This year’s MLA summer lamb ad took a slightly different approach to previous years. Australia had somehow dropped outside of the Top 10 happiness index and Sam Kekovich was having none of it. What we were presented with was the finest in Aussie humour, nostalgia and the spirit of the underdog. Meat & Livestock Australia chief marketing and communications officer Nathan Low caught up with B&T to explain the creative process, how they came up with the ‘Happiness Index’ approach, the challenges of coming up with hilarious ideas each year with creative partners Droga5, why they aren’t running it on TV after its Sydney Ashes test launch, and his favourite moment.
Now running for more than 20 years on TV (and five years on radio prior), the MLA’s lab ad has become, arguably, Australia’s ‘Super Bowl moment. But instead of celebrating big beefy guys throwing an egg shaped ball forward, it celebrates ordinary Aussies eating lamb to help farmers throw more lamb cutlets into supermarkets and on fine dining menus.
This year’s ad was a roll call of Australian culture; featuring hardware stores where sausages outsell tools; venomous egg-laying mammals; the Sydney Opera House; giant monuments to fruit; and sporting equipment that doubles as bins.
It also features Aussie icons, including Bob Hawke, Agro, the Australia II yacht, Don Bradman and Steve Irwin in a magical homage of nostalgia.
The campaign was created by Droga5, part of Accenture Song, and directed by Dave Wood from Good Oil.
It’s truly a masterpiece of writing and production, and System1 test agrees, and Low spills the beans on how it came about (the creative process began in July 2025) and what makes it special.
B&T: How did you and Droga5 come up with this year’s concept around the Happiness Index Top 10?
Nathan Low (NL): For each year, we start out with the same goal to find something that feels culturally and topically relevant. If you look at the history of the 20 years of the Lamb, there’s been a consistent theme of unity in those campaigns. So we’re looking for something where we can tell that story of togetherness through sharing lamb in summer.
The agency is diving into what’s topical in the news, what’s happening with culture, and what stories are blowing up.
In some years, things rise to the surface more easily. For example if you look at the Border Walls ad we did during Covid (see video below) and The Generation Gap (further down in this piece) — both were very topical at the time.
This year was a bit tougher and we needed a bit more of a deep dive as there wasn’t anything we were all living through together at the same time.
What we did find is something that we thought can’t be real and can’t be right. Firstly, there’s a World Happiness Index, and that Australia fell out of the top 10!
For the first couple of months, we’re exploring three or four ideas to see which ones are the stickiest, which ones are easy to for the creatives to write to, which ones we can write lots of gags into and make it super entertaining, but it still feels, I guess, important and authentic. And this proved a really rich territory.
Make Lamb, Not Walls
B&T: What is it about the Happiness Index idea that provided fertile ground?
NL: Australians are really, really proud of our culture and our lifestyle. And we’re also a nation that punches above our weight on the world stage, so falling out of the top 10 provided the opportunity to kick some competitive juices into the spot. We wanted to tell Aussies about this and see if we can’t get Australia into the top 10 the next time happiness auditors are putting their list together.
B&T: For many people, 2025 (when you began working on this) was a really challenging year. I love the humour, and we probably all need a bit more of it in advertising, but how do you strike the right tone at such a difficult juncture?
NL: Tone is always really important to us. We spend a lot of time, both as client and agency, discussing that throughout the creative process to get the tone right of the jokes we’re making. We want to make sure we’re laughing with people, not at people.
We make sure we’re making fun of things that it is acceptable to make fun of, and that Australians are going to come on the ride with us and find it funny. (Kiwis, Swedes, Finns and Townsville are in the ‘OK to laugh at’ bucket this year)
And then there’s the overall feel of the ad. It felt like 2025 was a tough year for a lot of people, and we wanted to strike a bit more of a positive tone versus the classic version of the last few years of lamb ads, where we find something that’s creating debate or division. And lamb brings people together.
This year, we’re not overcoming division. We’re rallying around a cause that Australia is pretty great and we should celebrate that.
B&T: The writing in this ad is hilarious and it flows so seamlessly, how did you manage to nail that – take us through that process?
NL: The first challenge is actually crafting a story that will make people care about it and before you get into the production, the writing is so important. If you look back at the history of the summer lamb ad, it actually began as a tactical radio campaign about 25 years ago before arriving on TV, so the writing has always been critical.
The first part is you just write and write and write and write, and you find the jokes that stick. We had a lot more funny material than we needed, and a lot more awesome Australian things to showcase than we could possibly fit into a three minute film.
The key thing was to piece the story together in a way that made people care about the fact that Australia had dropped out of the top 10 as well as making them think it was a real thing and not something that we actually made up.
So it’s very rare that in a lamb ad we would have a scene where we’re breaking the fourth wall and you’ve got a character directly talking to the audience. We deliberately wrote that scene, where the character deliberately holds up the newspaper (see image above) with the headline saying ‘Australia out of the top 10 happiest countries’. If anyone doesn’t believe us, go Google it, because it’s a real thing. (B&T has verified that it actually is a real thing, and totally unacceptable).
