This year’s finalists for Best Media Campaign are truly remarkable. The most important and innovative media agencies in the country are here, including Atomic 212°, Avenue C, OMD and UM and the industry’s finest work is set to be lauded at the Hordern Pavilion on 8 November.
But, if you want to see who gets the ultimate highscore and walks away with the coveted B&T Awards trophy, you’ll have to grab your ticket now. And you grab your ticket now — our scarcely believable Early Bird-priced tickets end TODAY!
Last week, we looked at the Best Integrated Ad Campaigns. You can check out the finalists’ work in the other categories HERE.
Reader, do not delay. Grab your tickets now. In the meantime, check out the finalists for Best Media Campaign below, in their own words — and in alphabetical order only.
Atomic 212°, “Memorable Media Moments”, Tourism NT
The NT is Australia’s most overseas-like destination and we needed to get more Aussies to think about the NT when planning their next holiday.
Instead of booking typical media and being outspent by competitors, we created immersive, memorable experiences to captivated people.
Immersive Shelters: An immersive experience during cooler months, we fitted bus shelters with heaters that raised the temperature, mimicking the NT climate. We wrapped the shelters with iconic NT scenery, custom seating dressed up as beach towels, Nitmiluk inspired rock formations and native foliage.
Content Series: The 30th anniversary of the iconic film Priscilla Queen of the Desert in the lead up to Mardi Gras and Fab Alice in partnership with Bonds we delivered a content series to LGBTQI+ communities.
Cheeky hyper-targeted media: dominated the Gather Round in Adelaide, SA from 4-7th April encouraging AFL fans to travel north ‘Up here Nature kicks the goals’
The results spoke for themselves.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Avenue C, “Go On, Feel amaysim”, amaysim
Imagine being the little guy in a sea of big established players, in a category largely hated by their customers? That was us. But as the only telco consumers loved, we had the permission to stand proudly and free people from the telco tyranny that our competitors had created.
We set a bold objective: transform market challenges into opportunities for significant brand growth. Our central media idea ‘More substance, more swagger’ was developed to showcase a better way, one that was full of affordable freedom, that made consumers reassess everything they thought they knew about us.
How we did it?
• By identifying an audience with a propensity to switch providers and dominating their most-loved programming
• By bringing a cheeky swagger through the line, letting the semi-naked lady from our creative run free across all touchpoints
• Capitalising on those moments that the big guys messed up!
As a result, we increased brand awareness, brand consideration and marketing ROI metrics as well as expanded our customer base. An ‘amaysim’ result!
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Howatson+Company, “I’m Dying Inside”, Modibodi
Life’s a lot for young people. Heartbreak. Anxiety. Moving out. Coming out. Sex. #hustleculture. The f***ing climate crisis. Men. Then you get your period.
To show Gen Z how Modibodi, Australia’s leading period underwear brand, gives you the leak-proof support to navigate it all, we didn’t create an ad – we created a new series built for their favourite platform.
‘I’m Dying Inside’ is a modern period drama created exclusively for TikTok. Five episodes, four housemates, all getting their periods at the same time. A taboo-breaking celebration of life today for young menstruators, exploring issues like baby-gay hook-ups, endometriosis flare-ups, accidental period sex stains and more.
Created with the production value of TV,?crafted for 9 by 16. Featuring a cast, crew and writer’s room made up female and non-binary Gen Z talent, original screenplays dripping with cultural nuance and original music for each episode.
But we couldn’t just put the episodes on Modibodi’s TikTok channel and expect people to watch it. To make the algorithm work for us and drive views, we collaborated with TikTok to create an entire ecosystem of BTS content that tapped into platform trends and topics of interest.
This fresh approach to delivering content achieved huge results, helping an entire generation of young menstruators fall in love with the Modibodi brand. Slay.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Howatson+Company, “TOUCH”, Mastercard
Over 500 million people visit the cinema every year. Yet for those who are blind or have low vision, the experience is an afterthought. They rely on audio descriptions, screenreaders or a companion to explain what’s on the screen.
To launch Mastercard’s Touch Card – a bank card designed for the blind and low vision community – we flipped the script and created an inclusive cinema experience that was truly priceless.
‘TOUCH’ is a feature-length motion picture without pictures. Brought to life solely through Dolby sound, without images or audio descriptions. Made so all audiences can enjoy the magic of cinema together, no matter their level of vision.
