The lamb ad: Everything rides on a $3 million gamble

Watching the original Australian lamb ad from 2005 is to go back in time.

The 4:3 format, single shot rant from ex-footballer Sam Kekovich plays right on the edge. It’s self-consciously intolerant, lampooning and at the same time harnessing jingoistic patriotism.

It could easily have failed, and in some ways it did: less than a year later, race riots broke out around Sydney’s Cronulla Beach. The Australian flag that had been pinned up behind Kekovich, and his naked hostility, became a lot less funny.

Meat and Livestock Australia had to change direction. In the 2006 lamb ad, the flag was less conspicuous and Kekovich less openly hostile. It was still a single shot to camera, and it was still a harangue. But more importantly, the ad was still there. What had begun on that edge had found a way to stay on the edge. Just.

That was the beginning of a 20-year annual campaign that was recounted by MLA marketing director Nathan Low at the Mumbrella 360 conference this week in Sydney. 

“One of the things we’ve done for the 19 years since is we’ve always tried to keep unity at the heart of what we do. Even though we’re being provocative, we try to make sure we walk that fine line and get as close to the line as we can,” Low said. 

“The birth of that—how do we walk the line, how do we strike the right tone of humour—was born in 2006 and [was] a result of trying to overcome some of the emotion in the country that was happening off the back of those riots.”

Low revealed a few things that lamb-watchers will find interesting.

Nathan Low

Firstly, the budget for the campaign is $3 million a year.

“ That includes agency fees, production, media, PR, point of sale, the activation we do through food service, through butcher channels, through supermarkets, et cetera. All has to be delivered on a budget of $3 million.”

This puts the MLA and its current agency Droga5 in the situation of having to take risks. There just isn’t enough money to count on a safe campaign that won’t cut through and get a majority of earned engagement.

“When we sit down and review the plans with our board, the risk appetite for our marketing activities is actually clearly defined … high risk is acceptable.”

The change to a production-first budget came with the era of the “epic lamb ad”, which began in 2015 with a switch of agency from BMF to The Monkeys (now Droga5) and “You never lamb alone”.

Droga5 CEO Matt Michael, who also presented, said the production-heavy spend increased the pressure to succeed. 

“Nathan mentioned a change in strategy where we are spending more of that really limited budget on production and less on media. To do that we had to provoke, we had to be really interesting to get people to share, to get people to talk about it.” 

Another interesting lamb fact is how research gets used in the creative process. MLA and Droga test on audiences, not to approve ideas but effectively to kill the wrong jokes. An example comes from the 2023 ad, where anyone who says “Un-Australian” gets sent to a dystopian void. 

“The original version of that, that made it all the way through to the animatic and into testing, started in the schoolyard,” Low said. “It was a really funny scene. We didn’t pick it, but we discovered in research, do not disappear kids. People don’t like kids being disappeared. In fact, they dislike it so much that when that’s your opening scene, they hate the rest of your ad.”

“That ad has actually been one of our best performers, one of our most popular, and we could have stuffed it up.”

Low said this year’s ad, “The comments section”, had increased engagement by 50% on the previous year to over 20 million views across platforms, vindicating the strategy of focussing everything on the 3-minute creative.

“I actually see zero value in everything we do unless it drives someone to watch the three-minute film … Everything else exists in the service of getting as many people … [to] engage with the core asset.”