‘Be That Teacher’ campaign offers valuable creative lesson

Creative advertising agency Clemenger BBDO were engaged to develop the Australian government’s new $10m Be That Teacher‘ campaign to address the crippling teacher shortage across the country. But ordinary government advertising, this campaign is not.

A still from Clemenger BBDO's 'Be That Teacher Campaign'

Underappreciated and in increasingly short supply, teaching staff from across the country are the focus of a new Australian government campaign to help attract and retain staff to the profession.

To help achieve this, creative advertising agency Clemenger BBDO were engaged to develop the content-led project aimed at changing perceptions of teaching.

The campaign is centred on an exhibition that features teachers’ mementos gifted from students, with thank you letters, illustrations and other tokens all displayed in a museum-like setting. It is an emotive homage to the impact that teachers have made on students’ lives, and vice versa.

Clemenger BBDO's 'Be That Teacher’ campaign for the Australian government is centred on an exhibition

Eight films were also developed based on the content of the exhibition, and these videos are being screened in cinemas, online, on social media, and out-of-home mediums including billboards across the country for the next six months. One film will also be aired on TV.

The project also invites other teachers to take part in the campaign. They can submit their stories via the website BeThatTeacher.gov.au over the coming year, and are additionally encouraged to share their stories on social media.

Clemenger BBDO executive creative director Tristan Graham said: “I really pushed the team to think outside of TV, and to approach it as a big creative platform and a more modern marketing ­solution than just TV ads.

“We have to remember that the world is changing, and people can increasingly opt out of what we make. So you have to make stuff that they want to opt into themselves – stuff that people seek out. And I think this campaign is a good example of that.”

Teachers from across the country loaned their mementos for the exhibition

The stories are part of the $10m Be That Teacher campaign, which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese unveiled on October 31.

The campaign forms part of the government’s wider agenda to address the shortage of high school teaching staff, which is estimated to reach 4000 by 2025, and is the result of a combined federal, state and territory government initiative.

The teachers who wanted to share their stories and mementos were forthcoming in far greater numbers than expected, according to assistant secretary of communication at the Department of Education, ­Dijanna Ratajkoski.

She said more than 800 teachers responded to a casting call-out, well above the expected handful of about 30 to 40 applications.

A Queensland-based primary school teacher, Mirakai Kentwell, loaned her memento – a photograph of her and a student – to the exhibition. In a video, she explains the image was taken on the day of her school’s athletics carnival, when her student, who is blind, took her hand and started running during a relay race.

Mrs Kentwell explained the joy she felt seeing her student taking part in the sport with enthusiasm, as his peers also cheered him on. “The rewarding feeling I get from teaching is something I’ve never felt from any other job,” she says in the video.

“It’s awesome getting to be the person to share that experience with him. I’m lucky, very lucky.”

The 60-second films were also directed by renowned Australian documentary filmmaker, Christopher Nelius, who was the creator of acclaimed series Girls Can’t Surf, which examined sexism in surf culture in the 1980s and 1990s.

When the government’s National Teacher Workforce Action Plan was launched nearly a year ago, it was agreed upfront that a campaign would be part of a broader plan to attract more people to teaching.

The ongoing teacher storage is an acute problem that continues to impact students and teachers alike. A 2020 report from Monash University found that 71 per cent of teachers didn’t think the Australian public appreciated teachers.

A recent white paper commissioned by the Department of Education also documented the drivers of teacher shortages. These included the status of the profession, workload pressures, and salary, among others. The sector is also facing declining enrolments in teaching education; initial teacher education declined by 8 per cent and completions declined by 17 per cent between 2017 and 2020, according to the paper.

“The teacher shortage issue and challenge isn’t one that stemmed up yesterday, it’s certainly been a complex problem for many years and has many causes,” Ms Ratajkoski told The Growth Agenda.

“At the heart of it, if (teachers) feel they don’t have the country’s backing in what they do, you can see the need to help change, or start to change, that narrative. That’s why I think communication is so important,” she said.

“Teaching is the profession that starts all professions. And along our way, as we get older, we often forget that.”

She added that the campaign is “absolutely different in terms of government advertising”.

This imperative – to deliver something “different” – was a key part of the government’s brief to the Clemenger BBDO creative team.

And “different” was delivered from the agency, not only through the creative approach and media channel mix, which breaks away from a traditional television-led approach.

The campaign is also unique because it emotively speaks to a number of audiences at once. This includes teachers, both prospective and current, as well as students.

The exhibition and films prompt audiences to think of teachers who have shaped their lives, and that emotive meaning is significant, Mr Graham said.

“From an emotional point of view, even just seeing one image of an exhibition, it treats the subject matter with reverence, and it tells you teachers need to be respected (and) what they’re doing is incredible. Sometimes, that respect has been lost. We wanted to really put teachers figuratively and literally on a pedestal and say: ‘Look at what they’re doing. Look at the ­impact they’re having on our kids’ lives’,” he said.

Ms Ratajkoski said that the campaign pointed to a broader ­ambition to change perceptions of teaching in the long-term.

“No one-off campaign is going to change this overnight. It’s important to know that this is part of a bigger suite of work and a part of a bigger package of measures to actually address this issue. But we hope this does start the conversation and start to change that narrative,” she said.

She also added the department had set ambitious targets to measure the success of the campaign.

“We will undertake evaluation and market testing, of course, like any campaign needs to have. But we do hope we see a shift in perceptions. We do want to see more students enrolling into teaching degrees. We do want to see more teachers enter the classroom. But we also want to see teachers stay in the classrooms too.”

Ultimately, the true stories that form this campaign are what she hopes will connect with audiences.

“Those stories were magical. I saw them 1000 times throughout its development. And I get moved by them every single time,” Ms Ratajkoski said.