It follows an original story of a neuroscientist trapped inside his father’s mind, along with his ex-girlfriend and an unsuspecting delivery driver. To escape, they must journey through crumbling memories and forgotten worlds.
This new kind of film was developed in collaboration with consultants, composers, writers and actors from blind and low vision communities all over the world – alongside award-winning filmmakers.
TOUCH premiered at iconic theatres across Australia, where both sighted and non-sighted people were invited to experience the film together. After one premiere, the project garnered +AUD $10million in earned media coverage and reached 74+ million people.
But this is just the start. The production learnings from TOUCH have been turned into a lesson module and taught in leading film schools, giving future filmmakers a blueprint to make more inclusive productions.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
M&C Saatchi Group, “UNCLOUD”, Minderoo Foundation
Launched as a safe version of smoking from a seemingly anonymous source, vaping has been able to grow in a vacuum free of truth and without challenge; branded, flavoured and socialised into aspiration. It felt like a safe and sexy habit to dabble with for many youth.
Against this backdrop and with traditional health messaging failing to slow the vaping epidemic, we had to take a different path. Introducing UNCLOUD, a revolutionary campaign that elevated the voices of those affected most, to lead a peer-to-peer platform to warn of the true horrors of vape addiction and shift behaviour and change the culture surrounding vaping from the inside out.
To launch, we got young Australians whose mental and physical health had been affected to write their own warning labels, in the style of iconic anti-cigarette packaging, empowering them to share their warnings with peers at UNCLOUD.ORG. These weren’t warnings from faceless legislators, they were warnings from the heart.
Each and every placement needed to be carefully crafted to appear authentically throughout in youth culture, with strategically placed warnings within TikTok, video games, and physical spaces.
With incredible results, UNCLOUD showed that youth-led public health messaging can be far more effective than traditional approaches, providing a blueprint for future initiatives.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Mediahub, “Run Your Way”, New Balance
THE CHALLENGE
New Balance experienced a surge in popularity as a lifestyle brand, but its core running segment remained stagnant. The challenge was to increase awareness among runners while capitalising on the brand’s newfound lifestyle success.
THE OPPORTUNITY
We identified a key audience segment, “Global Independents,” through our own custom research, recognising their unique approach to running, prioritising health, social connection, and individual expression. This insight led to the creation of the “Run Your Way” campaign, catering to this diverse and growing audience in running.
THE IDEA
We scaled New Balance’s position in running via iconic, hyper-contextual OOH that utilised live running data, ensuring maximum visibility and engagement with the target audience in their natural running environments to empower their run, wherever and however they choose to run as they hit the pavement around Australia.
THE IMPACT
We delivered the most impactful campaign they’ve run yet in Australia; increasing prompted brand awareness by 11 points from 75% to 86%. Brand search volumes increased by 53%. Sales of NB flagship running shoes increased by double digits.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
OMD, “Entering the Colour Era: How Taylor Swift and Dulux broke the media (channels)”, Dulux
Dulux face a problem in the context of the cost-of-living crisis with trade down. While Dulux have more colour options, 70% of consumers were heading into store, picking one of our colours, but then 35% were mixing it into another inferior paint brand.
We are probably sitting in one of the most infrequently-bought categories, so we needed to find a way to bring one of the most procrastinated tasks to the forefront of consumers’ minds. Our goal was to build brand quality perceptions through the main driver of purchase, colour. We were also tasked to grow our already incredible awareness from 95% to 96%.
On the horizon, we saw an opportunity not to be missed; knowing how swiftly Tay Tay could provide another level of ubiquitous access to both attention and Aussie culture. However, previous cultural activations simply played with timing and proximity. We needed to go further to own one of the most cluttered and anticipated moments in recent history.
Cue the context of T Swift; music. And then compare that with the visual required to communicate not only our newest brand asset, the swatch, but colour itself. In an Australian media first, a new method for targeting and flighting was born. OOH and radio (oOh!, POLY and Nova) would be connected seamlessly for the first time.
Having never been done before, this was no simple task. Behind the scenes, Nova and oOh! developed a sophisticated synchronisation between Nova Radio’s programming schedule and oOh!’s creative technology team.
