B&T Awards The Work: Best Content Marketing Strategy Shortlisted

Content marketing doesn’t immediately inspire a quickening heart rate, yet when you look at the brands behind some of the shortlisted work here, largely banks and insurance companies, you quickly realise it’s where the big money plays.

In the Best Content Marketing Category, judges were looking for a thorough overview of a content marketing project. Credit was given for creativity and innovation; the strategy; evidence of its effectiveness such as measurement of lead generation, sales conversion and increased brand awareness; audience reach and the overall impact on the brand/product.

Of course, now that you’re invested in shortlisted entries, why not come along and see who will be crowned the winners at the Hordern Pavilion on Friday 24 November 2023? Early bird tickets are limited so don’t run the risk of paying full price later.

Secure your table now!

And if you haven’t already, don’t forget to check out the entire shortlists for the 2023 B&T Awards here and here.

Catch up also on the B&T Awards shortlisted work here:

• B&T Award For Bravery
• B&T Award for Diversity
• Best Content Marketing Strategy
• Best CTV Campaign
• Best Data-Driven Marketing Campaign
• Best Digital Campaign, sponsored by Twitch
• Best Direct Response Campaign
• Best Integrated Campaign
• Best Media Campaign
• Best OOH Campaign
• Best PR Campaign
• Best TV Campaign
• Best Use of Sponsorship

Below are the finalists with each heading showing the name of the agency, the name of the campaign and then the client footing the bill. The words are as submitted by the entrant.

Bastion, dwayne bennett, budget direct

The challenge:

Budget Direct wanted to build brand salience and consideration by leveraging sponsorship of brand-new NRL team The Dolphins. We had to help launch the Dolphins team, drive membership and attendance and importantly make Budget Direct feel like their most significant and likeable sponsor – even though they weren’t!

The Dolphins best asset was one of the greatest coaches in NRL history – Wayne Bennett, However, he is not known for his humour or love of the media. Our challenge became – how do you activate & supercharge a sponsorship when your most recognisable name is out of play?

The thinking:

We needed another way to create and share engaging content. A key insight into NRL fans helped unlock our solution: NRL fans don’t engage with brands the same way they engage with other fans.

The idea:

Budget Direct created their own ‘Dolphins super-fan’ – Dwayne Bennet, Wayne Bennett’s long lost and more extrovert cousin.

Through quick-wit and humour, Dwayne ‘s character acted as a bridge between NRL fans and Budget Direct, allowing us to share a mix of episodic, always-on, live and reactive content.

The outcome:

In four months, Dwayne amassed a legion of dedicated ‘’Phinatics, including many fans of other NRL teams, including over 40k followers on TikTok, 10k on Facebook, and 8.3k on Instagram. Helping the Dolphins raise to 4th place on the NRL Membership Ladder in their first season.

Budget Direct has also achieved a huge level of exposure across all major social media platforms, with many subtle references to Dwayne Bennett’s great ‘mates’ at Budget Direct

During the campaign period Budget Direct also delivered “its largest Car & Home Insurance new customer sales volume in its 22-year history” said Jonathan Kerr, Budget Direct Chief Growth Officer.

CARAT, A Good Heart, Flora ProActiv

Someone has a heart attack or stroke every four minutes.

Whilst the brief that we received wasn’t about saving lives, our approach was one that was designed to just that (whilst also smashing the briefs objectives!)

Whilst Flora ProActiv has been clinically proven to reduce cholesterol levels by up to 10% when used as a butter replacement for just 21 days, it was losing share to lower price alternatives. The brief was to reverse a downward sales trend for a mature product that commands a high price premium within an established category.

With only 10% of the adults who suffer from heart disease realizing that they are at risk, the real challenge, and route to growth, was to close this ‘diagnosis gap’ by helping to empower those at risk of heart disease to take action.

It wasn’t that people didn’t care about their heart health, but that their heart simply wasn’t getting stuck on their minds for long enough for them to do remember to do anything about it. We needed an approach that was not only motivating, but unforgettable.

To get the heart on the mind our idea was to get the heart stuck in the mind.

