The OZ/NZ Cannes Contenders (part one)

"It has become more of a tribal phenomena where entire regions and nations are getting behind it," says Burchill. "There is a fair representation across the planet. As people click in to find out about the application process they are learning about the Great Barrier Reef," says Burchill.
The campaign attracted controversy when a video of a candidate with a themed tattoo was revealed as a staffer at the advertising agency. However, Burchill says the video was only created to provide an example of an application for early candidates.
"When people picked up that it was generated by the agency, they seemed to think it suggested the whole thing is a scam. Of course it is not a scam, it's a real job, with a real salary and real responsibilities. That has been so much more powerful than offering a prize or a promotion or something else that comes out of pure marketing trickery," he says.
So far, figures suggest the campaign has generated about US$150m worth of media attention globally. Also CNN and 3 other major world wide news networks did a 'live cross' to the island for the announcement. There is also a 1 hour BBC documentary airing early July.
The work won Best of Show at The One Show in May this year.

CLIENT: YELLOW PAGES NEW ZEALAND
CAMPAIGN: YELLOW TREEHOUSE
AGENCIES: COLENSO BBDO / AIM PROXIMTY, AUCKLAND

Nick Worthington, ECD for Colenso, says globally Yellow Pages has a history of really cool advertising but it's been classically posters and a TV, leaving the product in need of an image update.
"They were losing their relevance in many ways, so there was a real need to engage people again and to make Yellow Pages seem extremely progressive. The key to that idea really was that basically they want people to pay money to be in their search engines or online," he says.
A competition was launched to find a person to manage the project and the winner, Tracey, was given a laptop, a mobile phone and a copy of the Yellow Pages to get the restaurant built within a limited time frame only using contacts found in Yellow Pages.
Regular updates were provided on her progress via TVCs, outdoor billboards and the project was covered by New Zealand's main news outlets - making the front page of the New Zealand Herald and the TV news as well as coverage online around the world. The restaurant was launched in January and was fully booked for lunch, afternoon tea and dinner.
Worthington says two things drove the exposure.
"First of all because it is nuts, and secondly it is so beautiful and a lot of people have eaten there. I said to the client that we'll only know three to six months after we have done it how successful it has been because basically that's when everyone will understand it," he says.
The campaign won the 360 AXIS Award.

CLIENT: TOOHEYS EXTRA DRY
CAMPAIGN: TED 696 PROJECT
AGENCY: BMF SYDNEY

The 'TED 696 Project' launched the longneck bottle of 696ml of beer by inviting street artists, designers and the target audience to design their own unique bags for the trade to use - which would become an advertising medium and an exhibition
It was initially pitched at the design and art community giving them an opportunity - a canvass if you like - to show off their design skills with the brown paper bag, says Warren Brown, founder/ECD, BMF.
He thinks part of the appeal of competitions like the 696 Project is that it gives people an opportunity to express their talent to a wider community.
"Artists get to show their work in galleries, but it's not a massive audience. With this you've got an opportunity to get your work out there to a huge audience, which is essentially what advertising creatives do," says Brown.
There were 500,000 longnecks sold in the first eight weeks and over 2000 people responded to the bag design competition from 104 different countries.


CLIENT: 42 BELOW VODKA
CAMPAIGN: ART PROJECT
AGENCY: THE GLUE SOCIETY, SYDNEY

New Zealand vodka brand, 42 Below, commissioned The Glue Society to create a series of art instillations to establish its credentials among creative leaders. So far there's been a UFO structure made entirely of milk crates near Queenstown, a hundred inflatable sex dolls on Bronte Beach, the wrapping of a street of cars in Christmas paper and a 30-foot high rainbow arch made from plastic chairs and placed on a snowfield in New Zealand's South Island.
42 Below approached TGS after seeing its sculpture of a melting ice-cream truck, created for the Sculpture by the Sea.
Jonathan Kneebone, founder of TGS, says 42 Below treated it more like a commission than a marketing/advertising relationship. He says: "The thought was if they could create public bits of arts that would get discussed by newspapers and television stations then as people found out more about it the connection to the brand would become more apparent".
A group of anonymous figures in white coveralls - symbolizing the purity of the vodka - constructed the sculptures in high profile places across Australia and New Zealand.  This was to reflect the brand's 'because we can' attitude. The figures in white will also appear in live events, for example, sponsored parties, national sporting events and film openings as well as the print and poster advertising for the campaign.
Unbranded content of the figures in white constructing the artworks were distributed as web-based art films with credit to 42-Below.
Kneebone refers to it as 'creating unbranded content'.
The only real moment when there's the risk of unbranded exposure to art was that if people saw it on Bronte Beach, for example, as online it was always linked to the brand.
"For us this was really the art in its purest form and we felt it was smarter to do that unbranded rather than branded as it had more credibility as a piece of art and potentially people would wonder who did that and as soon as you search for chairs on Bronte Beach you'll see the brand roll in it," says Kneebone. "But it wasn't for us to put logos on all the dolls or bottles of vodka on all the chairs because that wasn't the idea, the idea was to make art, not advertising."
 