The period saw Dulux brand scores rocket, gaining +2% percentage points increase in an already extremely high awareness from 95-97% and increase of intent to purchase by 7%, securing Dulux to colour and making the deferral at the till even harder.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Principle Media Group, “Gummies”, Swisse
Swisse’s Gummies campaign revolutionised vitamin marketing for Gen Z and Millennials, transforming awareness and purchase behaviour. This ingenious strategy showcased Swisse Gummies as the ultimate trifecta: functional, fun, and delicious, aiming to challenge Nature’s Way’s market dominance.
At the heart of this groundbreaking campaign was the appointment of comedy sensations The Inspired Unemployed as Chief Gummies Officers. Their adventures at Swisse ignited a narrative that seamlessly wove together paid, owned, and earned media resulting in, fun and engaging content, regardless of where it was consumed.
The paid media strategy was nothing short of brilliant, yielding phenomenal results:
Smashed reach targets: Net reach exceeded projections by 2%, reaching an impressive 83% of People 18-44 years
YouTube dominance: 94% view completion rate for 5-15 second ads, with 68% of viewers glued to their TV screens
Long-form content triumph: 2-minute adverts captivated audiences with a 38% view completion rate, doubling the Swisse benchmark of 19%
Omnichannel success:
• Retail OOH reached 3.8M 18-39-year-olds on the vital path to purchase
• Large format OOH reached 39% of people 18-39
• YouTube achieved 30% reach of 18-39 years
• Meta Ads secured 29% reach of 18-39 years
• TikTok Ads captured 35% reach of 18-39 years
The pièce de résistance? Swisse’s Share of Voice catapulted to an impressive 45.5%, obliterating the annual target with a 25.3% increase. This meticulously crafted paid media strategy not only solidified Swisse’s market position but also sparked a vitamin revolution, leaving competitors in awe and consumers clamouring for more.
The campaign’s resounding success across paid, owned, and earned media ecosystems demonstrates the power of an integrated, innovative approach in moving the needle on critical business objectives.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Publicis Groupe Power of One, “End The Trend”, Cancer Council Australia & Australian Government
In the summer of 2024, the Australian Government & Cancer Council Australia launched one of the largest youth skin cancer prevention campaigns in Australian history.
Two in three Australians will be diagnosed with skin cancer in their lifetime and around 2,000 Australians die from skin cancer every year, and yet most young Aussies still suntan.
The culprit? Powerful cultural norms, that glamorise suntanning, perpetuated by social media, brands, media and influencers. To address this, we devised the communications platform:
“END THE TREND”
Suntanning may be trending. But so is skin cancer. By harnessing cultural influences to challenge thinking and provide timely behavioural cues, we can empower them to end this dangerous trend.
Before we could think about telling young people to be safe in the sun, we needed to address the cultural drivers and attitudes that have made the trend of suntanned skin so enduring. Our 3-stage campaign deviated from the traditional public health approach, by leading with the cultural norm setting voices and brands that our research showed our audience admired.
In fact, the first two stages of activity were completely unbranded. Only when these powerful forces had softened rigid attitudes and norms did we consider the audience to be suitably primed for branded behaviour change messaging.
Blending partnerships with key youth culture tentpole brands like The Iconic, Laneway Festival, PopSugar, Buzzfeed and Snapchat alongside highly targeted media placements, and extensive influencer activity, the campaign worked to put an emphasis on audience participation and co-ownership to ensure our message got through.
And it worked. The results demonstrate we have created momentum & started real generational change of not only how young people think about suntans – but how they act in the sun.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
REA Group, “Home of Homes”, realestate.com.au
Forget flashy gimmicks – realestate.com.au prioritises robust media planning to achieve clear business results. In a competitive market, we tackled three challenges:
1. Boost Brand Attributes: Increase trust, preference, and understanding of user needs while maintaining awareness.
2. Elevate realEstimate Awareness: Drive awareness and consideration for our property valuation tool.
3. Optimise Media Effectiveness: Enhance efficiency and impact of channel mix.
• Back to Basics, Forward Results: We revisited media fundamentals: reach, frequency, attention, data-driven targeting, synergy, and context.
• Maximising Reach: Utilising Roy Morgan data, we built a tool to identify incremental reach opportunities, reaching 98% of Australians. We expanded publisher partnerships, reducing costs and adding OOH reach. Additionally, Ipsos iris insights helped us select the best BVOD platforms.
