It’s time for more finalists work at the B&T Awards, presented by Rokt. And today, we’re showcasing the quite wonderful work duelling it out to take home the Best Creator-Led Campaign.
This award rewards creative campaigns for brands that are led at their heart by social media creators.
These campaigns showcase an impactful and creative collaboration between a creator(s) and the brand that would not have been possible through other media.
A couple of days ago, we took a look at the finalists for the Best Consumer PR Campaign award.
As part of each submission, we ask agencies to submit a maximum 300-word condensed version of their entry. Below, it’s pasted verbatim. It’s their take on why they should win. But only the judges will decide.
To find out who wins first, make sure you buy your tickets for the B&T Awards. It’s on 27 November 2026 in Sydney.
And don’t forget our live judging day for Agency of the Year and some Leadership and Marketing awards on 5 November, also in Sydney. Click here to see if you’ll need to suit up and present to our formidable in-person jury.
Connected Media Group, ‘Skinstitut | The Skin Check’, Skinstitut
There’s a genre of content built around catching beauty brands out – a $150 serum next to a $12 one, four words: “they’re literally the same.” Dupe culture has turned skincare shoppers into ingredient-list investigators, and industry research puts category price scepticism as high as 75%. That should have been Skinstitut’s moment: pharmaceutical-strength actives at a price under $49. But the same audience that rewards an honest product is quick to drag one that oversells itself – and Skinstitut was mid-reposition, launching hero products into an audience primed to fact-check every claim.
A brand can’t out-argue that scepticism. Meta’s research backs it: 71% of people buy within days of seeing creator content, because a creator’s review reads as evidence, not a marketing claim. So casting had to answer three doubts: does the science hold up, does it survive real use, and is it as good as the expensive stuff? Three creators anchored the proof – Sharn O’Brien, a dermal therapist; Morgan Mitchell, an Olympic athlete and mother; and Isabel Larkin, a fashion and beauty editor – backed by 18 more creators working the same brief. The team called it The Skin Check: The Claim, The Check, The Verdict.
Conviction showed up in the budget first: Skinstitut went from zero creator spend to 60% of paid social in a year. Creator content reached 1.16M new people. Skinstitut beat its FY25-26 revenue target by 26%, mostly in months with no sale running. And when Skinstitut narrowed its retargeting audience by 60% in June, paid social ROAS jumped 152%.
In a category where the internet checks every price tag against every claim, Skinstitut didn’t try to win the argument. It handed the mic to a dermal therapist, an Olympian, and a magazine editor – and let 1.16 million sceptics reach their own verdict.
EssenceMediacom and WPP Media Influence, ‘Liquid Gold’, KFC
KFC had four weeks to launch Liquid Gold, a new bigger 150g dunking tub, and make it a commercial hit. In a cluttered QSR market, sauce is an afterthought in a sachet, and the Gen Z fans KFC needed most scroll straight past traditional food ads. Our insight: for 18-24s, eating is social, ritualistic and visual. Dunking had already become a theatrical food ritual on TikTok, sensory content people share rather than skip.
We turned that ritual into a spectator sport. Borrowing the codes of basketball, our audience’s fastest-growing sport, we built The KFC Liquid Gold Dunk Contest and handed it to creators to compete in. The strategic shift was simple: move from showing the product to building the campaign around the behaviour that made it distinctive. The dunk became a repeatable creator format, not just a product moment.
Creators were the contest. We built a multi-layer creator system plus a podcast strand, sequenced weekly. Our tease turned the act of “dunking” into a name: Duncan. Anyone called Duncan could claim a free Liquid Gold sauce, with @duncan__james breaking the news and driving 780,822 pre-launch views. Macro creators owned launch day, mid-tier creators widened the field, and food reviewers like @russeats and @nectoriouspapi did what a TV ad can’t: demonstrated the dunk and drove in-store trial. 14 creators filmed across 12 KFC stores in two weeks; every asset earned 72 hours to prove itself organically before we backed the winners with paid spend.
#2 > #1 > Category leadership in Share of Influence (51.4%), out-engaging all five tracked QSR rivals combined.
21.18% Meta 3-sec VTR, +226% above benchmark and KFC’s highest ever for a product campaign.
+71.1% Youth (18-24) purchase intent lift.