We did this by re-recording our own distinctive version of ‘A good heart’ with ex yellow wiggle Greg Page.
This heart anthem was complete with a distinctive heart inspired drum beat, and timed to be exactly four minutes long in recognition of the incidence of strokes and heart attacks in Australia.

The Flora ProActiv heart anthem launched during national heart week, to piggyback on the national awareness being driven by the Heart Foundation, to make a modest media budget work as hard as possible.

With over 64k extra households giving Flora ProActiv a go, the results didn’t miss a beat!

CHEP Network, (Un)Geddes, Karicare

The brief:

Karicare, a baby formula brand, is on a mission to redefine how society portrays parenting. Today parents are under more pressure than ever, everywhere they turn they see an inaccurate portrayal of what parenting should be like – that it should look and feel perfect.

We had two key objectives (1) redefine how parents view ‘perfect’ parenting moments, (2) turn around a year-long flatline in market share growth.

The Strategy:

First time parents are content hungry and we needed an ecosystem of tailored content orchestrated across four phases (tease, launch, impact and action) to cater to every way in which our audience would consume the campaign:

• Influencer: we partnered with Anne Geddes, challenging her to break her style to show the ‘real’ moments behind the perfection she is famous for.
• PR: Across 60 pieces of media coverage and interviews, Anne explains she is breaking her style to reassure parents that parenting is meant to be chaotic and real.
• Research: our research uncovered some startling facts:
  -96% of Australian parents feel they’re under pressure to be perfect
  -61% of parents feel bad when they see ‘perfect’ images
• Social: long and short form film content allowed Anne to take the viewer behind the scenes of this new collection of images, allowing parents to feel seen through her work like never before.
• Native: a content partnership with Mamamia saw stories and images of messy and joyful daily parenting adventures flooding social feeds.

Together this worked to show parents that real can be perfect too.

The Results: (Un)Geddes hit a cultural nerve, achieving:

• 52 million+ reach with 60+ pieces of media coverage.
• Record market share at 14.8%.
• The only brand in the category to grow in 2022, by 23%!
• Increased brand advocacy by 40%.

Essencemediacom, Levelling the playing field, Alienware

Innocean, Voice of the Sea, Australian Marine Conservation Society

In today’s age of environmental crisis, people have switched off to bad news (1 in 2 people, in fact). This is a huge challenge for conservation not-for-profits.

To turn apathy into action, it was time to change the tune.

Introducing Australian Marine Conservation Society’s VOICE OF THE SEA:
The national anthem of the ocean recruiting the next generation of ocean protectors through the power of song.

We partnered with king of Australian country music, John Williamson – an icon with a 50 year history of turning Aussies into environmentalists. His hits have become Aussie anthems, and the soundtracks to major conservation protests saving river systems and log forests.

Together we composed an unrequited love song to the sea, a melody exploring all the issues faced by our seas and marine life.

More than a song, a content generation engine that would become the evergreen brand platform for AMCS.

From lyrics to lessons, we created an animated lyric film unpacking all the themes of the song, then launched through the future voices of our future generation – school children.

Schools around the nation became our voice at end-of-year school concerts to thousands of captive families.

Voice of the Sea then stretched into PR, lesson plans in the Australian Education syllabus and now a Penguin children’s book.

From a hum to a rally-cry, we’re ingraining ocean conservation into the fabric of Australian culture for generations to come.

Keep Left, Upskill Your Financial Wellbeing, ANZ

Improving Australia’s financial wellbeing is ANZ’s north star as a business and a brand. It tasked Keep Left with developing a content marketing strategy to educate and increase consideration amongst millennial customers.

Keep Left’s audience research revealed millennials are secretly embarrassed to not know more about ‘grown up’ topics such as capital gains tax and superannuation. Armed with this insight, Keep Left proposed educational content series ‘Upskill Your Financial Wellbeing,’ leveraging the second largest search engine in the world – YouTube – as the primary channel, given YouTube was a place our audience frequently went to inform and educate themselves.

Millennials can smell contrived advice from a bank a mile away, so authenticity was key and ensuring the content was native to YouTube. Australian comedian Louis Hanson was engaged to front the series and ask the finance questions young people have on their minds to a team of ANZ experts. To build empathy with our audience, Louis opened each episode by declaring ‘It’s okay, I didn’t know either!’

