B&T Awards The Work: Check Out What’s On The Box With The Best TV Campaigns

As this article goes live we find ourselves smack bang in the middle of TV upfronts. How appropriate, then, that we showcase the very best of the year that was from a TVC perspective.

Once the home of lavish productions and “hang the expense” casts, TVCs find themselves now not quite the glamour child they once were. Regardless, you’ll see these below campaigns have pushed the boat out in terms of creativity, humour, emotion and execution.

In judging these campaigns, the jury was looking for a strong creative idea specific to TV and for entrants to demonstrate a strong creative insight. Judges were looking for suitability of strategy, solution and execution against the original brief. And of course, outcomes: primarily, delivered effective business results (ROI, brand lift, sales revenue) and secondary, delivered audience engagement (reach, watch time & view duration, sentiment). This category covers all TV platforms, and campaigns must have appeared on free to air or subscription television during the judging period.

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.

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

Secure your table now!

Catch up on the other shortlisted work by clicking on the links below:

• 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

Here’s the finalists’ work in their own words, the headings below show the name of the agency entering the award, the campaign name and the client putting their trust in them.

BMF, Overcooked Generosity, ALDI

After a year of financial restraint, ALDI Australia encouraged Aussies to go all-out, not just on the Christmas spread, but on the spirit of generosity itself. Everybody wants to enjoy a feast with family and friends without worrying about how many prawns they can afford, or having to choose between mince tarts and panettone. So don’t carve by halves. Pile those prawns. Double up on desserts. Don’t hold back this Christmas, because when you shop at ALDI there’s always enough.

BMF, Shop ALDI First, ALDI

Those in the know, know shopping at ALDI first saves you shop-loads. But for everyone else, grocery shopping is a well-entrenched habit at preferred competitors. We needed to create sufficient intrigue and permission for people to bend their routines to try ALDI first.

Our idea not only accepts but encourages supermarket polygamy. It normalises the behaviour of shopping around, changing it from a point of awkwardness into a point of financial savviness.

With a healthy dose of honesty and self-awareness around ALDI’s range short-comings we helped Aussies understand that ALDI knows it’s not the only supermarket you see – it just wants to be the first.

In an idea made for TV screens, ‘Shop ALDI first’ takes a page out of popular romantic on-screen dramas like ‘The Notebook’ to dramatise that ALDI loves their shoppers enough to let them go.

BMF, Special you can Buy, ALDI

Not everyone gets to experience a grandiose life-changing event every week, but with ALDI special is a thing you can buy, twice a week.

‘Special You Can Buy’ revels in the possibility and magic of the middle aisle, putting Special Buys up there with the most special things in existence. Like life itself. Whether it’s a state-of-the-art washing machine, luxurious bed linen or barista beating coffee machine, Aussie shoppers are reminded the Special Buys experience is one worth seeking out in store.

cummins&partners, McCain ‘Nothing Special’, McCain

The Task

Our challenge was to create a campaign that leaned into McCain’s brand purpose of embracing messy togetherness, in the complex and competitive landscape of modern day Australia.

Everyday Aussies felt a tension between TV perfectionism and their reality. Other brands were setting unrealistic expectations around dinner-time, and their earnest tone worked against them, the ‘joy’ felt insincere.
This led to our creative insight: overly earnest portrayals of family life are giving Aussies the ick; and our creative proposition: Embrace messy togetherness.

The Idea: There’s something special, about nothing special

Australians are the master of the understatement – good becomes “not bad”, great becomes “alright”, and we’re always just “fine”. But at a certain point we’re just selling ourselves short. Like when we say we’re doing “nothing special”.

Airing on 27 February 2022, our film asks Aussies to re-evaluate what makes a moment special, showing how special chips, pizza and PJs on the couch actually are – pointing at the absurdity of referring to life’s wonderful moments as “nothing special”.

The Results

The TVC proved a winning combination of humour and human truth, delivering strong recognition and engagement (42 per cent recognition), and brand attribution well above norms (67 vs 52 per cent norm).

