Virginie Berçot, AXA: When An Insurer Provides "Group Therapy"

By co-producing a unique documentary where comedy meets mental health, AXA proved that it’s prepared to take creative risks. We talk to Virginie Berçot, Global Brand Director, about the project and her role.

If you feel like an emotional roller coaster ride, head over to Prime Video and a film called Group Therapy. It features a group of leading stand-up comedians, moderated by Neil Patrick Harris, chatting about how their comedy routines are often inspired by – and are a therapy for – their mental health issues.

The film will make you laugh – it may also make you cry. Behind it is insurance company AXA, along with WPP and Kevin Hart’s production company Hartbeat. Heading the client team is Virginie Berçot, AXA’s Global Brand Director. That the film exists is in part testament to her sense of openness.

Virginie comes from an advertising agency background, including over four years at BETC. But at a certain point she felt that a change was beckoning. “I’d spent more than 20 years working at agencies and I loved it – I felt as if I was always learning. But as I approached my fortieth birthday, I began asking myself how I was going to continue to grow in this area.”

At the same time, she sensed a certain disconnect between agencies and their clients. “Clients were beginning to change the way they thought of themselves and what they could do – they were asking new questions, but the agencies didn’t always have new answers. At first I resisted going over to the client side, because I was still enjoying what I did.”

Then AXA came calling. “When I talked to them, I realised: ‘Maybe insurance isn’t what you think it’s about.’ In fact, we live in a world where risks are increasing, becoming more frequent, more powerful. So this is a fascinating space: it’s about people, their health, their business, how we protect them and the world we live in.”

Plus her role of Global Brand Director gives her a big playing field. “You’re dealing with so many different markets and cultures, but you still need to be one AXA brand. And I work in areas ranging from digital to experience, brand architecture, brand identity, sponsorship…so I have a lot of scope.”

A four-year collaboration

In a sense, AXA’s values underpin the Group Therapy film. “When I think of our values at AXA, they’re about courage, boldness, integrity and putting the customer first. And these are things I experience every day in the way we work. We’re also constantly thinking of ways to push the boundaries of the insurance business model to make it relevant not only today, but tomorrow. Risks have changed. So it requires insurers to change, to adapt, to anticipate new risks.”

AXA has been attuned to the issue of mental health for several years – in fact it recently released the 5th edition of its Mind Health report. The impetus that led to the film was to create something “iconic” around the issue of mental health. “But if we wanted it to be iconic, we felt that it couldn’t be a conventional advertising campaign – so why not a long format film?”

The brand usually works with WPP on the media side, but this time the group delivered a great creative idea. The finished movie is the result of a four-year collaboration between AXA, Hartbeat and WPP group agencies VML, Group M Motion and Wavemaker.

The film’s cast is impressive. Even if you know little about stand-up comedy, there’s a chance you may have heard of Tig Notaro, Nicole Byer, Mike Birbiglia, London Hughes, Gary Gulman and Atsuko Okatsuka.

Says Virginie: “When you have Hartbeat behind you, finding a great cast is not a problem. We certainly wanted a film that could be global. We wanted the cast to be 50-50 male-female. We also needed to make sure they were comfortable with each other – because the subject is intimate. They needed to feel confident with who was in the room with them.”

Directed by Neil Berkeley, the film feels American in tone, but explores diverse cultures. For instance, Atsuko Okatsuka is moving – and of course hilarious – about her turbulent relationship with her Taiwanese family. London Hughes shares her experience of growing up as a British black girl confronted by conventional beauty norms.

Rising above the noise

Dimitri Guerassimov, Chief Creative Officer at VML France, comments: “It’s hard to get people’s attention in a world where new information is coming at us 24/7. To find a voice and rise above the noise is almost impossible. But what we’re seeing is that when people watch Group Therapy, they react extremely positively to the conversation. The very act of six people sitting in a circle, opening up to each other, has touched a nerve in a unique and profound way.”

It’s definitely not “branded content”, adds Virginie. “For the entire 90-minute long documentary, you do not see any placement of the AXA brand whatsoever, apart from our credit as a co-producer.”

Indeed, Group Therapy was welcomed to the Tribeca Film Festival as a documentary, not a branding exercise. The film made its debut there, in a thousand-seat movie theatre. “At Tribeca, only a small section of the cinema at the front is reserved for festival officials and film-makers,” Virginie explains. “The rest of the seats are available to the ticket-buying public. Not only was every seat filled, but the audience gave the film a standing ovation.”

In one of the film’s most moving moments, Tig Notaro recalls how she stepped onto the stage and began a comedy routine based on her recent breast cancer diagnosis – not to mention the death of her mother and splitting with her partner. It was immensely brave and an utter triumph.

Looking back, Tig sums up the universal appeal of the film: “You can find yourself in anybody’s story.”

Source: Epica Awards