Acts over Ads: Stories that are on Brand with Raelene Metlitzky

Lydia Chan sits down with Raelene Metlitzky, Head of Content and Editorial at IAG, Australia's largest insurer, to explore why brand storytelling isn't the story of your brand, but a story that's on brand. It's a distinction Raelene has built a career on, moving from theatre to radio journalism to leading brand storytelling inside a 100-year-old insurance business. The centrepiece is A Fire Inside, the feature-length documentary Raelene drove about Australia's Black Summer bushfires. Funded by an insurer, it reached over 50 million people, became a number one film on a major streaming network, and grew into an ecosystem of 900 pieces of content, a book, a school curriculum, and a movement to build the country's largest organisation of helpers. Raelene explains how it started not with a piece of content but with a community: "what we wanted to build was a community, an advocacy piece, a shared value system." The conversation gets specific about the attention deficit economy. Raelene cites the drop in human attention span from 12 seconds to 8.2 over a decade, now below a goldfish, and McKinsey's finding of a roughly 25,000% rise in content volume over ten years while watch time per person stays flat. Her answer is to narrowcast, not broadcast, and to treat acts over ads. She walks through the Queensland "Bruce Highway Helpers" campaign, an advocacy play with a heritage media partner that delivered the brand's first lift in consideration in 20 years. Along the way: why brands should become the show rather than interrupt it, why staff pride is an underrated metric, and why trust should be treated as a strategic growth lever. Her through-line is a challenge to every marketer chasing eyeballs: "instead of fighting for attention, let's fight for alignment." This one is for marketers, creatives, leaders, and internal comms teams who want to earn attention rather than take it, and build loyalty that lasts. Follow Audience Connection Podcast: Website: https://www.casualfilms.com/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/casualglobal/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/casual-films-international BlueSky: @casualglobal.bsky.social Subscribe now and join the conversation about creating content that truly resonates and storytelling backed by behaviour science.