Weekly transactions +102% and store sales +86% vs the 12-month taste-layer average; 1.94x creator ROAS.
EssenceMediacom and WPP Media Sport & Entertainment, Livewire, ‘Badge vs Buttons’, Queensland Police Service
Queensland Police Service (QPS) faced an increasingly competitive recruitment market, with policing struggling to attract younger Australians who perceived the career as high-risk, restrictive and not for people like them. QPS needed to reposition policing as a modern, purpose-driven career and increase qualified expressions of interest by 2%.
Rather than asking young Australians to believe policing had changed, we partnered with the people they already trusted: gaming creators. Our research revealed that 75% of our Gen Z recruitment audience were regular gamers, developing skills such as leadership, teamwork, communication and rapid decision-making every day. We saw an opportunity to prove that these were the very same skills required in modern policing.
The result was Badge vs Buttons – a creator-led campaign that collided two worlds that had never meaningfully intersected. Working alongside leading Australian gaming creators Vindooly (13.5 million followers) and Berticuss (1.5 million followers), we developed a “Skill-Sync” framework that mapped gaming behaviours to real policing capabilities.
Creators became the heart of the campaign, not simply its distribution. They trained alongside QPS officers, undertaking tactical challenges, communication drills and resilience testing before inviting officers into their own world through live Fortnite and Rocket League streams. These authentic, unscripted exchanges transformed recruitment into entertainment while allowing creators to demonstrate, in their own voice and style, that gaming skills translate into real-world policing.
Across YouTube, Twitch, TikTok and Instagram, creators generated 1.4 million video views, 1.2 million social reach and drove a 40% increase in new users to the QPS recruitment website after the first phase, followed by a further 41.8% increase after the livestreams. Most importantly, the campaign delivered 5,507 expressions of interest – a 4% increase versus the previous period, doubling the campaign target – while significantly improving perceptions of QPS as a modern, collaborative and highly desirable career.
Hello, ‘Hello x Paramount+ Two Years Later’, Paramount+
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How do you make Australia fall in love with a man who doesn’t exist?
Two Years Later had no global franchise, no existing fan base and no cultural momentum. We could have briefed influencers to post trailers and tell their followers to watch. Instead, we made creators characters in the story itself.
Before audiences met Ryan and Emily on screen, giant unbranded love letters from a mysterious “Ryan” began appearing across Brisbane, searching for the woman he’d lost.
No Paramount+ branding. No show title. No explanation.
But four projections alone wouldn’t create a national obsession.
Creators would.
At the centre was Aimee Connor, whose lo-fi, follow-along commentary style and 1.6 million followers made her our perfect hero investigator. She discovered clues, questioned Ryan’s intentions and brought her community along in real time.
Around her, 20 strategically deployed creators discovered, investigated and debated the mystery from different perspectives. Instead of 20 influencers delivering 20 versions of an ad, we created an influencer ecosystem collectively investigating the same love story.
Their communities joined in. Comments became theories. Followers searched for Emily. Mainstream media joined the hunt. Soon, a fictional romance had become national news.
The final clue invited Emily to Brisbane’s Clock Tower, where actor Brenton Thwaites emerged as Ryan, revealing the mystery as the real-world prelude to Two Years Later.
The organic creator network delivered 4.62M impressions, 1M+ reach, 541K ThruPlays and 137,940 engagements, with a 4.5% organic engagement rate.
Most importantly, influence converted. Two Years Later delivered Paramount+’s biggest Australian Original launch to date and exceeded subscriber acquisition and first-stream expectations by more than 20% across its first 28 days.
Howatson+Company, ‘Dirty Old Secrets’, Seasol International
Seasol has been in Australian gardens since 1974, but by 2025 its loyal customers were ageing while more than 70% of 18–35-year-olds were learning to garden from TikTok, Instagram and YouTube, where the advice was performative, not expert.
Seasol needed to recruit a generation of young gardeners without hiring the polished creators. Young audiences don’t reject authority, they reject fake authority so instead of casting influencers to talk convincingly about plants, we went looking for the real thing.
Through a nationwide search, we cast ten real elderly gardeners, chosen for personality as much as expertise and made them the entire creator roster for Dirty Old Secrets, with no scripts, no actors and no media training between them. Each episode was built around one gardener’s genuine knowledge, shot in their own backyard, told with sharp, irreverent voiceover.
