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Bank of Melbourne Bets on a Penguin to Sell Victorian Ambition
Bank of Melbourne's 2019 film campaign, 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way', is a CGI-driven narrative produced by Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne and released across Australia in April 2019, using the story of a St Kilda penguin who progresses from modest beginnings to swimming coach and business owner as a metaphor for the bank's promise to support customer ambition.
The campaign launched on 31 March 2019 and rolled out through April across television, outdoor, and radio channels in Australia, as reported by brandinginasia.com. Its core objective was to reinforce Bank of Melbourne's positioning as a distinctly Victorian financial institution — one that exists to serve local ambition rather than national scale. This was not a product-led campaign. It carried no rate announcement, no fee comparison, and no transactional hook. Instead, it staked the bank's brand equity on an emotional proposition: that the right financial partner transforms personal will into tangible progress.
Bank of Melbourne operates as a brand within Westpac Banking Group, alongside St.George and BankSA, as noted by brandinginasia.com. It was relaunched in 2011 as a specifically Victorian banking brand following Westpac's acquisition, giving it a structurally unusual mandate — to feel local inside a national group. 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way' is a direct expression of that mandate. The Melbourne setting, the St Kilda penguin as protagonist, and the narrative arc of incremental achievement are all calibrated to resonate with a specifically Victorian audience rather than the broader Australian market. Production was handled by Goodoil Films and Alt.vfx, with Alt.vfx responsible for the CGI execution that earned the campaign recognition at AWARD Awards 41st in 2019, according to awardonline.com. The campaign contains one primary media asset and was submitted to Clapboard's global advertising archive, where it holds a Clapboard Score of 63/100.
Bank of Melbourne occupies a deliberately narrow competitive space inside Australian banking. The bank's primary competitive pressure comes from four national majors — Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, NAB, and ANZ — which, according to Silver-Lining Agency citing data from September 2017, held approximately three-quarters of total banking assets in Australia despite representing only a small fraction of authorised deposit-taking institutions. Against that concentration of scale, a state-focused brand cannot compete on ubiquity or price alone.
The strategic logic behind 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way' follows a lineage of campaigns that have consistently prioritised belonging over breadth. The 2016 predecessor campaign, titled 'For the Makers' and documented by adnews.com.au, positioned Bank of Melbourne as 'Victoria's local bank' using real local people as its creative foundation. The 2019 campaign evolves that positioning by replacing documentary realism with animated metaphor — a shift that allows the bank to compress a complex emotional proposition into a single narrative arc without the constraints of representing any one type of customer. The St Kilda penguin is simultaneously every aspiring Melburnian and none of them, which gives the film broader resonance across the Victorian market.
The financial services category in Australia is one in which brand differentiation through emotional narrative has become an increasingly viable strategy, particularly for institutions without the media budget to match the national majors. In the Australian banking sector, where consumer trust remains a recurring challenge as documented extensively by afr.com following the Royal Commission into Misconduct in the Banking, Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, a campaign that leads with aspiration and community rather than product specifications represents a considered response to the category's reputational environment. Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne's decision to anchor the 2019 financial campaign in warmth and local specificity rather than in competitive rate messaging reflects a clear-eyed reading of where Bank of Melbourne's brand equity is most defensible.
Director Adam Gunser of Goodoil Films led the live-action and animated production of 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way'. Alt.vfx handled the CGI execution that places a St Kilda penguin at the centre of a Melbourne-set narrative — a technically demanding task given that the character must carry the full emotional weight of the film without dialogue. The penguin's expressiveness, physical progression, and integration into real Melbourne environments required a level of character animation that sits closer to long-form feature production than to the compressed timelines typical of broadcast advertising.
