10 Years, 10 Jobs and 10 Lessons with Special Australia

We all know that anonymous criticism is damaging to our people. It could have also seriously hindered our growth as an agency. After the first year of ‘Tonight I’ll be Eating…,’ the anonymous feedback was harsh and hurt everyone's confidence. If we had all given up—which almost happened—we might not have continued with the campaign that is now the foundation of our local and global growth. ‘Tonight I’ll be Eating…’ ended up running in Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Taiwan, the USA, and Canada. Someone having a bad day nearly put an end to that.

This might not be the time to explain Glass & Clay as it will be too long. But we invented Glass and Clay to help break down what makes an idea work (the glass) and what is malleable (the clay). It's something we have used for many, many years. With the Tourism New Zealand ‘Good Morning World’ project we had a different New Zealander to say 'Good Morning World’ every morning. As they are the first country in the world to see the sun rise, we had a greeting every day for a year from a different part of the country, therefore showing off the amazing place through the welcoming people who live there. Of course along the journey people asked some very logical and understandable questions such as “We also have amazing parts of NZ people enjoy at night, so can a person say good night to the world?”

This question is very valid, but unfortunately breaks the glass of the idea.  

Thankfully we all agreed to keep the idea pure and as a result it went on to be the most successful campaign Tourism New Zealand has ever made and won the world’s highest Effie.

Uber Eats ‘AO Ambush’ 

From the very beginning, this was a partnership between Special, Uber Eats, Channel 9, Mediacom, Tennis Australia and The Glue Society. It wouldn’t have happened without everyone bringing their absolute best to the table. No politics, no hierarchy, no lines between roles—we all just piled in and did whatever we needed to make it happen. One team, one very bloody difficult dream. We never could have done this job from brief to the Australian Open in around 6 weeks if we all fell into traditional roles and responsibilities. We have always described our job as being useful and this was the perfect demonstration of that.

We love a metaphor, so how about this: Creatives may build the car, but the rest of the agency builds the road. When you’re a creative agency you can start to believe that having a great idea is all that matters, and it will somehow sell itself. Definitely not true. Every difficult job we’ve ever done only happened because of a tenacious business management person or a resourceful producer. The ‘Middle Seat Lottery’ was a logistical challenge on so many levels, it required so much more than just concepting and presenting the idea. Making it happen is perhaps the real achievement here.

After globally working on ‘Tonight I’ll Be Eating’ (TIBE) for over 5 years, there was a lot of hesitancy and nervousness about building a new brand platform to accommodate the shift in Uber Eats’ business moving to do more than online food delivery, to delivering almost everything. But ultimately you have to believe that if you did it once and if you take all the myriad of learnings from the first go around, you will succeed in making lightning strike twice. And thankfully, ‘Get Almost Almost Anything’ has now spread further around the world and grown bigger than TIBE (it's even proven more effective at selling online food - the original brief, thank god). 

It’s not discussed very often, but traditionally agencies are built to create and turn around ideas in about three to six months. This is a pace built around traditional channels like film and posters. But unconventional ideas and ideas that play with and shape culture are not built to work at that pace. Some require you to move instantly and react to the cultural circumstance, other projects which require vast organisation and stakeholder management can actually take years. Years of juggling resources and keeping momentum. Modern agencies need to move and make themselves capable of working at multiple speeds all at the same time. Shift 20, a program to shift representation of people with disabilities in Australian advertising, required the agency to do 2 years of planning, organising and building with Australia’s biggest brands.

At a time when Kathmandu had become a bit voiceless, the other outdoor brands were so busy either being hardcore explorers or trying to save the world, they never mentioned that our brains are actually wired to appreciate the outdoors. Finding this truth actually carved out a fresh space for Kathmandu that the brand could not only own, but made it so much more accessible to a wider audience. It was another example of how if you prospect around for a truth that has never been said before, but is intuitively understood, it's a great foundation for creating something powerful. 

As a very positive consequence of working with Uber around the world, we have been exposed to some incredible and fascinating cultural insights about other countries. As a result, we’ve learnt to bring the culture of Uber as a brand to the table and then spend careful time and energy working out how it can collaborate, merge and adapt to be part of the cultures of the countries it is working within. This has been an essential process in all our work overseas for Uber, but particularly Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong where the cultural cornerstones are much less shared than they are with the United States and the United Kingdom.

Admitting you have a problem can be one of the most powerful, disruptive, and frankly likeable things to do. It makes a brand feel relatable, more human, and less like a corporate monolith. When Uber Eats expanded beyond just food, the name itself became ripe for confusion. We leaned into this potential misunderstanding, embracing the possibility that the public might not immediately connect the name with the new offerings. This approach led to what has become our favourite Super Bowl commercial to date.

We are big believers in exploring as many styles of marketing and advertising as possible. We’ve always felt this way because we’ve never wanted to limit ourselves to the ideas and style of ideas that are possible. A big part of that is accepting that we are not the only type of creative out there, and in fact different creatives with very different voices can create amazing work that you yourself would be unlikely to do, but still very much appreciate. Mutti & eBay was created by some incredibly talented creatives with very much their own style, craft and voice. Embracing and championing that has resulted in work for the brands that have become more successful than ever before.