The MLA lamb ad confirms Australia Day is the latest victim of cancel culture
By distancing themselves from Australia Day, brands could be also distancing themselves from the majority of the population, and, therefore, the majority of their customers, argues Paul Costantoura.
Now that the annual lamb ad has finally hit our screens, it confirms that Australia Day has finally become another victim of cancel culture.
If you haven’t caught up with the concept, it is the evolution of call-out culture. It happens when a negative idea is spread on social media among people who are likely to become outraged by it. And it’s designed to end the careers of individuals and the profitability of businesses that have broken some unwritten social expectation.
In 2020 it seems that (almost) the entire Australian advertising industry has bought into the idea that Australia Day should be cancelled because of the fear of a negative backlash.
I say ‘almost’, because one advertiser actually rose above the noise and attempted to respond directly to the meaning of Australia Day by painting an inclusive vision of Australian identity in 2020.
You’ve probably seen it. The National Australia Day Council ad, ‘We’re all part of the story’ was launched in early January and presents 20 scenes of the people who make up Australia today. Each person simply offers a few words on their own story.
The campaign was created under the direction of the National Australia Day Council, and produced by Growth Mantra in conjunction with Wolf King and Flint Films.
There are two reasons for writing about it now. The first is that, with the lamb industry removing their own link to Australia Day, the National Australia Day Council is the only player left on the field.
The second is that ‘We’re all part of the story’ achieved extremely strong advertising evaluation metrics.
The ad paints a vision of a mutually respectful Australia in 2020 which recognises our diverse history but doesn’t shy away from the current debate around Australia Day. It is based on a poem which ends with the words: “It brings us together and tears us apart. We all have our views, so where do we start? By listening to each other, and sharing our part.”
The final words were delivered by both Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians in a clear statement about the importance of listening, sharing and respecting each other.
Most Australians recalled seeing the ad (64%), thought it was personally relevant to them (67%), thought it represented what it means to be Australian (72%) and said they either liked it or loved it (72%).
These are numbers that any ad agency would be ecstatic to achieve – which suggests the ad was saying something worth hearing.
These results are from an independent survey we ran over the 2020 Australia Day holiday last weekend looking at attitudes towards Australia Day and Australian values. This year, we were supported by analytics business Strategic Precision, and the leading market research technology platform, Cint, that collected data from a representative sample of 1,020 Australians for the study.
The facts about how Australians view Australia Day are always obscured by vested interests – usually the Institute of Public Affairs and The Greens get diametrically opposed numbers about changing the date because they ask different questions in their surveys.
We’ve run the same survey for four years and it shows that there is very slight movement in attitudes towards changing the date from year to year.
At the extremes, in 2020, only 11.4% agreed simply that ‘Yes, the date should definitely be changed’, while 40% agreed that ‘No, the date should definitely not be changed’.
Both of these were slightly down from 2019, when 12.3% were definitely in favour of change and 42.5% were definitely against it, with the balance moving to the middle ground.
In 2020, this left 48.6% between the extremes, spilt between 12.3% who thought it should probably be changed, 15% who thought it should probably not be changed, and 21.3% who really didn’t care either way.
In 2018, I cautioned about jumping on the bandwagon of avoiding Australia Day.
So, consider the numbers in 2020. By avoiding Australia Day, you are making the decision that the views expressed by 11.4% of Australians over 18 (or some vocal proportion of them) will have more impact on your brand than the other 88.6%.
There is bound to be lots more commentary and debate on the merits or otherwise about the lamb ad and its strategy, timing (towards the end of summer after the BBQ season has finished?), target market (27-year-old females?), complexity and call to action.
Personally, I think it’s a loss because the lamb brand used to stand for Australian identity and spirit, delivered with classically Australian humour. It’s not clear what it stands for now.
However, for brands and agencies considering your own strategy towards Australia Day 2021, I suggest it’s worth watching the National Australia Day Council ad again and considering if you can craft your own respectful vision of Australian identity and use Australia Day as the opportunity to present it to the population.
Then do some objective research, rather than only listening to Twitter.
Paul Costantoura is the CEO of Review Partners
Lol, the 2020 NADC Australia Day ad doesn’t paint an “inclusive” vision of Australian identity. It’s a do-nothing box-ticking exercise from a government that’s taking $50 million from essential services to spend on statues of Captain Cook to get First Nations people to shut up about changing the date, hold hands with White people and sing kumbaya. It’s hardly a visionary piece of strategic and creative excellence.
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What ever happened to great Australia Day Lamb ads? This is invisible indulgent rubbish,1min.47sec to get an idea across! When can we get back to producing great creative entertaining advertising advertising that appears across mainstream media that reaches mass audience quickly. If it wasn’t for Mumberella I would not see this advertising because is would be lost in web space……like last year. Like the researcher said MLA missed 88% of people who do not want to change. Also, as someone who works in AG Industry marketing I bet 90% of lamb producers don’t care a toss about changing the date and aren’t they the stakeholders here?