The topics of the 12-episode series were informed by Google search trends to ensure ANZ was provided helpful content that indeed answering the key finance questions millennials had. Launched in December 2022 and amplified via digital and social channels via paid and earned media, the campaign’s success can be attributed to the Keep Left team’s ability to craft a message that was informative, educational, and resonated with the audience – telling a story that inspired action. Results to date include:

• 27,124,065 total view views
• 117,964 total watch time
• 456% increase in ANZ’s YouTube subscribers
• 64% increase in organic traffic to the ANZ website.

M&C Saatchi Group, Safe, CommBank

In 2022, devious scammers traumatised 1 in 5 Australians, robbing them of savings earmarked for important life goals. Scam scenarios had shifted shape, from long lost royal relative sob stories, to deep fake technology that could fool the most astute of us. As Australia’s largest bank and caretaker of the nation’s hard-earned money, CommBank was compelled to act on behalf of all Australians. Eliminating scamming altogether is an impossible task, but CommBank could help the nation to reduce their risk by making customers aware of innovative security features and through an educational content program.

CommBank Safe led to 748,197 people taking action to protect themselves and potentially avoided a conservative calculation of $66,302,769 in losses by preventing inevitable scam exposure from becoming devastating.

Stepping up to fight an invisible enemy led to improvements in both trust and reputation. And most importantly continue today as an act of leadership and simply good citizenry as CommBank shares these innovations with large corporations, government and beyond.

Six Black Pens, NAB Business & Private Banking content program, NAB

In a post-pandemic world, as inflationary pressures mounted, business confidence plummeted. Business owners were desperate for trustworthy insight. In 2022, NAB tasked us to be bold in response: to radically reinvent its business content strategy to deliver more with less – more powerful insights, more practical resources and business building tools, on 25% less budget.

The ask? A content marketing strategy of unprecedented cohesion.
A content program for 1.1 million NAB business and private customers and the 2.6 million Australian business owners and decision-makers nationally that:

• Was tailored to six specialist business segments
• Delivered to NAB’s business strategy and goals
• Connected NAB’s content producers

A bold strategy

We created one framework with three core pillars aligned to the sales funnel for all audiences and content types, flexible enough to cater for consumption, format and channel preferences.

• We built out one world, strengthening NAB’s voice and brand and launch editorial initiatives.
• We created one ecosystem of content producers for better efficiency.

An operational revolution

Moving from generalised to personalised content helped us hero our business segment audiences’ priorities.
Our strategy included:

• A clear, rigorous framework: Every asset mapped to three content pillars, the bank’s business strategy and audience needs.
• Tailored sub-streams: Across six business and private audiences – small, medium, regional and agribusiness, health, professional services, private.
• Mixed content styles: A mega calendar optimising audience content based on consumption data.
• Diverse channels: Content flighted and optimised via Mindshare.
• BAU to big moments: Always-on program plus five hero content programs to create pace and difference.

With some 600 assets published through the year, this program delivered. And it performed. With year-on-year improvements across KPIs, it achieved some of the best results NAB Business & Private Bank has ever seen.

Watch the case study we couldn’t embed for some reason here.

Special, Last Performance, Partners Life Insurance

Life Insurance. Only 29% of New Zealanders have it. And traditional advertising wasn’t a motivating factor in swaying Kiwis to get it.

New Zealand life insurance provider, Partners Life, sought to do something radically different.

We revealed three critical truths:

• “Peace of mind” advertising wasn’t shifting the needle. We needed to embrace the reality of what we were selling. Death.
• Hindsight from an accident, break-in or illness sparks interest in insurance, but death, well, that’s a little too late for hindsight.
• True Crime entertainment is hugely popular in NZ – making ‘death’ more palatable.

These truths revealed an opportunity – rather than using traditional advertising, we needed to activate where people were already engaging with death.

Introducing… ‘The Last Performance’

Turning NZ’s favourite murder mystery TV show into an ad for life insurance.

In every episode of The Brokenwood Mysteries, someone dies. So, at the end of every episode we brought these murdered characters back from the dead to share their regrets about not getting life insurance. Using the same actors, director, crew and sets, we created an all-in-one content partnership, media-hijacking, product placement, and good old-fashioned testimonial, that challenged NZ’s preconceptions of life insurance.