Consumers wanted to act as a result of having seen the TVC, with strong shifts in strategy-specific brand image data for those who saw the advertising vs those who didn’t.

Finally, 78 per cent of research respondents agree there’s something special about ‘nothing special’.

But ultimately, the proof is in the pudding (or frozen chips, pizza and veggies). McCain saw an increase of 10 per cent across their product portfolio, proving that the new brand positioning was having the desired effect where it matters… at the checkout.

Howatson+Company, Thummit, Belong

Everest. It’s big: 8.849 kilometres in fact. That’s a long climb for a human with legs, even longer for a human thumb without them. Yet every month, our thumbs scroll this very distance, emitting carbon. We brought this story to life to remind Aussie’s that with Belong, their network usage is offset and they can Scroll Good. In our campaign, ‘Thummie’ overcomes blizzards, scales cliff faces, and comes thumb to face with a Nepalese mountain yak; reaching the glorious summit and proving that our scrolling thumbs can live in harmony with nature.

As Australia’s first carbon neutral telco, Belong had long been able to differentiate on their ‘green’ credentials. However, competitors had since caught up by achieving carbon neutral status themselves and as a result, Belong needed to re-establish its green leadership position within the category.

This was executed by running 60” placements in tentpole moments on screens to deliver impactful reach, then supported by 30” placements to extend reach efficiently. CTV, online video and social provided further incremental reach efficiently, then leveraging large format OOH placements to deliver impact and drive research.

‘Thummit’ is Belong’s brand campaign aiming to reposition and re-establish the business as Australia’s leading green telco.

Key campaign objectives were to increase sales by 8 per cent for the campaign period, and achieve a 10% YoY uplift.

Results:

• 10 per cent sales increase during the campaign period
• 14 per cent sales increase YoY.

Special, Last Performance, Partners Life

Life Insurance. Only 29 per cent 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 per cent of New Zealanders, category interest increased by 12 per cent, brand awareness increased by 6 per cent and brand consideration increased by 5 per cent, as The Last Performance captured the attention of New Zealand and turned a nation apathetic to life insurance, into one actively engaged with it.

Special, Get Almost, Almost* Anything, Uber Eats

Uber Eats is in a period of business growth, continuing to expand their delivery offering beyond takeaway food, to groceries, alcohol, convenience products and beyond. So despite several years of successful ‘Tonight. I’ll be eating ..’ campaigns that had skyrocketed the brand from fourth to the market front runner, the business needed the brand marketing to pivot to reflect this new ambition. This case is the story of how the brand’s new positioning ‘Get Almost, Almost Anything’ launched, and the success the self-deprecating brand admission has had after mere months in market.

Special, Summer Never Sleeps, Kathmandu

After 11 months of relative hibernation due to the obligations of work, life and pandemic lockdowns, summer was eagerly anticipated by our young audience, ready to embrace their freedom together.

Summer Never Sleeps is a film that encourages outdoors enthusiasts to cram in every ‘out there’ adventure they can this summer, by waving goodbye to sleep. With its power over us gone, the symbols of slumbering get repurposed. Pillows become campfire marshmallows, nocturnal animals are your best mates and sheep nod off counting humans. Day turns into night and back into day, as simply as a merman flipping a switch. And even when you finally crawl into your tent – normally the end of a full day – you find it’s actually a portal to a cave party, being DJ’d by an owl.

The Monkeys, part of Accenture Song, Weather Anything, Macpac

Macpac is New Zealand’s original technical outdoor brand – making and testing tough, high quality outdoor gear since 1973.

Despite being well known in its home market of NZ, the brand was relatively unknown in Australia, less than 10 per cent of Aussies aware of Macpac. And those who knew it, reckoned it was just another outdoor brand.

The outdoors category is a crowded market… one that’s full of clichéd conventions.

While we knew we had to play to some of those category codes, we needed to find a way to make Macpac distinctive and win an unfair share of the market’s memory and mental availability.

