Medibank Untangle: health cover becomes mental fitness

Medibank has launched Untangle, a national brand campaign and long-term platform developed with Colenso BBDO. The film, debuting this week across TV, out-of-home, social and content partnerships with news.com.au and Mamamia, introduces a simple word for a feeling many Australians know but cannot easily name: being tangled. It is aimed at Australians who may not think about mental health as something you can train, and it positions mental fitness as small, everyday actions that leave people clearer, more capable and in control.

The levers it pulls

Untangle works because it gives an abstract state a concrete, physical shape. Three behavioural principles do the heavy lifting.

• Processing fluency. “Untangle” takes a diffuse feeling of overwhelm and turns it into a familiar image: a knot. When a concept is easy to picture, people are more likely to accept it and remember it. The film’s visual language of knots loosening makes the brand feel intuitive rather than clinical.
• Category reframing. Mental health is usually framed as binary—you are struggling or you are not. By calling it mental fitness, Medibank shifts the frame to a continuum where everyone can take a small next step. That is a naming move: if you define the everyday action, you can own the solution.
• Implementation intentions. The platform’s promise is small, everyday actions. Linking a cue (“I feel tangled”) to a routine (“do one small thing to untangle”) mirrors the habit-formation formula popularised by implementation intentions. It makes the next step feel automatic enough to do today.

The bet the brand is making

Medibank is betting that relevance with younger Australians comes from emotional utility, not policy detail. The insurer has announced a $100 million investment in mental health over five years, and Untangle is the public-facing expression of that shift. If the platform works, “feeling tangled” becomes a phrase people use before they think about an insurance product—and Medibank becomes the brand that helped them clear it. That is a long-term brand play, not a sales activation.

Chief marketing officer Geoff Ikin says the opportunity is to make the next step clearer, simpler and more accessible. Colenso BBDO group strategy director James Tucker says the challenge was making mental fitness something people advocate for regardless of how they currently think about their mental health. Chief creative officer Simon Vicars calls the idea “an empowering simplifier of a complex subject matter.”

What to borrow for your next campaign

Untangle is a useful reminder that the best brand platforms start with a feeling people already have, not a feature they have not asked about.

• Name an unavoidable feeling before you name your product.
• Use a physical, visual metaphor—untangling, clearing, lifting—so the benefit feels tactile.
• Frame your category as a skill people can build, not a problem they only solve in crisis.
• Attach the campaign to a tangible tool, as Medibank does with Family Roast, so the idea has somewhere to go.

The film is days old, so its commercial effect is unknown. But as a piece of positioning, it does something few insurers attempt: it makes mental health feel like something you can train, not just something you claim for.

Watch the original: Medibank on YouTube

Source: Campaign Brief