in an absolutely powerful role of influence.

And they perceive LMI sometimes negatively. We know from our research that only 34 percent of mortgage brokers actively recommend LMI. So that’s interesting. And some of the challenges we hear are, it’s too expensive. It’s seen as an additional cost. There’s no benefit. It doesn’t actually benefit the client because it does protect the lender.

And then if you think about the home buyer, The same thing when you’re in the process of buying a home and you’ve got your home loan and all the additional costs, stamp duties, moving, thinking about your furniture, then also having an additional cost being lender’s mortgage insurance because I don’t have my traditional 20%.

Homebuyers are always confused about why this additional cost and particularly what is the value if it doesn’t protect me. So having those two challenges. was what really drew me to how do we talk to LMI and really position it positively and to really create that positive narrative and so The ideation of presenting data insights and looking at real life stories and creating real life data from our own LMI portfolio and showcasing two couples and two couples with, same deposits, same location, same everything the same other than the power of LMI was a great story for us to actually reframe the LMI story.

Listen to the full episode to see even more great conversation between William Tyree and Dimi Bartolillo…