Case Study: How The Royals and the Australian Labor Party put the spotlight on Australia’s broadband infrastructure with Abbott’s Internet
Case Study: For the 2013 Federal Election, The Royals were appointed by the Australian Labor Party as its creative-digital and social agency. The agency delivered a vast range of work from tightly targeted and localised messaging to bigger, creative campaigns.
One of the major policy issues being debated in the 2013 Australian Federal Election was the Labor and Liberal parties opposing views on broadband infrastructure. Australians need to understand the extent to which we lag behind the rest of the world with internet speeds, infrastructure and services. Aussies already have a cultural cringe about being seen as second fiddle to the rest of the world. The Royals needed to demonstrate that only the Australian Labor Party had a plan to address this. The ALP’s NBN plan is an investment in Australia’s future. But it appeared the Coalition wanted to keep us in the dark ages. Tony Abbott and the Liberals insisted that their 25Mbps broadband would be all that Australians would ever need. The Royals weren’t so sure.
So to get a ‘second opinion’, the agency created a branded product called Abbott’s Internet. It was positioned like any other typical internet provider. The agency then sought to describe its benefits to people from different countries to gauge their reaction to the offering. The Royals used the real attributes of The Coalition’s broadband plan and tried and sell it to people overseas. Facebook ads were created that were targeted at people from The US, Hong Kong, Andorra, Romania, Czech Republic and more. The agency also hit the streets in a few different global cities in its efforts to pitch the Coalition’s policy to locals. The reactions were incredibly compelling, both on Facebook and in the live video we captured. Here’s the outcome:
Significantly, The Royals created the whole campaign – from concept to launch – in 8 days, such is the turnaround time required during a fast-paced election where policies need to be communicated quickly and widely. The results speak for themselves:
YouTube: 994,050 video views
Twitter Reach: 8.5m+ impressions
Twitter Virality 8,229 Tweets: original, retweets, replies.
AI Website : 180k visits
The campaign received local and global coverage from being lead story on the Sydney Morning Herald to coverage on Al Jazeera! This campaign has been described as a game-changing by everyone from the senior ministers to ‘Team Obama’ consultants from Blue State Digital that came out for the election. One of the things that helped the idea hit home was that by creating a fake brand out of the policy issue, we were able to objectify and package up the opposition’s perspective in a way that people could understand and digest. In doing so we were able to invoke more a more passionate response than every day campaigning might have. And for a short time, the agency made the election entertaining.
9 Comments
Ummm, not sure if you’ve seen the result, but the ALP got walloped… Good strategy aside, its the result that counts unfortunately.
And Australians need to know, at launch, Labor said it would cost $5b.
Then it said it would cost $20b.
Then costs rose to $40b and is still rising.
In reality, the NBN cost Labor votes, not because everyone opposed the concept, but because it became an huge symbol of Labor’s financial incompetence.
For every person ‘passionate’ about the NBN who saw the campaign and voted Labor, there were just as many who saw it and were just as passionate in their reaction to the costs and it renewed their passion to vote Liberal.
The Royals did a very good job, but let’s not turn this into another Earth Hour and Dumb Ways orgie of fanciful claim after fanciful claim.
I thought that case studies were supposed to showcase success. Labor lost. I wouldn’t be blowing a trumpet on this.
http://www.change.org/en-AU/petitions/the-liberal-party-of-australia-reconsider-your-plan-for-a-fttn-nbn-in-favour-of-a-superior-ftth-nbn
Ha why would you compare this to Dumb Ways to die? (Dumb ways to compare). It’s smart work and although nothing could save Labor, the NBN’s popularity has soared. Watch Turnball squirm.
I do a campaign for Coca Cola.
No-one buys Coca Cola as a result.
The Coca Cola business turns to poo.
Lots of Coca Cola people lose their jobs.
How good was my Coca Cola campaign, you reckon?
But, I’m not really talking about Coca Cola, am I?
Pretty silly comments. It worked wonders for the nbn and still is. It was never going to save Rudd. Nothing could.
Just go and sign the petition.
You’re hilarious, Silly PR. You think that every campaign Coke does sells every bottle they have? You think that nothing is worth doing for an election campaign if they can’t win? No understanding of politics or marketing as a whole. Just like NBN Fan said, nothing was gonna save Rudd. But ideas like this can boost popularity of certain issues. I bet you voted informal.
Labor lost. Liberals won. NBN board members resigned. Turnbull won. Case closed. I’ve seen some silly PR attempts in this blog but this has to be one of the most vacuous.