All six episodes offered unique hindsight into the consequences of unexpected death reflective of the characters’ life and reminded NZ that that life isn’t scripted so it’s best to ‘Plan ahead and get life right’.

Beyond the TV show integration, we used the dead characters’ pleas in social weekly, and drove traffic to our website.

Our message reached 59% of New Zealanders, category interest increased by 12%, brand awareness increased by 6% and brand consideration increased by 5%, as The Last Performance captured the attention of New Zealand and turned a nation apathetic to life insurance, into one actively engaged with it.

The Royals, Pet Health Magazine, Ivory Coat

To help high-quality Australian pet food brand Ivory Coat grow by 50% in two years, The Royals created a category-busting, entirely new brand platform – “For pets as healthy as you” – encouraging humans to think of their pets’ health like their own.

But pet health can’t be improved with ads alone, or expecting owners to click through to a website. Ivory Coat needed to disrupt the habit of finding a pet food brand and sticking to it, with compelling reasons to try a new brand beyond an ingredient story alone.

We needed to find a platform that was a natural and familiar place to promote a healthy lifestyle, diet and fitness. What better than a health and fitness magazine?

Enter Pet Health Australia, a 64-page high-gloss fitness magazine for dogs and cats, helping owners make their pets as healthy as them.

The Royals put together a team of experienced journalists, editors (including a former editor of The Sun-Herald), photographers and designers to ideate, write, design and produce the magazine – from scratch.

Pet Health featured 22 articles and leaned on different content formats from long-form features, to data story-telling, listicles celebrity features (including Ash Barty’s life coach Ben Crowe), plus guides and reviews, and interviews with subject matter experts from pet nurses, to nutritionists and vets.

About 10,000 copies were distributed to specialty retail outlets, ticket holders at the Dog Lovers Show, partner veterinary clinics and through the Pet Health mobile stand, delivering strong results for Ivory Coat:

• 18% KG growth vs forecast (May – July 2022)
• 1.34 million impressions across News Digital: delivered pet owners
• 22% GSV growth vs forecast (May – July 2022)
• 5.9 million reached through OOH (transit and LF)
• 798,000 pet owners reached through tactical news ads
• Circulation of 10,000 magazines (readership approx 25,000)

Wavemaker, Outreach, Mitsubishi

Chances are you’ve just read the title to this entry and thought: auto brand x road trip content – how conventional, how clichéd.

But this was a different approach to car content. No overtly branded images of cars cruising through Tourism Australia’s greatest hits. Actually, no cars at all. And destinations so obscure even seasoned travel editors hadn’t heard of them.

Indeed, creating content about the least-searched destinations made Mitsubishi more searchable than ever.

And the best bit: it was content that was published organically. Informed by SEO insights, it was content that was timely and newsworthy, not overtly-branded puff pieces.

Mitsubishi Motors’ innovative road trip content strategy effectively combined SEO with PR, driving authority, visibility, and business value. The campaign achieved remarkable results, proving its ability to stand out from competitors and solidifying the brand’s reputation as a leader in the automotive industry.

WiredCo., 7 Second Resume, Indeed

We helped Australia prepare for the realities of the seven second resume with Indeed, increasing brand awareness 13% and traffic 90%.

Seven seconds. That’s the average amount of time recruitment managers give a resume before deciding to move on. Sobering.

Indeed was looking for a way to increase brand consideration amongst Gen Y and Z’s. They knew that their comprehensive tools and resources were of value in the Great Resignation. The problem – you can tell people tools exist that give them an advantage, but it’s hard for them to see exactly why they’ll help unless they feel the emotional benefit.

In an ultra-competitive recruitment market, we knew people would be shocked into action if they knew the truth and harsh reality their resume faced; seven seconds. The seven second resume content series brought this to life for four Australians in a raw and emotional way, provoking thousands of Australians into talking about what their seven seconds could look like.

This is a world first story of how we created a slightly strange content experiment to help Australia prepare for the realities of the seven second resume with Indeed, increasing brand awareness 13% and traffic 90%.