Work of the Year: LBB AUNZ’s Favourite Campaigns of 2024

If there is a better, more substantive statement of intent by a major AUNZ brand in the last few years, I’d love to see it. ‘Better on a Better Network’ is not only an effective, engaging, and highly entertaining piece of brand marketing, we can't forget how utterly brave it is. This is a legacy, ex-government telco investing in cutting edge stop-motion animation. 

Not only aesthetically brilliant, beautifully written, and very funny, it’s the sort of work that should raise the threshold for all marketers, here and worldwide. And for that alone, it deserves its accolades.

‘The Cassette’ sees a man who is visited by Death and chooses to spend his final moments playing his favourite song, ‘Here Comes Your Man’ by The Pixies. The Palliative Care Queensland campaign by Cocogun and Rowdy contributed to the rise of craft we’ve seen over the past year. 

I love the emotional, handcrafted feel of the stop motion animation. For me, it healed broken pieces of my heart and replaced them with a sense of hope. Cocogun made a difficult topic approachable, handling the sensitiveness and nuance. The choice to represent Death as a friend is one that I believe transcends the spot and asks people to think about death in a new way. I hope it has led people to the realisation that there can be control, choice and dignity in death.  

‘Adoptable’ is brilliant in every way: the idea, the execution, the ingenious use of AI, the media play, the transformational impact it’s having on Pedigree, the real-world impact it’s having in finding shelter dogs good homes. 

The media strategy uses data like household sizes and proximity to parks to pitch the right dogs to the right areas, reducing the likelihood they’ll be returned to a shelter (usually, 1 in 5 adopted dogs are returned). The AI-created digital dog can pose in any way, for any media format, and when a dog is adopted, it’s dropped out of the media rotation. 

The results say it all: within the first two weeks, half of the shelter dogs featured in the campaign had been adopted, and there were 6x more shelter site visits. By 2026, all of Pedigree’s digital touchpoints will feature Adoptable dogs. More ideas like ‘Adoptable’, please.

I love this film and OOH, but even more importantly, I love what they represent: investment in a long idea, storytelling, and craft - off the top of my head, I can tell you there were 40 special builds and almost 300 OOH assets created to reflect the papercraft’s shadow and light. You can’t reflect on 2024 advertising across Australia and New Zealand and not immediately think about what Telstra and Bear Meets Eagle on Fire have done for this market: how many brands and agencies could have done ‘Better On A Better Network’, ‘Wherever We Go’, ‘Four Bars’, and the Christmas ad in one year, all to that standard? 

Telstra has a bigger marketing budget than most brands in this country, sure. And not every CMO is a ‘Brent Smart’. But could we get more like him? If he can do this work, in this business, in this category, I reckon more marketers could be demanding, selling up, and protecting, special work.

Heinz paired the well-loved flavour of ketchup with the divisive flavour of pickles. To match this audacity, TBWA\Sydney sent a ‘human pickle’ into the tomatoey mess of La Tomatina festival in Spain. Bizet's ‘Prelude' to Act 1 Of Carmen gave the spot a renaissance-tinged fun. 

I know I won’t forget the memory of a human pickle when standing in the sauce aisle. 

How do you keep a decade plus-long brand platform fresh and engaging? Well, it seems by taking a very simple idea, and executing it beautifully. It’s way harder to do less than more, and this clever and funny OOH execution proves it doesn’t all have to be flashy visuals and AI to be great.

Motion Sickness took what is essentially the traditionally dry category of public service information film, and turned it on its head with a bit of humour and a lot of love. This works in so many ways. It’s a great piece of education, but also a totally brilliant, attention-grabbing headline delivered with both wit and style.

My hopes were high for ALDI’s Christmas ad: last year’s was going to be hard to top, BMF won Effective Agency of the Year this year, and ALDI Effective Advertiser of the Year, and the ‘Good Different’ platform is a big promise to live up to. 

It exceeded all expectations. The boat-sized gravy boat was actually created for the shoot. The insight is bang on. So is the track. The attention to detail is gorgeous (cracking a bottle of champagne on the side of the gravy boat before its maiden voyage!). And the moment the matriarch screams “Save the turkey!” and he jumps out of the boat genuinely made me actually laugh out loud. They really did ‘go a little extra’. I couldn’t love it any more.