The Campaign

The ascension of Donald Trump has put Australia on edge. With our first diplomatic foray with the new Trump administration ending in a very public humiliation, uncertainty about the status of our relationship with the U.S. and the weakness of our politicians has become the national preoccupation. This genuine fear and raw tension allowed us to frame HoC’s fifth season’s key themes of fear and insecurity within a rich, current local context. Our idea was to create a new entity in the Australian political landscape. Showing our desire for a leader who would not yield, we would build a groundswell of support through an intensive campaign across TV, Print, and Social.

The Brief

Creative Development & Production - $92,850 AUD Social Video Spend - $65,562 AUD TVC Spend - $48,218 AUD Print, Digital & OOH Spend $40,515 AUD Total = $247,145 AUD

Creative Execution

During an intensive three-week period, our flighting began with Budget Night. We piggy-backed off news and current affairs segments dedicated to budget-related coverage, promoting ourselves as Australia’s political fix. The ‘Australians for Underwood’ activation captured public attention, fuelling curiosity and speculation on social media about this new leader on the scene. The next day, a full-page print execution was placed in Australia’s leading financial newspaper, The Australian Financial Review. We specifically embedded the campaign ad within a dedicated budget coverage lift out – providing political context and credibility to the campaign. This drove further conversations among fans and journalists, capturing interest from finance journalists to entertainment reporters. The campaign’s tail left a lasting impression through highly visible OOH executions at Sydney airport - asking all Australians returning home to get on board. Across the promotional period, social activity rallied HoC’s fans and ‘Australians for Underwood’ supporters to spread the message.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

In the first 24 hours, the TVC was seen on social over 320,000 times. Helping us achieve pick up in Time Magazine (Digital), Daily Mail, Gizmodo, Mashable, Junkee, Huffington Post, The Hook Mag, Cnet, News.com.au and Ask Men. Through this, we achieved syndication all over the world, achieving 52 million media impressions and a total earned value of $3.36 million. Our social community grew by 6000% (becoming a long term asset for future marketing efforts). We also were able to spark 25,988 interactions from 3,339,287 social views and achieved a 33% view rate on online content.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

Launching the new season of House of Cards (HoC) in Australia, our modest budget dictated that every element in the campaign delivered the biggest possible bang for buck. To do this, we created a fake political movement in support of our season launch. With it we hijacked Budget Night, the 24-hour window in which politics is centre stage. News media outlets everywhere were buzzing with conflicting theories about the campaign. With just a few TV, print, and OOH spots cleverly deployed we drove speculation with media and fans alike.

In an atmosphere of political fear and insecurity, we subverted the tactics of real-world political movements with an unbranded ‘Australians for Underwood’ campaign. It was launched on the night when every Australian is a self-proclaimed expert on politics – the Budget. Creating a high impact, high return campaign on a meagre budget, required an innovative, precise, and newsworthy promo strategy. Our focus was to use our unbranded ‘Australians for Underwood’ TVC to promote conversation and curiosity about this new force in Australian politics. Only after media and public speculation had reached fever pitch was the real objective of the promotion revealed – exploiting Australia’s love of Frank Underwood to launch the new season of HoC. At a grassroots level, the social activation became a hub for the media, fan engagement and a vehicle for sharing.