• Mitigating Frequency: Yahoo’s DSP and Samba TV data enabled us to optimise “screens” activity, reducing ad fatigue. We also shifted our TV buying strategy to prioritise reach over environment, minimising frequency.
• Data-Driven Optimisation: Our first-party data ensured high SOV in key areas. This resulted in 73% of OOH inventory being in relevant districts.
• Contextual Integration: Partnering with Channel 7’s Sunrise, we created realestate.com.au talent segments within the program’s monthly PropTrack report, building trust with consumers and generating 17-minutes of on-air exposure.
The campaign delivered substantial growth in brand awareness, significantly enhancing key brand attributes. Our property valuation tool, realEstimate, experienced remarkable growth in both awareness and consideration.
Beyond these brand metrics, the campaign generated exceptional business outcomes, including significant increases in new member acquisition and the utilization of our property valuation tool. Furthermore, we achieved a substantial improvement in media return on investment.
realestate.com.au is committed to media excellence. With a focus on fundamentals and strategic optimisation, we achieved outstanding results, solidifying our leadership position as Australia’s number one address in property.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
Special & PHD, “Shift 20 Initiative”, Dylan Alcott Foundation
Despite almost 20% of Australians having a visible or non-visible disability, only 1% are represented by brands in their advertising and marketing communications, leaving a large portion of the Australian population feeling unseen and unacknowledged.
Partnering with the Dylan Alcott Foundation, we were tasked with not only raising awareness around the lack of visibility of people with disability in mainstream media, but also inspiring long term change.
In response – we launched the Shift 20 Initiative, a collective movement of some of Australia’s biggest brands, committed to normalising disability by increasing visibility of people with disability in advertising.
The campaign achieved blanket coverage across the national and global media landscape, creating mass inclusion on a national scale. The campaign achieved:
25% increase in awareness & understanding of the issue in the first 3-weeks– 500% over target.
78% uplift in recall of disability representation in participating brand’s advertising in the first 3-weeks.
10% increase in overall recall of disability representation in advertising in the first 3-weeks.
63% of people felt more positive about a brand after seeing advertising featuring people with disability & 27% said they’d take some kind of action.
Sparked a national conversation with 144 pieces of media coverage in AU & 467 in USA, exceeding
targets by 80%+. Over 600M impressions. Combined reach of 96%
amongst Australians 18+.
Post launch, 200+ brands, organisations and agencies reached out to see how they could get involved with Shift20.
However the true marker of success was the response from the community of people with disability, with personal stories shared expressing gratitude for the campaign’s role in raising awareness and fostering positive lasting change.
Grab your Early Bird tickets today before it’s too late!
The Hallway, “The Cardboard Cake”, Wholegreen Bakery
PROBLEM
Coeliac disease affects over 1 in 70 Australians (>380,000) with accelerating rates of diagnosis every year.
Getting diagnosed with this incurable autoimmune condition is stressful and unpleasant, especially the prospect of having to eat gluten-free food the rest of your life – because the general perception is that means a life sentence of replacing the food you love with bland and tasteless alternatives. Especially with the reputation that “gluten-free food tastes like cardboard.”
In this case, perception is not reality; Australia’s Wholegreen Bakery has been making delicious gluten-free food for more than a decade. It’s just that most Australians still don’t know this is possible.
IDEA
With 2024 Coeliac Awareness Week looming, in partnership with Wholegreen Bakery and coeliac Australia, we decided it was time to dispel the “Gluten-free food tastes like cardboard” myth once and for all – by creating a cake that looks like cardboard, but tastes like… delicious cake.
EXECUTION
No one had ever made a Cardboard Cake before, so bringing our idea to the bakery shelves required months of R&D. We had to lean into industrial design, creating a bespoke baking tray to make pastry look like corrugated cardboard and trod a delicate tightrope, balancing cardboard appearance with delicious taste.
With a media budget of $0 to achieve our campaign goals, we made The Cardboard Cake our media. We launched during Coeliac Awareness Week by identifying a list of 100+ celebrity chefs and foodie influencers and simply sending them each a slice of Cardboard Cake fresh from the baker’s oven with an invitation to share their feedback on social media.
UM, “How The SEEKret Turned Plateau Into Growth” Seek
v2food, “Update Your Plate”