The bet paid off because the relationship didn’t end at episode ten. The cast became the brand’s ongoing voice replying to comments, joining trends and starring in a brand music video acting as real community managers, not one-off talent, while carrying the campaign onto billboards, a dedicated website and national PR.
Ten first-time creators drove 42 million views, 35% lower CPMs, 55% uplift in consideration and 32% purchase conversio. Proof that authenticity builds a creator audience better than polish ever could.
New Moon, ‘New Moon for H&M Seongsu’, H&M
Seongsu, Seoul: where fashion, art and culture collide, and brands battle for relevance in one of the world’s most influential neighbourhoods.
For H&M, opening a flagship here meant thinking beyond an opening event. To earn cultural relevance in one of Seoul’s most competitive creative neighbourhoods, we knew they needed a creator who could make the space feel authentically Seongsu.
We partnered with MLMA, the South Korean artist, rapper and designer known for her surreal, provocative visual language and distinctive approach to blending creative disciplines. With more than one million followers and deep ties to Seoul’s creative community, she was the creative force to bring H&M into the neighbourhood.
But we didn’t bring MLMA in to promote the store. We collaborated with her to transform it. What began as a one room artist residency became a three storey store takeover, with MLMA’s creative vision shaping every detail of the experience, from the bespoke facade and giant sculptural head to tattooed hands, hidden chambers, mirrored fitting rooms, industrial displays and digital touch points.
We worked directly with MLMA throughout the creative process, as producers in Seoul, creative collaborators and the bridge between artist and brand, working together to create an environment that people could explore, photograph, share and experience for themselves.
The result was MLMA’s biggest project to date, and a flagship that became a cultural destination in its own right. H&M earned 170+ media placements across leading publications including Hypebeast, Vogue Korea, Design Magazine, Superfuture, Designboom and FRAME, while foot traffic increased 33% week on week, with queues around the block. H&M ranked #1 for social conversation in the first two weeks, outperforming Zara and Uniqlo for the first time, proving that when creators are given the space to lead, they can turn a retail opening into a cultural moment.
Ogilvy Australia x WPP Media x Those That Do, ‘Cadbury &MORE – House of Indulgence’, Mondelez International
From a chocolate block seen as “mid” to a launch that became impossible to ignore.
Cadbury was launching &More in Australia, its biggest product innovation in over a decade: a new brand created to recruit the next generation of adult chocolate lovers. But locally, that meant overcoming a simple problem.
For younger consumers, Cadbury was loved, familiar and trusted. But it was not always craved. Under-35s were turning to ice cream, bakery, savoury snacks and bite-sized treats for immersive, multi-sensory indulgence. Chocolate, even Cadbury, risked feeling ordinary.
So we didn’t launch &More like a normal chocolate bar. We launched it like a world you wanted to enter.
The House of Indulgence turned Cadbury &More into a creator-first, sensory-first social event, designed to be experienced in real life and multiplied online. We brought 100 creators into an immersive Sydney takeover, with five rooms built around five flavours and five sensory cues: ASMR blindfold tests, tiramisu lounges, interactive cocktails, a TikTok creator summit and product worlds designed to be filmed, shared and remixed.
Then we used organic performance data from pre-launch seeding to identify the content already proving its power, amplifying the strongest creator UGC across TikTok and Meta to drive reach, relevance and trial.
One Green Bean x UM, ‘The Roast’, Meat & Livestock Australia
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For 20 years, Australian Lamb built cultural relevance through its famous summer TVC. But connecting with the next generation of lamb eaters required a different approach. Younger Australians were consuming an increasingly fragmented mix of media and food content, so simply reaching them wasn’t enough. We needed to create something they would choose to watch.
The answer was The Roast, a creator-led social entertainment format developed with Lachy Mac. Lachy wasn’t simply cast in a finished campaign. He collaborated on the format and proposed fellow creator Edan McGovern as co-host and sous chef, putting creator instinct and chemistry at the heart of the idea.
Built around a simple premise, The Roast brought creators together over lamb to roast life’s little gripes. Part talk show, part cooking show, Lachy and his guests unpacked the everyday things that get under their skin while Edan cooked lamb alongside them.