CLIENT: VIRGIN MOBILE
CAMPAIGN: RIGHT MUSIC WRONGS
AGENCY: DROGA5, SYDNEY

Virgin Mobile's 'Right Music Wrongs' by Droga5 Sydney set out to create debate about what makes music good or bad by having rapper Vanilla Ice apologise for his recording of 'Ice Ice Baby'. In excess of 40 million copies have been sold since the song's launch in 1991. The video clip leads to the www.rightmusicwrongs.org website where viewers can vote Vanilla Ice innocent or guilty and nominate other artists for their music wrongs.
Online and print ads ran in major metro newspapers, free street/ music press, ninemsn and music sites such as Faster Louder and InTheMix along with radio ads, street posters, chalk stencilling on city streets and POS material in Virgin Mobile stores.
Sudeep Gohil, founding partner of Droga5 Sydney, says the brief was to cement Virgin Mobile's credentials in the music environment by tapping into popular culture.
He says: "On the surface that feels a little too much to ask traditional advertising to do because our feeling was it would just turn into wallpaper if we go, 'we are Virgin Mobile, we think that this is good music and that's bad music'. So we decided to encourage people to discuss things about music themselves and through that process communicate what our point of view on music was. The idea of having people involved with the campaign was more important than the brand just saying what it believed."
Droga5 approached Vanilla Ice through some personal contacts. "We said, we're calling from Australia, we have this little campaign for Virgin Mobile, we are doing this thing about good music and bad music and we want you to essentially apologize for the music that you've made. His management were all over it, they thought it was a great idea," says Gohil.
Vanilla Ice hadn't seen the proposed script until a couple of days before the shoot in Miami.
"The whole thing with the script wasn't you must say these words, we were like, this is our indicative theme, you do it how you want. Whether it's convincing or not, it's actually his personal point of view on it," says Gohil.  "We didn't say you used to be a pop puppet and talk about the music, that was him doing his thing."
Vanilla Ice performed at the V Festival and again at the Vodafone MTV Music Awards walking the red carpet wearing a Virgin Mobile t-shirt.
With only $150K spent on traditional media, they were basically relying on blogs and the Internet to get the message out there.
Since being placed on YouTube on March 4, the Vanilla Ice apology has been viewed over 300,000 times, attracting more than 1,700 comments.
 

ADVERTISER: FRUCOR'S SAMEDI
CAMPAIGN: VOODOO
AGENCY: CLEMENGER BBDO, SYDNEY

In the religion of Voodoo, Baron Samedi is a spirit known for drunkenness, debauchery and his power to awaken the dead. So when Clemenger BBDO, Sydney, was tasked with launching a new energy drink that bears his name, the creative team traveled to New Orleans to find a Voodoo priest to channel Baron Samedi. The idea was that Samedi's 'spirit' could come up with the ads to promote the drink. The only rule the team set was that they would do whatever Samedi wanted - his ideas included drinking rituals, lines for street posters and urban graffiti, TV ads and sampling. He also gave advice on typefaces and design as well as blessing the first batch of cans. A thirty-minute documentary, 'Samedi Says' about the experience aired on MTV Australia last November.
Richard Maddocks, ECD of Clemenger BBDO, Sydney, says none of it was staged - the team went to New Orleans with no idea about they were going to get and appeared in the documentary. Does he look at the work and think it's great advertising?
"I think it's fantastic, it's really different and doesn't pretend to be anything it's not. It was interesting for us putting the agency as part of the content but we went let's show them the inside workings of it," says Maddocks. 

CLIENT: PREVENTING VIOLENCE IN THE HOME
CAMPAIGN: BARCODE
AGENCY: TBWA\WHYBIN\TEQUILA, AUCKLAND

The key challenge for TBWA\Whybin\Tequila Auckland in a campaign for Preventing Violence was how to provide a helpline number to women who were in danger of being beaten if controlling partners found it.
The New Zealand charity, which offers counsellers and help centres for women who are the victims of domestic violence, opted for stickers that disguises the helpline number as a barcode that could be stuck onto any domestic object and go completely unnoticed.
Doctors and hospitals across New Zealand adopted the barcode device and international governmental and NGO agencies are following suit. Also, health professionals have reported an unprecedented acceptance of helpline details by victims since the circulation of the barcode.
The campaign won the AXIS of Innovation. Download the PDF:
00380-barcode.pdf

