Meat & Livestock: Grand Slamb

Name	Position	Company
Kurt Burnette	Sydney Sales Director	Seven Network
Henry Tajer	Managing Director	Universal McCann
Saul Shtein	Head Of Sport	Seven Network
David Thomason	General Manager Marketing	MLA
David Flanagan	Group Account Director	BMF
Nathan Brown	National Strategy And Communications Director	Universal McCann
Natalie Jay	Client Service Manager	Universal McCann
Dennis Koutoulogenis	Copywriter	BMF
Karen Judson	Marketing Manager - Brands	MLA
Janice Byrnes	Brand Manager - Lamb	MLA
Tiana Diep	Marketing Assistant	MLA
Warren Brown	Executive Creative Director	BMF
Julie Burke	Account Director	BMF
James Warburton	National Sales Director	Seven Network

Meat and Livestock Australia wants to get Australians eating more lamb. For the last three years its message has been conveyed by a single spokesman, an aggressive former Aussie football star and satirist, who goads people into eating more lamb on our National day; Australia Day. It's an approach that polarises audiences, attracting many complaints but also many, many fans. MLA's lamb ads enjoy some of the highest likeability scores in Australia. Each year the ads are highly anticipated. They have moved beyond advertising and have become sought-after content. It was this insight that fuelled our media strategy. Instead of simply buying airtime on multiple TV channels, we turned the tables. We asked the broadcasters to show us what they were willing to do to get their hands on this content. The best Network bid would win the rights to the campaign.

The Seven Network won. Its willingness to work with us to make MLA's content even more famous, stood out from two very attractive rival bids. It opened up previously unavailable editorial spaces, allowing us to embed our content in Seven's programming. Our football legend unleashed his 2008 tirade from Centre Court at the Australian Open Tennis tournament, within the opening night's live national broadcast, a media first in an event of this scale. For the next 12 days our spokesman continued to appear in his very own segments during the tennis, all in non-commercial airtime. These daily segments amplified and extended the lamb message exponentially.

Our target audience was anyone with a mouth (excluding vegetarians of course), basically all Australians. We already had an iconic campaign, we needed an iconic media platform to match it. Aussies love sport. Sport in January means The Australian Open Tennis. By embedding our content into this premier sporting event, we capitalised on the 'Australian-ness' of both the campaign and the event. We reached more than 26% of Australians in the process. The integration, particularly the daily segments, gave our spokesman the chance to mix humour with lamb, tennis and current affairs. The freshness of our daily content got people talking.

Put simply. Lamb sales were up as high as 29% year on year (and last year was big!) More than $9 million worth of exposure was achieved from a budget of $850,000.