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Christmas has been celebrated for a very long time, its Christian significance was gradually overlooked, and it even acquired the agnostic and commercially convenient spelling of Xmas.
The religious Christians were put out, and regularly niggled about the commercialism and the fading respect for the Christian holiday, but nobody took any notice, and Christmas continued to be a regular big deal once a year. Not many when celebrating Christmas took a moment to consider the Jews, and many Jews even joined in the festivities, though without religious commitment.
When we received a large number of emigrants whose religious conviction was Islamic, suddenly we started to question our habit of celebrating Christmas quite so enthusiastically and adopted a slightly guilty cringe.
Australia day we felt was a good idea, since we considered all races and religions living here to be Australian, but that was brought into question by some individuals who decided that all people may be entitled to be Australian, but it might just be that some are more entitled than others, and attention was drawn to voyages of discovery undertaken by a Dutchman, a Spaniard, another Dutchman, and eventually a Yorkshireman Cpt James Cook, which lead to colonization. This was suddenly reinterpreted by some as an invasion, and all Australians of European origins were expected to feel guilty and ashamed, and Australia day was damned.
Commercialism seems to have saved Xmas, now it is a force in either the support or the damning of Australia day. We are the Australian People, we should practice our religious and political convictions as it pleases us, we should also get our heads clear of both, and once a year rejoice in honor of our shared homeland.
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Hi Paul.
Thanks for these results. We did this campaign with the objective of making Australians feel good about celebrating the day while realising this day is brutal to a huge percentage of Aboriginal people. The results you quote make us feel we did a good job, while realising there is so much more to do. Cheers. Dave
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What perhaps isn’t being taken into account here is generational attitudes. That percentage for 26 January is, according to IPA data, propped up by the silent generation, Boomers and Gen X. Now, that is a considerable part of the market, and potentially the ad bubble is at play.
However, support for 26 January is much lower amongst Gen Z and Millennials (47% and 58% resepctively) and we’re at a point whewre we can’t discount these generations as young trendies, given the oldest millennials are now 38.
If the goal is to get younger generations eating lamb, advertising around 26 January in the context of getting together for a BBQ while not explicitly connecting themselves to Australia Day is a smart move that caters to divided opinion. Given the content of the ad and the line “the original social feed, share the lamb”, I’d pretty much hang my hat on these people being MLA’s intended target.
In short, you’re talking about cancel culture and bemoaning how people cater to vocal minorities, using an example that is not meant to cater to the entirety of the population. And, you distaste for listening to the vocal minority, you have used the social media reaction to support your argument, when social listening has been shown to skew strongly, in both directions, towards the extremes and when it has been shown that people are much more likely to express negative sentiment on social than positive.
This is not confirmation of Australia Day falling victim to cancel culture. The only thing this is confirmation of is that MLA has made a strategic decision to target a younger audience.
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Hi Dave.
We presented the ad objectively without any preconceptions about how it might be received. However, while some people are suggesting that you just trotted out the same old imagery to justify Australia Day, it seems that the agencies involved, and the National Australia Day Council, took a risk by landing the casting and script right in the middle of the debate (while all other advertisers were walking away).
It also seems that you took a creative risk with the tone of the ad which might be seen as ‘over the top’ in its emotion. However, the response suggests that both risks paid off with a positive response from a majority of Australians – and that was consistent across age groups.
And the importance of understanding the majority view is not to assume that they are morally correct, but it is to recognise that any political change will be underpinned by a shift in the majority view. So it makes sense to start by at least engaging them – which the ad seems to have done.
Paul
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Hi Joshua
Thanks for your comments. You make a few different points worth following up.
You are certainly correct about there being generational differences in attitudes towards changing the date. Responses to our objective question were a bit different to the IPA’s question. While 11% in total thought the date should definitely change, this rose to 16% among 18-29 yr olds and 17% among 30-39 yr olds. Most other age groups landed on or just under 11%, except for those over 70 yrs, where only 2% felt this way.
However, it’s also worth noting that larger proportions of both younger demographics felt the date should definitely not be changed – 19% of 18-29 yr olds and 27% of 30-39 yr olds. The rest were somewhere between the extremes.
So, we certainly don’t have any distaste for listening to the vocal minority, but in each of our four years of surveys we have simply tried to set it in context against other population segments.
Remember the core of our story was about the positive response to the National Australia Day Council ad, which we thought should not be overlooked. It was also the only ad available for us to include in the survey. I would have loved to include the lamb ad in 2020 because we’ve included it in every survey since 2017.
And yes, it’s pretty obvious that the lamb ad is targeting a younger demographic and there is plenty of debate in the advertising and rural press about whether it has got the content and timing right (which we aren’t buying into).
But the decision by the MLA to hold off left an advertising-free zone – which is evidence that the day has been ‘cancelled’ by the advertising industry generally as an effective marketing opportunity.
One big question, though, is: What does this mean for defining and expressing Australian identity? In the current debate it seems a lot easier to see the arguments for what our identity should not be rather than what it is.
From a personal point of view, I just think it’s a debate worth having.
Paul
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