Page 23 - Adnews Magazine January 2022

www.adnews.com.au | January-February2022 23
Agency of the Year
was going to keep happening, to someone else, again and again, for another 100 years.
“But Australians, known for their laidback, easygoing attitude, are happy to be apathetic and say ‘it’s getting better’. We even have a phrase for it — if something goes wrong, we just say ‘she’ll be right’. It means any old problem will sort itself out with time. It is a wonderfully optimistic phrase, but it can also be a dangerous one. It gives society permission to sweep problems under the rug and absolves them of the responsibility to act.
“On International Women’s Day, we launched a campaign criticising our cultural apathy, rallying people behind the question #WhenWillSheBeRight?”
Finalists:
BMF, ‘The Great Fresh Food Migration’, ALDI Australia.
CHEP, ‘Where Babies Come From’, Genea.
The Monkeys part of Accenture Interactive, ‘Make Lamb, Not Walls’, Meat & Livestock Australia.
Burger Urge via The General Store. Bottom: ‘When Will She Be Right? via The Monkeys part of Accenture Interactive.
Media Campaign of the Year Presented by Disney Advertising Sales.
Winner: Initiative, Swintopia, Swinburne University of Technology.
Judges: “It is so hard to get cut through in this industry — never mind in a year when students are not engaged physically on campus, so to get the results they got is no easy feat. It is huge! The judges were impressed with the learnings that they have taken and the suc- cess metrics they have delivered from a year like this!”
As COVID-19 cancelled univer- sities’ most powerful recruitment tool, Open Day, Swinburne University of Technology needed an innovative solution.
Initiative: “Our challenge was to replace the single most impor- tant day in the higher education marketing calendar in a time when our target audience of school leavers weren’t even allowed to leave their homes.”
In researching the media behaviours of the target audience, Gen Z school leavers, one activity peaked above all others...gaming.
Initiative: “We set out to turn Open Day into Open Play. Enter ‘Swintopia’, a gamified simulation of the Swinburne experience in a virtual, open world.”
Finalists:
Clemenger BBDO, ‘Pitvertising’, Unilever.
OMD Australia, ‘Macca’s Monopoly — Playing to WIN!’, McDonald’s.
TBWA\Sydney and Mindshare, ‘Play NZ’, Tourism New Zealand.
Small Budget Media Campaign of the Year (Less than $500,000) Initiative, Swintopia, Swinburne University of Technology
Judges: “... loved the insight that as the real world closed, the virtual world opens. The execution of ‘Swintopia’ has the potential to rede- fine the whole category in recruiting the next generation of university students. In a time when they were just looking to reduce decline, they were able to deliver the most success- ful ‘Open Day’ in the university’s history which is no mean feat!”