5,000+ personalised agent videos across four regulated markets.

The problem

Agents wanted videos they could share with clients and prospects under their own name. A film shoot for each of thousands of agents is impossible. In insurance, every one of those videos is a regulated communication, and legal has to be able to stand behind each one.

Reviewing thousands of videos one by one was never going to happen. The programme needed a way of approving that could cope with the volume.

How the campaign ran

The campaign ran as an activation of about two weeks, built from two tools. A campaign page, made with Instant Studio Campaigns, was where each agent took part. A Creative Workflow behind the page produced every greeting to Sun Life's rules.

Sun Life sent 27,547 invitations. An agent opened the campaign page and added a selfie. The workflow made a picture of the agent standing beside the Sun Life ambassador for their market, and the agent chose the one they liked. From that choice the workflow made the finished video, ready to share with clients. There was no app to install.

The details came from the agents themselves, one at a time, which is why the programme needed a campaign page. When a client can supply the details as a data export, the same Creative Workflow runs without one.

What was fixed and what changed

Some parts were fixed for each market, made once and approved. They were the ambassador's greeting in their own voice, the scene, the closing shot and the New Year card frame. The disclosures and the brand elements were fixed too. None of them changed from one agent to the next.

Made new for each agent: the pictures and the shots that put the agent into the scene beside the ambassador. The agent's name and details, the market and the language were controlled fields. The workflow placed them as supplied and never invented or rewrote one. That is the locked, controlled, generative split. The greeting, the scene, the disclosures and the brand were locked. The agent\'s details, the market and the language were controlled. The pictures and the shots that placed the agent in the scene were generative.

How each video was made

The campaign's Creative Workflow was designed and built on ToolKit, Instant Studio's platform. Each video started with one selfie. The workflow made three pictures from it, in order. First the agent beside the ambassador. Then the agent alone in the scene. Then the two of them taking a selfie from further back. The agent chose the first picture, and the other two were built from that choice.

Three short shots followed. The agent walks into the scene. The two take a selfie as the camera pulls back. The view lifts away over the scene. Each shot starts on one picture and ends on the next. That keeps the agent and the ambassador the same people from the first frame to the last.

The workflow then joined the shots to the ambassador's greeting, added subtitles and the soundtrack, and closed on the framed New Year card. It did this thousands of times across four markets, and every video came out to the same standard.

How approval worked

Sun Life's legal team reviewed the Creative Workflow: the rules, the templates and the way the disclosures behaved. Every video the workflow produced could be traced back to that approved set-up. Legal approved the workflow once, on the set-up.

Approval was the hardest part of the programme. The campaign used real people and real voices, and the likeness of Sun Life's brand ambassador in each of the four markets. Every face and voice was used with written consent on file. Four markets meant four sets of rules for the same greeting.

The Creative Workflow kept that complexity in one place. It held each market's rules and fixed what could change and what could not, so every greeting came out as the approved set-up specified. People reviewed the exceptions and the final cut.

The rules that apply

Hong Kong's Insurance Authority holds the licensed insurer responsible for what an AI system produces on its behalf. Its guidance expects testing, governance and ongoing monitoring under the enterprise risk management guideline (see the Authority's Conduct in Focus article on chatbots and AI). In March 2026 the Insurance Authority, the HKMA, the SFC and the MPFA launched the GenA.I. Sandbox++, which extends the 2024 generative AI sandbox to insurance. A workflow whose rules a legal team can inspect and sign, with every video traceable to those rules, is how that responsibility is met in practice.

The result

More than 5,000 personalised agent videos and 22,213 selfie eCards in about two weeks, across the Philippines, Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia, legal-approved in every market. Agents shared the videos on social media without being asked. The marketing lead's instruction on rolling it out: "Just do it."

Seen in the wild: an advisor's own Instagram post of their personalised New Year video, tagged #SunLife2026 and #SunLifeHappyNewYear.

A separate project: the We Care film

Sun Life Philippines' film "We Care" is a separate project for the same client. Instant Studio generated the images, the cast and the video rushes. Adaptive Media Partners, our production partner in Hong Kong, did the post-production. More Sun Life films have followed.

What we learned

Plan the approval first. Every market's rules sat in one Creative Workflow, so a change went back to counsel once, and Sun Life's legal team approved the workflow once for all four markets. Approval came first, on the workflow, and the videos followed: more than 5,000 of them across four regulated markets in about two weeks.