Not with a bang, but a whimper: Australia’s continuing cultural cringe
Talk to anyone working in the field, and you will hear that the rise of branded entertainment represents one of the most interesting and important shifts in the world of commercial creativity.
But those same people will also tell you that in Australia, we aren’t much good at making it.
The rhetoric from the industry was largely that we’re sadly lagging behind our US and UK contemporaries.
Anyone you speak to who has created good work will tell you it happened against the odds.
Brave clients are seen as a rarity, even from those with a portfolio of case studies across brands. Successes are related like war stories, tales of victory snatched from the jaws of defeat.
As the curator of the upcoming Festival of Branded Entertainment, I approached the task of sourcing content, case studies and clients with some trepidation, wondering how much scraping the bottom of the barrel lay ahead.
I found that the reality was different.
There is, in fact, a rich seam of branded entertainment being produced in Australian and New Zealand, funded by clients as diverse as not-for-profit, utilities, FMCG and cultural institutions.
This market is responsible for a dazzling variety of pieces of entertainment created with brands: we’ve made viral hits from hundreds of voices, made tear-jerking 3D glasses, sent cinema audiences to sea, followed intrepid explorers across the Antarctic, along the Great Ocean Road, gatecrashed a rugby tour, dragged reluctant travellers to New Zealand,…
At Cannes this year, around ten per cent of the shortlisted Branded Content and Entertainment Lions were from Australasia. Ten per cent of the entire planet’s work. But instead of being triumphant about our success at home, I think the cultural cringe is at play.
We seem so accustomed to this self-effacing habit, blaming limited budgets or the size of the audience, that when we’re actually doing some great stuff, we can’t recognise it.
The idea that the colonial parents are streets ahead still resounds in this market, despite the fact that legislation in the UK restricts much of the creation and use of this type of content.
Our proximity and trade relationships with Asia are such that I simply can’t understand why we constantly prefer to compare ourselves to a country with such a remote historical link to this one. It’s time for this sunburnt country to move out from under the shadow of a dead empire.
I won’t deny we create some abysmally crude ads and many of our television properties leave a lot to be desired, but in the field of branded entertainment, we have plenty of clients who have collaborated with some bright storytellers and created magic.
In an essay about the cultural cringe, Clive James writes: “Australian writers, painters, singers, actors, film directors, scientists, sportsmen, and tycoons make a disproportionate bang in the world.”
This disproportionate bang, is, in part, what the BE festival is seeking to acknowledge. There really is quite a lot going on at home, but it seems it’s more recognised abroad. And if we want to create more, and better work in this evolving field, we need to address the challenges and obstacles that get in the way of doing so – one of which might be our low expectations of ourselves.
Cathie McGinn
- Tickets for the Australasian Festival of Branded Entertainment are available via this link.
The adland bubble is full of people (mostly foreigners) telling everyone that Aussies don’t get anything and everything, and we are doing it all way shitter than everyone overseas.
We heard it with digital. We heard it with social. We’re hearing it with branded content. And we’ll hear it with whatever comes next.
But inherent Australian corporate conservatism (and smaller budgets) means that by accident or design, few Aussie clients get suckered into spending money on the marketing “fad du jour”.
There is nothing wrong with not running after the latest marketing trend, sitting back calmly, watching the success and failures of others (with deeper pockets), and then only funding successful strategies on your own dime. (It’s called “fast following” and we laud it in every other industry but our own.)
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the media regulations around “branded content” are pretty tough here in TV and radio in particular. That doesn’t help …
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