CLIENT: CARLTON DRY
CAMPAIGN: TEAM DRY
AGENCY: CLEMENGER BBDO, MELBOURNE

'Team Dry' is an extremely useless team created to find the exceptionally useless. Aimed at guys in their 20s, Carlton Dry wanted to show that it not only understood the desire to put off adulthood, but encouraged it.
Clemenger BBDO Melbourne ECD, James McGrath, says that to reach the target market they had to find a way to get around their erratic waking hours and erratic media consumption.
"And as we were building a new brand platform, we had to earn their respect. Entertainment was key," he says.
The result was a competition offering two people a professional sponsorship of $50,000 to goof off for a year.
A ten-minute film 'Tokyo Blitz' followed Team Dry on their tour of Tokyo and showed viewers the calibre of useless brilliance judges were looking for. Team Dry members were cast from the auditions of real people with crappy talents including Jimmy, who bounces ping-pong balls into plastic cups, and Angus, who makes his biceps dance.
The film was available on TeamDry.com, a virtual team headquarters, on TV, on one of 100,000 DVDs given away with cartons of Carlton Dry and through Foxtel's On-Demand service, 24-7.
Over 700 entrants uploaded their auditions of two-minute videos to teamDry.com.
McGrath says that so far, through Foxtel, Zoo and Ralph online, it has received over 21 million impressions by 1.2 million unique browsers. Users also spent over 5000 hours engaging with the campaign online and it has had 92,000 video plays on YouTube and Google.
McGrath says that Carlton Dry's volume per outlet during the campaign period of October 2008 to March 2009 is up 88 per cent versus the same time last year and up 64 per cent versus the prior six-month average.
And Carlton Dry grew 68 per cent by value on an MAT February 2009 basis to become the fastest growing regular beer brand in Australia, according to AC Nielson LBEER database.

CLIENT: FOUR'N TWENTY
CAMPAIGN: MAGIC SALAD PLATE
AGENCY: CLEMENGER BBDO, MELBOURNE

James McGrath, ECD of Clemenger BBDO Melbourne, says that after having a long history of success as the unpretentious, honest and satisfying lunch for guys, Four'N Twenty, the iconic Australian meat pie brand, was beginning to struggle for something to ignite consumer interest.
"It also suffered from being considered a bit of an unhealthy meal choice," he says. "Sure guys still loved the pies but often they couldn't commit themselves to digging into one because of constant societal pressure to be responsible with their diets. The brand needed a new way to give them permission to enjoy the pies by reengaging with them in a fresh way. Television was the medium the brand had always used in the past and just didn't seem it was going to cut it this time. The target needed to be surprised and given a new reason to act."
Instead of denying Four'N Twenty's lack of health, like so many other brands with their healthy choice menus and meals, Clemenger convinced the brand to embrace it.
The result was the Four'N Twenty Magic Salad Plate, a plastic plate embossed with a garden salad so it looked like they were eating salad with their pie. The plates were sold online using codes collected from pie packs.
Thanks to a run of free publicity within the first fortnight there were 25,000 salad plates in distribution. There was a 40 per cent increase in sales of four packs of Four'N Twenty pie and 21 per cent in singles, making it Four 'N Twenty's  most successful marketing campaign ever.
The Salad Plate was also voted the second best new product of 2008, behind the Apple iPhone - but ahead of Barack Obama - in a survey of marketing executives by the Australian Financial Review.

CLIENT:  ZUJI
CAMPAIGN: HELPING HOLIDAYS HAPPEN
AGENCY: HAPPY SOLDIERS/THE HALLWAY, SYDNEY

With the global financial crisis taking travel off the agenda, online travel company Zuji needed something out of the ordinary to convince people to take holidays.
John Kane, founder of Happy Soldiers, which created the campaign, 'Helping Holidays Happen,' with strategic agency, The Hallway, says that every travel company was offering price deals to try and appeal to people so Zuji needed to do more.
"Everything they do must in some way help people go on holiday and with the current financial situation what better way to help people then by saving them money? So we thought, 'let's make an everyday product and sell it cheap so people could save more for a holiday'," says Kane.
The result was Zuji Baked Beans, selling them for just 10 cents a can through Zuji Bean Shops and stalls set up in Australia's major cities. Over 10,000 tins were sold and they are now becoming a rare commodity.
They started with baked beans because they are already considered a cost saving product, says Kane.
"We sold one product which in-turn sold another. By purchasing the beans people were actually paying for our ads and kept them in their cupboards for months. We made Zuji into a generous brand that didn't just take away your time, they gave you something for it," he says.
An advertising campaign ran in print, outdoor, DM and online to let people know about the beans. Word also spread when the campaign attracted mainstream media attention and attention from bloggers - Zuji Beans appeared on over 3550 web sites.  Kane says following the campaign the Zuji website saw a 38 per cent increase in search traffic, drawing the highest number of hits it had ever had.