The creative team at Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne was led by Chief Creative Officer Mike Spirkovski, Executive Creative Director Simon Bagnasco, and Creative Director Lee Sunter, as documented by brandinginasia.com and adsoftheworld.com. The production extended across a significant collaboration of specialist partners. Managing Director Mark Cochrane of Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne, quoted in Branding in Asia on 1 April 2019, described the process directly: 'The collaborative imaginings between the bank team, Goodoil Films, Alt FX, Pixel, The Butchery, Media Lab and our team has been fantastic to witness.' That roster — spanning production, visual effects, colour grading, editing, and media — signals a campaign produced with ambition proportionate to its strategic stakes.
The choice of CGI over live-action character casting was not purely aesthetic. Animation insulates the campaign from the risks of human casting in a category still managing reputational sensitivity in the Australian market, while simultaneously enabling the kind of fantastical narrative compression — a penguin becoming a business owner — that no documentary approach could deliver. The MADC Stars Creative Showcase 2019 jury specifically praised the CGI execution in the film category, according to madcshowcase.com, confirming that the craft registered at an industry level as well as a consumer one.
The campaign earned a Bronze award at the AWARD Awards 41st in 2019 in the K.02 3D Animation category, attributed to Alt.vfx for 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way' for Bank of Melbourne, as documented by awardonline.com. The MADC Stars Creative Showcase 2019 also recognised the campaign in its Film category, with the jury citing the CGI execution as a distinguishing factor, according to madcshowcase.com. A Gold award at the BADC 2019 has been referenced on LinkedIn but cannot be verified against official archive records, and is not treated as a confirmed result here.
No verified consumer performance data — including brand lift, recall metrics, market share movement, or media reach figures — for 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way' is publicly available. Assessment of effectiveness therefore rests on structural analysis. The campaign's single-film format, deployed across television and outdoor in the Australian market, is a format with demonstrated brand-building efficiency for financial services brands that lack the product differentiation to anchor broadcast advertising to a specific offer. The penguin's narrative arc — from aspiration to achievement — mirrors the bank's brand promise with a directness that minimises interpretive risk. The casting of a St Kilda penguin specifically, rather than a generic animal character, also performs a geographic signalling function for Victorian audiences that broader national campaigns cannot replicate. The Clapboard Score of 63/100 reflects a campaign with clear creative craft and strategic coherence, marked down by limited verifiable performance evidence and a single-asset media footprint relative to the ambition of the proposition.
'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way' is a 2019 film campaign created by Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne for Bank of Melbourne. It uses a CGI St Kilda penguin progressing from modest beginnings to business owner to express the bank's promise of supporting Victorian customer ambition. It launched on 31 March 2019, as reported by brandinginasia.com.
Saatchi & Saatchi Melbourne created the campaign. Director Adam Gunser of Goodoil Films led production. The creative team included Chief Creative Officer Mike Spirkovski, Executive Creative Director Simon Bagnasco, and Creative Director Lee Sunter, according to brandinginasia.com and adsoftheworld.com. Alt.vfx delivered the CGI animation central to the film.
The campaign won a Bronze at the AWARD Awards 41st in 2019 in the K.02 3D Animation category, attributed to Alt.vfx, according to awardonline.com. The MADC Stars Creative Showcase 2019 also recognised the film, with its jury specifically praising the CGI execution, according to madcshowcase.com.
Bank of Melbourne chose a St Kilda penguin to signal Victorian specificity to a local audience. The character enabled narrative compression — depicting a full arc of ambition and achievement — without the casting constraints of human advertising. It also avoided category reputational risks while maintaining emotional accessibility for the Australian market.
Bank of Melbourne's 2016 campaign, 'For the Makers', positioned the bank as Victoria's local institution using real local people, as documented by adnews.com.au. The 2019 'If You Have The Will' campaign evolves that positioning by replacing documentary realism with CGI narrative, shifting from community portraiture to aspirational metaphor while retaining the same Victorian focus.
Bank of Melbourne's 'If You Have The Will, We Have The Way' holds a Clapboard Score of 63/100. The score reflects strong creative craft and coherent strategic positioning against major Australian banking competitors, offset by a single-asset media footprint and the absence of publicly verified consumer performance data for the Australian market.
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