The Campaign

Our idea was to create a social instructional video that showed young Australians how to use the postal service. We knew that most of them would probably vote YES. We just had to show them how to cast their vote, and remind them how important it was to do so.

Creative Execution

The execution was created with social media platforms in mind. It is necessary to speak to users in a very tailored way on these platforms, in order to get a message across. Firstly, in order to attract attention in news feeds, the execution must have a hook in the first three seconds. This is achieved in the opening of the video with the word ‘lesbian’ present on the teacup that our ‘granny’ is using. The humorous nature of the video with an important underlying message then positions the video perfectly to be shared by users. The video was posted with just one week left to vote. We posted on the Australian Marriage Equality social channels, where we knew we would have an initially receptive audience. With no media support, this strategy then ensured that our primary engaged audience did the heavy lifting – sharing the video and increasing its reach.

Results

In the lead up to the YES vote, Australian Marriage Equality posted over 1380 pieces on Facebook. Although this video only played in the final week, engagement was 33% higher than average, and shares were 227% higher than average. Undoubtedly, this social post helped the conversation in the final days of the voting period.   And Australia voted YES.

The Grannie Vlogger film was designed specifically to connect with the 40% of young Australians who had not yet cast their vote in the gay marriage plebiscite. The objective of the AME (Australian Marriage Equality Group) was to engage with this audience and to inform them that the vote was actually a postal one, a format the digital natives were not familiar with. A direct approach was the best way to achieve this effectively.

A youth audience is inherently difficult to engage and spark to action, and the Australian Marriage Equality campaign needed a way to motivate younger audiences to take part in the postal vote – a practice they weren’t familiar with. The strategy was to initially deliver a message to a community through the Australian Marriage Equality social channels. This audience would then be used to seed the message, share it, and allow the audience to contribute to discussions that were already taking place on social media. The aim of the campaign was to talk to the younger voter base, and Facebook and Twitter were the perfect platforms to do this. There are 6.7m users under the age of 34 on Facebook, representing 42% of users in Australia.