The climate-resilience idea that won Cannes’ biggest Lion

Suncorp’s ‘Haven’ by Leo Australia took the Dan Wieden Titanium Lions Grand Prix at Cannes Lions 2026 — the festival’s most coveted award, reserved for the single most game-changing idea of the year. Here’s how an insurer turned its own data into a public service.

Background

Australia is the home of natural disasters. More cyclones have hit in the last 20 years than in the preceding 100, severe flooding strikes 30% more often, and bushfires now start earlier and burn for longer. By 2035, around one in ten homes is projected to be uninsurable — and yet nine in ten claims include damage that was preventable.

The catch: insurers were seen as part of the problem, not the solution. Suncorp, a premium insurer squeezed by comparison-site price wars that flatten every brand into the same row of numbers, had spent five years dragging the category from ‘Recovery’ to ‘Resilience’ through award-winning brand acts like ‘One House to Save Many’ and ‘Resilience Rd’. The barrier left to crack was apathy: 81% of Australians have lived through extreme weather, but only 17% have a plan to protect their home. Too big, too complex, someone else’s problem.

Idea

Give every home a voice. Haven is a world-first, data-led digital platform that hands each of Australia’s 11 million homes its own risk assessment — and delivers it in the home’s own voice. Enter an address and the house itself tells you what threatens it, whether storm, flood, bushfire or cyclone, and exactly what to do about it. It’s also the first time an insurer has opened up its own data and insights to help protect every Australian, not just its own customers.

Strategy

Research with climate, architecture and policy experts plus homeowners surfaced three barriers. A consumer one: “it won’t happen to me” — 81% exposed, 17% prepared, 90% of claims preventable. A cultural one: homes and mindsets stuck in the past, even as Queensland alone absorbed 80 major weather events and $16.1bn in recovery costs in a decade. And a category one: 92% of industry investment poured into recovery rather than readiness, training Australians to act only after the fact.

The strategic leap was to make resilience personal and urgent — using address-level risk data to show people their own home’s specific threat, and how to reduce it. Impossible to ignore once it has your address on it.

Execution

Two years in the making, Haven pulls from 12 data sets and live APIs — natural-peril risk, climate research, location, weather and property data — to build a cinematic, personalised experience across desktop and mobile, drawing on partners including Google, CoreLogic and WillyWeather. It gets specific, right down to the user’s street and neighbourhood, connects them to local tradespeople, and collates everything in a downloadable report.

The platform was amplified across TV, OOH, social, PR and digital, plus a home-renovation TV show integration and targeted ads inside Bunnings pushing resilient building materials linked to Haven. Alongside it, Suncorp backed resilience grants through the FRRR to keep the fix within reach.

Outcome

Haven drew 323,186 visits — 223% above target — with users staying close to three minutes and 139 earned articles to show for it. But the platform did more than pull eyeballs. Some 79% of users said they would go on to make their home more resilient, NPS leapt from 5.4 to 10.2, and people who saw the campaign were 21% more likely to seek a Suncorp quote, roughly double almost every competitor.

Home insurance market share rose from 13.4% to 15.8%. Across the wider 2019–2025 resilience platform, Suncorp climbed from #2 to #1 in home insurance, lifted marketing ROI by 238% and contributed $402m in customer lifetime value. And after Suncorp’s lobbying, the government committed an additional $2.6bn in resilience funding.

At Cannes, Haven was Suncorp’s fourth Lion of the festival, topping earlier metal in Creative Data, Direct and Brand Experience & Activation. Titanium jury president Chaka Sobhani called it a truly brilliant piece of work, praising it for making resilience a genuine business strategy rather than just a marketing platform.

Lead agency: Leo Australia (Leo Burnett), Sydney
Collaborators: Hogarth Worldwide Sydney, Le Polish Bureau, PXP Sydney, OMD Sydney
Award: Dan Wieden Titanium Lions Grand Prix, Cannes Lions 2026