Meat & Livestock Australia represents lamb farmers, responsible for driving domestic sales.

The annual Australian Lamb Summer Campaign is a cultural moment, much like the UK’s John Lewis Christmas ads. Except it happens in January – BBQ season.

The brand’s long-term strategy of 'unity’, that nothing unites the nation like getting together around a summer lamb BBQ, is well established and understood.

“The Lamb Ad” is considered the ultimate 'Australian ad’. An irreverent ‘unofficial state of the nation’ Aussies expect to be funny, insightful, satirical, culturally relevant, topical and reflecting Australia’s most divisive topic from the past year.

While this year’s campaign focusses on a global issue, it does it through an Australian lens. Using the most talked about topics of the year in Australia to illustrate the divisiveness of online comments sections. The commercial features three moments that will require extra context for non-Australian viewers.

The man uniting Australia with his cutlet is Sam Kekovich, who has been the face of Australian Lamb for the past 20 years. He is a brand asset, and his role is always the same - he unites the nation with lamb.

The AI generated figure on the beach is David Koch (aka ‘Kochie’), an Australian TV personality who became the face of a large-scale AI generated content scam, and the centre of a debate around the dangers of AI in Australia.

The breakdancer scene refers to infamous Olympic ‘athlete’ Raygun and was the most talked about story of the year.

A small brand, Australian Lamb battles for salience to push through the ‘auto-pilot’ of shoppers buying chicken and beef.

In 2024 Lamb’s retail price soared, becoming Australia’s most expensive meat. Faced with a “cost-of-living crisis”, justifying its premium is critical.

A modest budget means we rely on earned views and PR to drive engagement and sales.

The audience is extremely broad as we’re selling a non-branded, generic food - all Aussies who buy groceries or eat out. Or, ‘all Australians with mouths’. Media organisations are also a target, as their coverage of the campaign drives viewership, talkability and brand fame. 

Our brief, to drive sales in summer, by winning Aussies’ hearts and minds.

Lamb’s brand strategy is rooted in unity, because nothing brings Australians together like a lamb BBQ.

The lamb ad summarises and satirises the year in Australia. Identifying an overarching and unacknowledged theme that divided the nation.

This year Australian Lamb identified that while many topics were pulling our nation apart, there was one space fueling division across every subject. Online comments sections. These pseudo-anonymous spaces have become the homes of trolls, keyboard warriors and bots. They encourage the spread of misinformation, extreme points of view and straight up nastiness, creating the very real sense that we are a nation divided.

We knew in reality, around a lamb BBQ, Australians would never behave the way they do in the comments section. So we created a campaign that lived on YouTube and social, to get the nation “out of the comments and into the cutlets”.

To show Aussies how divisive, dogmatic and downright weird these digital spaces had become, we held a mirror up to the nation with a script created from 100% real Australian comments, sourced with geo-targeted social listening from the most divisive topics of the year.

We worked with social listening agency Kinesso, to scrape thousands of Australian comments on divisive topics from across the country. Then wove them into a funny, cohesive narrative.

This approach helped us identify polarising topics across demographics and regions which meant each moment or character in the film could speak to a different segment of the population – ensuring mass relatability and shareability. It also meant the film felt like a true reflection of the platforms it was satirising. With the language, opinions and characters feeling familiar to all.

These topics ranged from the serious (clean energy, the risks of AI, anti-democratic Russian bots) to the ridiculous (dog grooming, Olympic ‘breakdancer’ Raygun and tea-making etiquette). This helped highlight that The Comments Section was causing division across every subject.

Through the script building process, we were careful to laugh at all equally, keeping the focus on the larger issue of the comments section itself rather than any one group or opinion. The full film launched with PR and news, with all supporting media driving audiences to watch and share it on social platforms.

Knowing the majority of people would experience the campaign on social media, we designed every part of the execution to thrive in those environments. To drive interaction, we ended the spot with a piece of self-aware comment baiting: “I hope people post nice comments about this ad.” This worked, with hundreds of responses flowing in, many of them simply replying “this is a nice comment about this ad.”

To further amplify engagement, we flipped traditional media and celebrated our most engaged audience members – the commenters on our film.

Their comments were turned into OOH placements and a bespoke 15” ad for the online film, which included famous accounts like Katy Perry and Scott Morrison, who became ads for lamb, for free.

Finally, we infiltrated toxic comments sections across the internet with campaign gifs that any Aussie could use to encourage people to “get out of the comments and into the cutlets”. In doing so, we turned the very spaces that fueled division into media channels that spread unity and lamb.

A truly social campaign in all aspects. Conceived from social insight, created with social listening, shot in 9 x16 for social, executed through social platforms and amplified by social participation. Every creative choice – from the script to the comment-baiting ending to the gif infiltration – was designed to maximise organic reach and social engagement.

In just six weeks the campaign’s impact in earned brand fame and sales was impressive.

The long-form film alone was viewed 21,425,216 times - 60% earned or organically shared.

Beyond passively watching a 3-minute-long ad for Lamb, Aussies engaged with the brand. Posting 631,000 comments, likes and shares. Over 214,000 Aussies viewed our branded GIF’s.

The campaign’s topicality provoked over 700 media articles, earning Australian Lamb over 180,000,000 opportunities to see.

And, despite being the most expensive meat during our worst cost-of-living crisis, ‘The Comments Section’ won Aussies’ hearts and minds so much, they spent $148,173,000 on lamb purchases over the campaign period.

Not only a +7.7% increase in value sales vs 2024, but it was also the highest value sales of any Summer Lamb campaign in the brand’s illustrious 20-year campaign history.