B&T: Take us through some of the more interesting aspects of the production process and shoot this year?
NL: What’s really cool about shooting this ad is we left a bunch of open-ended spaces within the production schedule, where we’ve got something scripted but we plan to shoot long because we’ve got a lot of really strong talent that we cast that can adlib stuff. The creatives are on set and they’re still writing while we’re shooting.
For example, there’s the sequences in the car, when the staffers are with the World Happiness auditors (see image below), and they’re just quick cut edits, and are just rattling off lots and lots and lots of things.
This year, we were like, we’re just going to shoot a bunch of stuff. We’re going to ad lib, and then whatever hits the hardest is that’s what will make it into the finished edit.
That’s a critical factor, because we start developing it in July, but we’re shooting in November, so we can get a lot more topical, if we’ve created space to insert jokes that feel, I guess, more timely, given people are going to be viewing the ad in January.
B&T: Traditionally the lamb ad has featured celebrity cameos (see in the casting, but in this year’s ad we did not see too many famous faces, aside from Sam Ketkovic and that nostalgic montage. Is there a reason for this?
NL: We’ve moved away from celebrity cameos in the last few years. I mean, part of it, just being realistic, is it’s driven by budget. We’re funded by farmer levies and part of my job is to deliver the biggest bang for the buck we can.We try to deliver the best results possible. We’re also really responsible about how much we actually spend on the campaign and celebrity cameos have never been cheap.
The second part is, do you need them and do they feel authentic to the story that you’re telling? In lamb ads where we have used them in the past, they fit really well within the narrative of the story, but this year we just didn’t feel like we needed celebrities to tell the story. The campaign is about showcasing our lifestyle, culture and some of the great parts of Australia.
B&T: Your media strategy this year is interesting. You launched it during the Sydney Ashes test with a take over break on Seven and Kayo Sports. Given you have a three minute film, how do you flight this across TV, and the rest of your media mix?
NL: Beyond the launch moment, we are not spending a single cent on traditional linear TV this year. That’s not saying we won’t ever do that again; we certainly had a fair amount of spend on TV last year and the year before. It’s just something we’ve done this year.
We’ve decided that the full three minutes experience is what we want people to have to get the best brand benefit. Therefore, we didn’t want to dilute the budget by spending a bunch of money behind sixes and 10s and 15s and 30 second ads.
The Ashes gave us a great opportunity to run the whole three minute film on TV for the first time as a launch moment on Seven and Kayo Sports, creating a roadblock that we could share with our stakeholders.
From a media strategy perspective, if a million people now know it exists, some of them will go and look for it, some of them will post it and share it, and then that creates a domino effect. At the same time you are now spending on socials and we work with a select group of influencers and partners and media owners who are pushing the ad out through their channels.There is also a two-minute edit that we will run on cinema. Year on year, the total budget is around the same as previous years.
The Generation Gap
B&T: How do you measure the success of the summer lamb ads each year?
NL: Whilst we are not an industry body, the people we represent (lamb producers) are selling things so we judge success by looking at two things: have we created demand, and have we converted some of that demand into sales.
Within retail, that’s a lot easier to track than it is within food service, but obviously lamb is sold in both places, so we look at both channels. In retail, we tend to get a 5-10 per cent uplift in volume when the campaign runs which is a lot for the fresh meat category. In a food services setting we look at the presence of lamb on menus.
The success of the campaign creates a seasonal window where lam is top of mind and the campaign drives mental availability. We want to see restaurants and food chains basically putting more lamb in front of customers.
We also work with Kantar to track the performance of the ad and brand equity measures. Our stakeholders and farmers are very proud of the campaign, it’s very highly anticipated.
B&T: Final question, and I’m going to put you on the spot, what is your favourite part or sequence of the ad and why?
NL: I was skeptical up until the point of seeing the finished ad, which is when Sam Kekovich brings the lamb cutlet over to the mouth of the auditor as he’s trying to explain some boring scientific explanation. And how the World Happiness Index is calculated. And he smells that lamb cutlet. And then we, then we transition into the download of Australian nostalgia.
I just didn’t know that that was going to work. All these images aren’t new, and some are going to be low res from old news footage, and we are piecing them together at a really different pace to the rest of the ad.
we’re going to have 20 pieces of content, all of about half a second each, what’s going to go in there. We have to obviously get usage rights for that, and that requires negotiation.
So you don’t get everything that you want, but we got most of what we wanted. It was great to have Bob Hawke in there. It was great to have Australia II (America’s Cup winner) was in there as well as Succulent Chinese Meal Man and a lot of iconic things that have blown up in the media over the last 20 odd years.
It’s one of those things where you trust your agency partners and the creatives that work on it, and they’ve got a great track record of success, and we have a fantastic relationship where we kind of trust and listen to each other, and they were really bullish and confident and convinced that it would work really well.
That scene, I think, is fantastic. And it just ends the ad on, I know it’s not the final scene of the ad, but that makes that final third of the ad end on such a high with such a beautiful feeling.
B&T: Amen, what a benchmark in advertising to set in the first week of 2026.