This gave lamb a natural role in the entertainment. Rather than asking creators to constantly talk about the product, lamb created the occasion for good food, good company and funny, relatable conversation.
Long-form episodes generated platform-native social cutdowns, while Edan’s Recipes transformed the dishes cooked on the show into instructional content. Collaboration posts extended the series through creator channels and communities.
The creator-led approach generated 39M+ video views, demonstrating that audiences would spend time with Australian Lamb when the brand gave them entertainment worth choosing.
The Roast showed creators could do more than extend an advertising campaign. By putting them at the heart of the creative process, Australian Lamb created a social entertainment property where lamb wasn’t an interruption to the content, it was the reason to come together.
OPEN X and BRING, ‘Coke Studio: Uncovered’, Coca-Cola
Coke Studio: Uncovered rewrote the rules of a song release by playing it out in reverse. Song covers were commissioned before the track officially released, so fans heard it first through emerging talent, in different voices and different genres, with no original to point back to. For weeks, the only versions of AROUND U anywhere came from creators. That made them the release channel, not the amplification layer.
The challenge behind it: 90% of paid media targeting misses its intended 13-24 year old audience, and Coke Studio, only in its second ANZ season, had no goodwill banked. Luminate data showed 63% of Gen Z listen to new music specifically to discover new cultures and perspectives. They hunt, so discovery had to be the value, not the packaging.
Creators across Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines were briefed to reimagine the track before release, flooding social with ‘un-covers’ that felt organic rather than manufactured. Hidden cameos linked the ANZ and Philippines music videos, rewarding fans who cross-referenced both. Secret live events, a Newcastle pizza shop DJ set, a Brookvale surf shop pop-up, a Christchurch McDonald’s, were uncovered through creator-seeded clues rather than announcements. The Encore, OXYGEN AROUND U, then brought five artists across two countries together without warning.
Creator content across AU and NZ delivered over 18 million combined impressions and reach, plus 653,800 engagements in the Philippines, from half the creators used the previous season. The sound spread well past the creators briefed: 81.6 million TikTok views, much of it fully organic. Radio, Spotify and press followed, delivering 2,355 spins, 17,500+ playlist saves and 86 earned placements, including Rolling Stone Australia. Net sentiment landed at +77.3% in ANZ and +71.78% in the Philippines.
Creators didn’t amplify the song. They released it.
Poem, Droga5, Hearts & Science, SBS, ‘SBS World Cup Watchers’ Rights Association’, SBS
SBS had the 2026 FIFA World Cup live and free, and a target of 2.1 million more Australians watching than in 2022, extra matches already factored in. The good news? 65% of games would air in Australian daytime. The bad news? That’s when Australia is at work.
Two in three Aussies admitted to having watched sport at work, most on the quiet. SBS needed to give people permission to do it out loud. But when the network holding the rights tells you to down tools, it’s an ad. When a comedian who loves the game tells your boss to get stuffed, it’s a cause.
So we created the SBS World Cup Watchers’ Rights Association, a totally legit organisation fighting for Australians’ right to watch the World Cup instead of working, and appointed real people to run it, each from a corner of Australian culture football didn’t reach.
Nick Mohammed, ‘Nate the Great’ from Ted Lasso, became Honorary Chairman. Comedians and football tragics Matt Okine, Mel Buttle and John Cruckshank joined Matildas legend Lydia Williams on the committee. They starred in two social series, posted it all on their own accounts and did the media rounds as Association officers, most going past their contracts. Audio creators across Triple M, Acast and Clubby Sports rallied their listeners, and The Betoota Advocate covered it four times.
The officers earned their titles. Committee content pulled 2.2 million views on the talent’s own channels and reached 433,600 people against a 200,000 target. Mel Buttle’s ‘Hotline’ reel alone did 1.4 million. Eight talent interviews became 75 syndicated pieces. Then the desks emptied: Australia v Paraguay at midday on a Friday became the most-watched World Cup match in SBS history. SBS’s most successful World Cup ever: 17.3 million reached, 33% above target, 210 million hours watched.
Special & Special PR, ‘No Smith’s, No Game’, Smith’s Australia – Pepsico
Building on 2025 equity, the No Smith’s No Game campaign entered a new arena with an official FIFA World Cup sponsorship.
