Australian advertising: The top 10 best food marketing campaigns

From milk that tastes like real milk to getting pork on your fork – see 10 of Australia’s best food marketing campaigns. Vote for the most influential.

Angry mums assaulting armed robbers with milk bottles. Naomi Watts passing up the opportunity to meet Tom Cruise. Lee Lin Chin and Sam Kekovich strutting their stuff.

Over the decades, advertising executives have known the power to persuade the general public to buy extra Australian produce is through humour.

The Weekly Times has dusted off the old VHS machine and rewound the tapes to determine what truly are the best food marketing campaigns that Australia has produced.

TOM CRUISE AND UNKNOWN NAOMI

Whether it was Risky Business, Rain Man or Born on the Fourth of July, Tom Cruise had already notched up an impressive filmography by 1990. Plus, we weren’t aware of his Scientology and general sofa-stomping weirdness.

So the girls in the office were pretty impressed when Julie Rankin (played by a young Naomi Watts) scores a dinner date with Cruise in a radio competition.

But wait — Julie’s mum is cooking a lamb roast tonight. Dinner is off and, not to worry, Julie’s dad reckons you can go out with Tommy Boy any night of the week.

Such is the power of lamb.

PUT SOME PORK ON YOUR FORK

When it comes to double entendres, the Australian pork sector knows you can never get enough. Pork that is.

Some of the best known ads include an older gent in a medical clinic waiting room, telling his wife the doctor says they should “pork more often.”

Another ad involves a young couple on a bus having their love of pig-based protein misinterpreted by the dirty minds of fellow passengers.

Benny Hill would be proud.

ROGER THE MILKMAN

Speaking of Benny Hill, the late comedian memorably, if inexplicably, hit the top of the pops with his ditty Ernie, The Fastest Milkman in the West back in the 1970s.

Australian advertising executives, being big fans of Benny, were inspired.

Cut to a scene of a mature gent kissing his partner goodbye on the doorstep.

The couple are of a certain vintage, this could easily be an ad for the Australian Pensioners Insurance Agency.

But, hang on a minute. Old mate saunters down the street to the next house. He and another woman passionately embrace. Caption reads: Roger Daly, Age 67. Retired milkman.

If you didn’t pick the pun name straight away, you’re never gonna make it in advertising, mate.

ANGRY MUM WALLOPS ROBBER

Herman’s Hermit plaintively warble in the background: “No milk today, my love has gone away. The bottle stands forlorn, a symbol of the dawn.” The easy-listening sounds hot from the tape-deck at Smooth FM are doing little to soothe the nerves of this 1990s mum.

Her hopeless husband didn’t buy milk. The kids are going ape-bananas crazy.

She’s seriously pissed off.

And when an armed robber impedes her ability to pay for milk, she gives old mate bandit a crack over the noggin with her trusty two litres encased in plastic.

Lesson: Don’t mess with mum.

WOOLIDONGA B & S BALL

Two men dressed in dinner suits (and not appearing plausibly rural) make an appearance at the Woolidonga B & S ball. This duo don’t want to quench their thirst with a VB or Tooheys New, no sir, they’re after something a little less alcoholic. Carlton Zero was yet to find its way onto the market, so the blokes opt for a glass of milk. The crowd is unimpressed. Then they remember they’re actors and being paid by the NSW milk marketing board.

Arguably the only mainstream advertisement to include the Barry McKenzie idiom “dry as a dead dingo’s donga.”

MAKE THOSE BODIES SING

“Baaa-naa-naa-naa, make those bodies sing!” If there’s one thing a generation of Australian kids enjoyed most on television, it’s the ocker strine of a well-turned jingle. Plus, the incessant singing would prompt mum or dad to a few more of nature’s potassium pistols in the supermarket trolley.

REPORTING FROM WARSAW

Fernando Henrique Cardoso. Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. Boutros Boutros-Ghali.

When it comes to pronouncing the names of world leaders, Lee Lin Chin turned it into an art form on SBS’s weekend news bulletin over the years.

The veteran newsreader starred in the 2016 Australia Day lamb ad, recounting painful memories of being plonked in snowed out Warsaw some 20 years earlier without a lamb chop in sight. Fast forward to present day and Lee Lin works to ensure that no Australian shall endure a similar fate. She even gets some SAS paratroopers to break down the door of a ex-pat hipster’s Brooklyn apartment. Turns out the expat is a vegan. Lee Lin is not impressed.

DOG AT BUTCHER COUNTER

Suburban butcher shops? Remember those? Passers-by notice a new type of meat in the window. They’re intrigued. A grey-haired nana gestures to the butcher: Is that lamb? He nods in the affirmative. “You’ve got to be kidding,” she replies. A few other such encounters occur with SBS-style subtitles helpfully applied. Then a border collie shows up to inquire about the lamb. The early 1990s were simpler times.

MILK THAT TASTES LIKE REAL MILK

It’s the Pauls Milk ad that turned milk orders into a form of marketing poetry.

Gormless-looking bloke walks into his local milk bar. The shopkeeper, a woman who resembles Esme from A Country Practice, draws a deep breath and recites her timeworn list of lactose offerings.

“Low fat, no fat, full cream, high calcium, high protein, soy, light, skim, omega 3, high calcium with vitamin D and folate, or extra dollop?”

When it comes to reciting comedic lists, that milk bar nana gives the legendary Ronnie Barker a run for his money in the memory recall stakes.

KEKOVICH’S AUSTRALIAN MESSAGE

If you judge an advertising campaign by the number of sequels it spawns, then there’s only one winner: Sam Kekovich’s Australia Day messages.

The original ad was broadcast in January 2005. Initially inspired by the ex-VFL football star’s appearances on ABC comedy The Fat, Kekovich and lamb became something of a national day tradition. When the lamb marketers ditched Sam in favour of an alternative one Australia Day, talkback radio went into meltdown. Probably because he delivered lines such as:

“Look at our national song – Waltzing Matilda. It’s about a bloke trying to get a nice bit of lamb into his tucker bag. Not spicy chicken wings.”

Hard to argue with that logic.