Australia & NZ: The Asset of Antipodean Attitude

Things are on the up Down Under, with Australia and New Zealand producing such award-winning advertising they jointly waltzed out of Cannes 2013 with a haul of 119 Lions. Joe Lancaster heads south to investigate and finds ad folk with sunny, non-whinging attitudes, creating brave, culture-defining work.

It’s nice to visit Australia and New Zealand. Not just for the sun, sea, sand and other geographic benefits, but also the refreshing difference in attitude from most of the rest of the world’s ad folk. Instead of the usual whinging about ‘chicken-shit clients this’ and ‘dwindling budgets that’, the morale among the creative community is pretty upbeat.

“Creatively we’re punching above our weight in Australia, New Zealand even more so,” says Clemenger BBDO Melbourne chairman James McGrath. “Clients are naturally conservative and there’s plenty of ordinary work being done, but we’re doing ok.”

Not-so-dumb ways to succeed

‘Punching above our weight’ is a phrase you hear a lot here and you don’t even need to set foot on local soil to realise it’s warranted. A little caign you might know called Dumb Ways To Die did fairly well last year, raging through award shows like an Abrams tank attacking a LEGO village, leading the region’s ad trophy smash-and-grab.

The agency behind it, McCann Melbourne, picked up more metal than a Russian powerlifter at Cannes (including five Grands Prix, making it the festival’s most-awarded caign ever) and beyond, helping the shop claim joint top spot for Most Awarded Agency in the 2013 Gunn Report and making a huge contribution towards Australia’s fantastic fourth-place total Lions haul of 87.

New Zealand chipped in with a more-than-respectable 32, not bad considering the combined population of the two countries is around 27m, and all the more impressive that ad folk in both markets resisted the urge to submit every half-decent piece of eligible work they could, resulting in a high entry-to-win ratio.

“I think [another Dumb Ways is] what most agencies and creatives must be looking at now; yes you can do the one-off ad but where’s the big caign that people will talk about for years? It’s not just the print, outdoor and TV, Dumb Ways was so successful because it had the app, the game, the song – there were so many components to it,” says an admiring Scott Lambert, creative director at Innocean Worldwide Sydney, one of many huge fans of the caign and someone who’d like more big caigns to be green-lit. “We usually have to be quicker and more nimble with output. To have six to 12 months to work on a project and get it right, it’s a long time. You’ve got to have a client that’s willing to support that.”

While Dumb Ways has been the star of the show, in the last year, the region’s produced many other brilliant caigns. Network agencies including the Clemengers, Y&Rs and Saatchis, as well as indies, such as The Monkeys, have been making work that’s cut through mediocre media space clutter. Perhaps there is a wider discussion to be had than merely how to grab a few more Facebook likes or YouTube views though.

“Australia is scrambling to define what it is to be Australian right now and this conversation stretches much further than ad land,” says David Nobay, creative chairman at Droga5 Sydney, in reference to the nation’s stance on issues such as immigration. “I see the vacuum created by so much bullshit and rhetoric in Parliament on the subject as a unique opportunity for a brand to move into a broader space and start to lead and influence the chatter. That’s certainly where we’re pushing a lot of our effort these days.”

Following the sale of a large minority stake in Droga5 to talent agency WME, Nobay sees an opportunity for brands to engage audiences as part of culture-defining entertainment rather than in reaction to it. “Today, it’s more than likely, whether we approve or not, that fundamental decisions [made by consumers] are driven by the shows we watch, the celebrities we follow and the tunes we download, as by anything traditional influencers have to say.

In the past, advertising has been so often accused of simply aping pop culture, with the strategic and cultural insights we gain from WME, for the first time, we have a genuine ability to get in front of it.”

While not everybody down here is complaining about shrinking budgets, you won’t hear many ad folk say, ‘there’s too much money. We don’t know what to do with it,’ and lack of filmmaking funds is a topic often on the lips of producers.