While global ads starred Messi and Beckham, our local task was launching a blockbuster without this A-team. Research showed 89% of Aussies prefer local content, 50% favour local brands over global entities, and 78% tie sports to national identity. Lacking celebrity firepower amidst fragmented soccer viewership, our path forward was deploying authentic, localised talent to legitimately fire up and unify Aussie fandom.
To bridge global scale with local salience, Smith’s handed the whistle to local creators, transforming NSNG into a high-stakes, real-time social game show. We cast Those Carter Boys (dubbed “Australia’s Biggest Fans”) and supporting creators to land our message: you can’t watch the game without Smith’s, exposing the massive rewards for prepared fans versus the comedic fallout for those caught empty-handed. Targets aimed for a lift in sports association and in brand differentiation.
In a series of highly-entertaining surprise stunts, intercepted FIFA fans had seconds to produce Smith’s to win FIFA finals tickets in NYC, a carload of chips, or a watch-party TV set-up.
The resulting content fueled dual-screened game-time viewing, successfully deepening Smith’s sports association and driving core brand differentiation for 2026. We turned global alignment into cultural dominance.
This Is Flow, ‘Levelling Up Eye Care: How Murine Hacked The “Gamer’s Stare”, Murine (Care Pharmaceuticals)
Murine, a legacy brand in a low-interest, clinical category, faced a looming demographic crisis: Gen Z and Millennial audiences were completely blind to the eye care category. In their world, dry, strained eyes weren’t a medical condition requiring a pharmacy trip, they were simply an accepted tax of modern life.
And with Gen Z and Millennial gamers spending over two hours daily staring at a screen, where intense focus causes blink rates to drop by 60%, Murine needed to transform eye drops from an unglamorous pharmacy staple into a performance-boosting “health potion” for sacred gaming routines.
Partnering with gaming agency Livewire, Murine launched a creator-led campaign centered on authentic integration rather than disruptive ads. High-end creators like Midbeast, Develique, and Aliythia, chosen for their long stream times, hosted native “Murine Breaks” during marathon Twitch streams, applying the drops live to sustain peak performance. The narrative extended to TikTok and Instagram through setup tours and routine skits, while contextual rewarded video placements in mobile titles reinforced the ritual.
By reframing eye care as an essential digital buff, the campaign delivered unmatched engagement and commercial impact:
Double digit spike in retail sales that held steady for four consecutive weeks post-campaign.
Click-Through Rate on rewarded video +181% above industry benchmarks.
432,000 stream minutes watched across over a million targeted impressions (95% Video Completion Rate).
Over 2 and a half time increase over forecasted site traffic, routing tens of thousands of high-intent clicks.
By letting trusted creators lead the conversation, Murine successfully aged-down its 100-year-old image, turning a clinical necessity into a permanent fixture of modern gaming culture.
WiredCo., ‘Dream Garage: The show the creator community spent 25 years writing’, Honda
When the Honda Prelude came back after 25 years away its job wasn’t to shift volume, only 500 a year, but to act as a brand halo. Honda set us three goals; build quality organic reach, talk to a community that engages without being prompted, and lift consideration among 25 to 34s.
The audience had kept the car alive without any help from the brand. It left in 2001 and the community carried on building it online anyway, so a proprietary AI assisted cluster agent we named Turbo mined more than 80,000 of their comments and sorted them into 12 recurring
modification arguments. The four they’d fought over hardest became a real build specification.
Then we handed the whole thing over. Car creators Pat James and Middle.Twix hosted eight continuous hours of live, unedited restoration across Instagram and YouTube on 17 June 2026, in their own words, with nowhere to hide if a bolt seized. Honda was the venue rather than the voice.
Creators carried it from there. Nineteen creator posts came out of the footage against nine from Honda’s own channels, and when the numbers landed, 94% of the 1.65 million organic views had arrived through creators. One Reel passed a million on its own, against 99,755 across everything Honda published.
9,000 watched live and stayed an average of 20 minutes 30 seconds, the chat ran a comment every seven seconds, and a group who lasted the whole way named themselves ‘The 1pm Club’.
5,662 comments came back and we answered every one. 47 qualified leads, and a dealer screening it in his showroom sold a brand-new Prelude while it was still running.
