Senator Scott Ludlam’s ‘Welcome to WA’ speech converted into the words of Western Australia

A fortnight ago, with the all-important by-election approaching, Senator Scott Ludlam’s Green seat looked precarious. Richard Berney (whose day job is CD at 303Lowe in Perth) therefore took on the task of creating viral content on a shoestring to help attract the Green vote.

Leveraging the immense popularity of Senator Ludlam’s ‘Welcome to WA’ speech, a social media strategy was designed to convert Senator Ludlam’s words into the words of Western Australia.

The website www.ourspeech.com.au introduced this ambition to the public.

A transcript of the entire 8-minute speech was cut up into bite-sized snippets, and the public was then asked to replace each one with a portrait of themselves standing behind those words.

As each pic was tagged #ourspeech on twitter and instagram, they were manually added to the site, and to the speech itself. Those images were then collectively used as the new vision to the original youtube video speech, with Senator Ludlam simply left to narrate.

VIEW THE VIRAL

In stark contrast to the immense advertising spend of the Palmer United Party, this social campaign was originally launched with a single facebook post to Senator Ludlam’s Facebook page. It was then shared with over 140,000 people on twitter alone in the next few days preceeding the election. Over 600 people from all walks of WA life contributed artwork and their own image to the video, and in doing so created and seeded a hugely diverse, and moving re-appropriation of what the internet has dubbed the ‘speech Gen-Y has been waiting for’.

Ultimately, the Greens enjoyed a swing of 6.39 percent – securing their seat and affirming the power of a grassroots approach to their message.

Credits:

Technical Director: Aaron Collyer.