“Everyone’s moaned about budgets since I started in this industry but it’s becoming a bit of a problem now,” says Sydney-based PLAZA co-founder/EP Peter Masterton, having recently judged Craft at the AWARD Awards where, “a lot of conversations were about budgets.”

Smaller markets also allow few opportunities for talent development says Sam Sherriff, business manager at Sydney production company The FEDS. “There is a crop of young directors fighting for good scripts.” Sherriff and her peers have seen long-form branded content become much more popular recently. “Content is the great debate. Lots of clients want to do it but don’t want to pay much for it,” she says, and that even extends to TV networks. “Channel 9 can buy an episode of NCIS for $27k, so why would they invest in an original local production?”

But while branded content always seems like a great idea, there’s the classic quandary: “It’s hard to find long-form stuff people want to watch – stuff that’s not just long ads,” says Plaza’s Masterton. It can be done of course, as The Sweet Shop’s directors Special Problems showed with their nine-minute film, Echoes, for Lexus, one of a series of five shot by different directors from around the world.

“The lines are blurred now,” says Ed Pontifex, EP at the Melbourne office of The Sweet Shop’s international network. “The brief was that it didn’t have to feature the car. It’s entertaining people rather than selling to them.”

Simple structures for speedy ideas

Other production companies finding new ways to serve agencies and connect with audiences include Finch, with its unique technical innovations that you can read about on page 52, and Revolver Sydney, whose offshoot Will O’Rourke realises creative projects varying from events and art installations to experiential ad caigns and digital content via a roster of filmmakers, writers, designers, producers and artists, including The Glue Society, Steve Pavlovic and Chris Bosse. The post scene is returning to a healthy place, too, after a tough couple of years, with newcomer Heckler having grown from five to fifty staff in three years, proving there’s life in the industry yet.

Clemenger’s McGrath believes that “New Zealand benefits from simpler marketing structures,” allowing more creative ideas to get through the machine quicker and Saatchi & Saatchi New Zealand ECD Antonio Navas agrees. “Australia is a much bigger market, and with that comes bigger budgets and bigger budgets means more people watching how you spend it; more money for focus groups.

New Zealand is much smaller. Smaller budgets means big freedom and bigger, more unusual creative solutions.” His agency scored a viral hit last year with TUI’s Plumber, a fake video where a group of mates rigged beer barrels to their supposedly unwitting friend’s plumbing so that it poured from every pipe in his house. It was one of several slightly unconventional recent ads out of the country which included FCB Auckland’s Driving Dogs (below), where canines got behind the wheel and actually drove cars in a film for MINI/SPCA.

“New Zealand doesn’t really follow trends, [the natives] are creators, innovators and their indomitable spirit makes them inventors. By the time an international fad arrives in New Zealand they are already onto a completely new thing. It is refreshing being a part of that, living at the edge of the world makes you brave,” says Navas, originally from Venezuela, one of many expats who enjoy the energising creative freedom on offer.

“It’s not hard to attract great creative talent to New Zealand. The upside for creatives coming here is that they get a lot of very good work in their book very quickly,” says Philip Andrew, ECD at Clemenger BBDO Wellington. “Turnaround times on briefs are fast and while the budgets are smaller than elsewhere we are able to get a lot of the money into the actual work,” although he warns that it’s not always plain sailing. “Clients get the work they deserve and for the work to improve across the board here, marketers need to want it.” Read more from Andrew on page 58.

In both New Zealand and Australia it’s clear that more marketers have been asking for great work in recent times and what’s also key is that they don’t just want to compete on a regional level. “We don’t compare ourselves to ourselves,” says Clemenger’s McGrath. “It’s Cannes, D&AD and The One Show we want to win. We can compete with the UK and US.” You wouldn’t argue with him, because while it’s doubtful that a caign from Australia or New Zealand will live up to Dumb Ways in terms of trophies any time soon, that’s because it’s unlikely a caign from anywhere else in the world will either.