Nothing sheepish about new lamb ad that sizzles on TikTok

At a time when brands are increasingly risk averse, Meat and Livestock Australia define its advertising and marketing programs as having a “high risk appetite”. The Growth Agenda reports on the effectiveness of the approach.

A still from Meat and Livestock Australia's annual lamb campaign

Meat and Livestock Australia’s annual lamb campaign is shaping up to be one of its most popular since it went viral on TikTok earlier this month, breaking digital viewership records on social media channels.

It is also likely to benefit from additional awareness this year, following a partnership with Domino’s, with an ad that aired on Wednesday featuring the face of Australian lamb, Sam Kekovich, to promote its new lamb pizza range.

The iconic annual lamb campaign has been running for 20 years. For the past 10 years, the advert has come from MLA’s creative agency partner The Monkeys, part of Accenture Song. This year, Kekovich returned to screens to deliver a message of unity between jousting generations to bridge the widening generation gap.

The clip culminates with Kekovich declaring a “barbecue for the ages”, after the ad satirises generational stereotypes and the things that divide them. In the advert, millennials joke about staying cool with Generation Z lingo, as one woman excitedly quips; “Are we saying ‘slay’ now?”. Meanwhile Boomers walk through their neighbourhood, where houses are affordable, unaware their phone torch is on.

This year’s advert shows a physical generation gap (depicted as a gaping crevasse in a fictional Australian city) widens, leaving the generations stranded and isolated.

The more adversarial the generations behave towards each other, the wider the gap becomes.

But the inviting scent of lamb on a barbecue sparks the memory of their shared love of the protein. Finding common ground in that moment, the generations then set aside their differences, and the gap starts to repair.

A still from Meat and Livestock Australia's annual lamb campaign, which comes from its creative agency partner of 10 years, The Monkeys, part of Accenture Song

No guts, no glory

At a time when brands are increasingly risk averse, MLA is one organisation that gives creativity a broad canvas: its advertising and marketing programs are defined and written into its risk management framework as having a “high risk appetite”.

Over the years, the renowned lamb campaign has attracted its accolades and awards but also some backlash from viewers. However that hasn’t deterred its makers from taking some creative risks.

MLA’s general manager of marketing and insights Nathan Low said: “I don’t view provocative ideas as a risk, or big, innovative creative ideas as a risk,” adding that the biggest “risk” the organisation took each year was signing off on an idea around five months ahead of its launch. “That’s the leap of faith we need to take and where the trust and relationship between agency and client becomes really important, because our chips are all in at that point,” Mr Low said.

And that trust in The Monkeys is on solid footing: “It works because (The Monkeys) have an incredibly consistent track record of doing amazing work every year. And they’ve nailed the brief every single year,” Mr Low said.

While the content of the 2024 campaign isn’t excessively controversial, The Monkeys chief executive and Accenture Song Auatralia New Zealand president Mark Green said it was still a campaign that demanded a bold creative approach every year.

“There’s still a lot of comedy in what we’ve covered that could raise a few eyebrows,” he said. “There’s still a boldness to the idea and to the work that’s fairly unique and something that we’ve followed for the best part of a decade.

“It’s always the combination of fear of failure and ambition to knock it out of the park. And that tension between success and failure is always there, and something that we’re really motivated by, and in some ways addicted to.

“Every year you set that challenge and raise the bar. And we’ve done that since the beginning. Whether it’s the MLA work or any other client, we have that expectation. We know what that roller coaster looks like. I think now, if we don’t have that tension, we know we’re not trying hard enough.”

The campaign is not without its critics, who Mr Low says have perceived the campaign as a “vanity project” or just an “epic, fun campaign” over the years, but he is quick to point out the commercial strategy and rigour behind it.

“My oversimplified answer to that is, if you’re a brand owner, why wouldn’t you want to own a season and be incredibly culturally relevant? Who wouldn’t want that? That is an amazing position for a brand to be in. It makes everything else you do more effective.”

Social media success

Within five days of its launch on January 7, this year’s campaign had become the most viewed lamb advertisement in MLA’s history, clocking more than 3 million views on TikTok.

Across all channels, including X where it has also been particularly popular, it has now attracted 20 million views.

MLA did not purchase TV advertising space as part of its media plan.

Instead, the campaign relies on storytelling and the quality of its creativity to earn the attention of audiences, appearing in the news and on MLA’s own digital channels. Increasingly, the algorithms on social media channels also play a key role in determining reach.

So far, it has been TikTok that exceeded the expectations of the advertisement’s makers, where the channel’s algorithm favours popular and trending content.

It’s a channel where short-form videos usually thrive, however MLA’s three minute clip has still managed to captivate audiences, driven initially by a post from Australian-based food magazine Delicious shortly after the campaign was made public.

On its account, the video attracted 3.1 million views and 437,000 likes and over 5000 comments to become the publication’s best performing video on TikTok since joining the platform in 2021. Across TikTok, Instagram and Facebook, the video has now earned 4 million views in total, which Delicious estimates is its highest performing video ever.

The campaign also took a global turn on social media. Further fuelling its viral success, a McDonald’s marketing manager in the US shared Delicious’ post, which delivered 1 million viewers to the video on TikTok.

Delicious editor in chief Kerrie McCallum explained: “The ad seems to have been created in a way that will really resonate on TikTok and it was bang-on for the cultural climate bubbling away on that platform”.

And while global reach was not one of MLA’s strategic priorities for the campaign, Mr Low said he still considered the result valuable.

“Cultural relevance or cultural resonance is like a multiplier for effectiveness,” Mr Low said.

“Because we’re attaching it not just to the meal occasion of alfresco dining and barbecues, but we are closely associating lamb with a cultural identity of an Australian way of life.”

Investing in creativity 

MLA, a non-profit funded by farmer levies, is a research, development and marketing corporation and its annual campaign is its single biggest marketing investment of the year.

Of the organisation’s total domestic marketing budget of about $5m, up to two thirds of that investment is spent on the summer lamb advertisement, which encompasses production and a “mild” spend on media channels.

“We spend nowhere near as much on this as people think we do,” Mr Low said. “It’s a very unique campaign model. A lot of people call it a TV ad, but actually, the three minute ad has never run on TV.”

Mr Low likens the campaign to a “movie trailer model”, the success of which relies on being shared among audiences, media coverage and audiences seeking out the content for themselves on their channel of choice.

But viral success on social channels is never guaranteed, particularly in such content-saturated environments.

Mr Green said brands needed to be creatively bold to deliver the results that brands expected in 2024.

“The customer has so much more control than they’ve ever had,” he said.

“And to really infiltrate that in a way that is positive for a brand, you need to go there.” “There” being bold and creative territories.

“It’s not a ‘good to do’, it’s almost an imperative,” Mr Green said. “Because you get so much more value for money out of your marketing investment and return on investment.”