TLDR
GIO turned the said mid-section of Transport for NSW Route 333 buses into a giant red safety mat, the out-of-home centrepiece of its 'Great Insurance, Obviously' campaign with Leo Australia. Roy Morgan's June 2026 data shows GIO climbed 25 places to rank 50th most trusted brand in Australia.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
A bus mid-section becomes a red mat on Sydney streets
In March 2026, GIO wrapped the said mid-section of Transport for NSW Route 333 buses with a red decal that folds and stretches like a crash mat when the bus bends through a corner. JCDecaux described the execution as a media-first Transit Edge decal, with the bus joint transformed into the letter 'I' in the GIO logo.[2] The format had not been used this way before on the JCDecaux network.
The activation is the out-of-home escalation of a campaign already running since January. Leo Australia launched 'Great Insurance, Obviously' with GIO on 27 January 2026, built around a single typographic device: the 'I' in the logo redrawn as a safety mat.[1] That device runs across large-format billboards, digital screens, social content and broadcast placements, with the Route 333 bus its most visible single execution.[1]
Executive Creative Director Tim Woolford said the goal was to reconnect Australians with what GIO truly represents: safety, dependability, and great insurance, without taking itself too seriously.[1] The safety mat does that work literally: a soft landing, rendered in red, wrapped around a 12-metre bus.
The trust numbers behind the stunt
Roy Morgan's June 2026 Risk Monitor Quarterly Update, published 24 August 2026, recorded GIO climbing 25 places to 50th most trusted brand in Australia.[3] That puts GIO among the biggest trust improvers in the quarterly data.
Fiftieth is recovery, not arrival. Australian insurers spent much of the early 2020s absorbing damage from post-flood and post-COVID claims disputes, and the category has been working to rebuild goodwill since. A 25-place jump in a single quarter tells a brand its messaging is landing, and also how far there is still to go.
The campaign's core mechanic makes the trust argument without stating it. A safety mat is what you put under a trapeze artist or a toddler learning to walk: it does not promise nothing will go wrong, only that the landing will be softer. For an insurer, that is a more honest brief than most of the category runs, and Woolford's line about not taking itself too seriously is what gives it room to breathe. Roy Morgan's next quarterly update will show whether the bus wrap moved the number further.
SOURCES & CITATIONS
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
What is the JCDecaux Transit Edge format used on GIO's bus wrap?
Where did GIO rank on Roy Morgan's most trusted brands list?
Which agency created the 'Great Insurance, Obviously' campaign?
Xaviery Malinao writes for Prompt the Market on how brands and agencies are adapting to answer engines, drawing on Bushnote's work with clients across search, AI search and content.