What has changed in the outdoor gear category over the past five years is that brands became more fashion conscious, more attuned to urban wear than the traditional, technical heartland of the category.

Born of, and still tested by the New Zealand Alpine Team, Macpac has genuine mountaineering credibility, making gear that is technical and built to endure.

To bring these insights to life, we used one of the oldest (but often forgotten about) techniques in advertising — product demonstration. Proof always works better than a claim. We didn’t tell people about Macpac’s Kiwi heritage or strength of gear…we showed them.

Our campaign dramatised a group of suuuuper-chill hikers navigating a pretty precarious situation, with the help of a Macpac jacket. A simple but powerful product demonstration, wrapped in the uniquely deadpan comedic style that New Zealand has become synonymous with.

The campaign was integrated through-the-line.

Launching in March 2023, the campaign was immediately met with positive reaction from the Australian and NZ public and mainstream media. Cathy Seaholme, Managing Director, Macpac says they’ve “been truly delighted to see record-breaking impact of our Precarious brand campaign on our brand health…post the launch.”

The Monkeys, part of Accenture Song, History Is Calling, Uluru Statement from the Heart

Australia is one of the few developed countries that has not recognized its First Peoples in its constitution. For the past five years, the Uluru Dialogue has been advocating for an enshrined voice to Parliament, we worked with the Uluru Dialogue to create a powerful awareness campaign that would mobilize majority support for a “yes” vote at a referendum.

The campaign had two objectives: to explain to those with low prior awareness what a “Voice to Parliament” means for First Nations people and our progress as a nation, and to let all Australians know the important role they play in ensuring that the Voice gets a majority vote. The result was “History is Calling” – a powerful campaign designed to shape Australia’s future.

To get the desired result, the campaign needed every Australian to play their part and have important conversations with those around them. A TV and cinema film led the social movement calling on Australians to vote “yes.” The film tells a story of “how the people got a voice.”

The film was retweeted by newly elected Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who used his inaugural address as PM to commit to the Voice in full.

The “History is Calling” campaign is a powerful example of how advertising can be used to educate and mobilize people around an important issue. It demonstrates the power of storytelling and visual communication to create a sense of urgency and galvanize support for change. The hope is that this campaign will help bring about the long overdue recognition and respect for Australia’s First Peoples.

The Monkeys, part of Accenture Song, Un-Australia, MLA

With just 8% volume share of fresh meat, Lamb is dwarfed by it’s much larger industry competitors Chicken and Beef, with a dominant 70% collectively. Combined with weaker relevance and sales amongst younger Australians, Lamb’s challenge was to create fame, relevance, and desire with all Australians, in the face of far more affordable alternatives and a growing reliance on older Australians.

Australia has radically evolved, today 1 in 3 Australians born overseas. Influencing our sense of self, and leaving the nation asking itself ‘who are we?’ As we struggled with what it meant to be Australian, there’s one expression, that far from uniting us had become a ridiculous term of division… Un-Australian. It’s no secret that Australian Lamb had helped expand its use into popular culture with Lambassador Sam Kekovich bemoaning ‘there’s nothing worse than being Un-Australian’ less than two decades ago. So as an evolved nation entering 2023, and in the name of unity we decided to flip the script on Lamb’s past. The term Un-Australian had become so pervasive it was almost big enough to be a country of its own, so we created ‘Un-Australia.’ An alternative universe full of Aussies banished for being Un-Australian. And as it turns out… we’re all a bit Un-Australian.

Redefining a divisive term, Lamb brought a divided country together by suggesting our “un-Australian-ness” is actually what makes us all Australian. By satirising the overuse of the term, the campaign pointed out its ridiculousness and united Australians in celebrating what makes Australia a uniquely great nation – our cultural diversity. Because ultimately our collective differences are a great cause for celebration, not condemnation.

‘Un-Australia’ became Lamb’s most viewed campaign of all time with almost 12 million campaign views. And resulted in Lamb’s biggest 6-week summer campaign sales ever at $138 million.