Why is this work relevant for Direct?

Initially briefed as a pair of eDMs targeting a small list of global film and TV executives, “The Australian Job” blossomed into a fabricated film trailer emailed directly to 5000 recipients promoting the logistical and financial benefits of completing post-production in Australia remotely. From the heist trailer, to the bespoke tax incentives calculator, to the follow-up souvenir film poster, “The Australian Job” was designed to speak directly to a select audience in a niche industry.

Background

Australia enjoys a global reputation as a destination for world-class film and TV post-production services, using competitive government financial incentives to attract the best projects. During the challenges of the pandemic, Australian post-production studios proved they could deliver to the same high standard remotely too. Ausfilm, a government-industry partnership that promotes Australia’s production and post-production industry abroad, approached us to develop a direct campaign that would entice global film and TV executives to specifically complete their post-production in Australia remotely. Updated government incentives made the financial benefits highly attractive to international producers looking to make their budgets stretch further without compromising on results.

Describe the creative idea (30% of vote)

Drawing parallels with classic heist films — assembling the perfect team of experts to complete a highly rewarding job — we repackaged the administrative task of complex post-production accounting and navigating multiple government financial incentives into the thrilling heist caper. “The Australian Job” tells the story of a Hollywood Producer who engages an Aussie ‘Fixer’ to help assemble the right post-production team within the production’s tight budget. By doing so, the Producer not only gets world-class post-production for their project, they also unlock generous government financial incentives without the logistical challenges of travelling to Australia to oversee the work.

Describe the strategy (20% of vote)

Our audience are directly responsible for propelling a film or TV production from story to screen — assembling the right team of experts within a tight production budget is their most complex and important tasks. Making their work simpler and less expensive is a highly attractive proposition. Wrapping our message as a heist caper makes this administrative task exciting — our audience can see themselves as the star of their own “Australian Job”, securing lucrative government incentives and ensuring world-class post-production talent. Additionally, we collaborated with some of Australia’s leading post-production studios to make the centrepiece film a showcase of what Australia could deliver. (This part of the project was completed remotely too). The film encouraged our audience to visit a campaign landing page where a bespoke incentives calculator demonstrated the real-world financial benefits of completing post-production in Australia.

Describe the execution (20% of vote)

The centrepiece of this direct campaign was a fake film trailer, emailed directly to our audience of select global film and TV executives, portraying them as the star. The film itself not only outlined a solution to our audience’s challenges, but showcased Australia’s rich post-production offering of visual effects, score, sound, editing, colour grading and titles throughout the film. This led our audience to a campaign landing page which showcased Australia’s revised government tax incentives and included a simplified incentives calculator to demonstrate the real-world financial benefits Australia has on offer. A souvenir film poster for “The Australian Job”, which included a list of Australia’s post-production studios, was mailed to recipients as a tangible reminder of the initial email and encouraging the audience to reach out for personalised assistance.

List the results (30% of vote)

The email was sent to 5000 film and TV executives worldwide and achieved an open rate of 43%, a significant increase for Ausfilm’s benchmark of 32%. We also saw a clickthrough rate of 10.5% (benchmark 6%). To date we’ve had 777 unique visitors to the site (dwell time 3:07) which represents 15% of our highly influential audience. Of those, 60% went on to watch the trailer and 15% used the calculator. Now that the word is out we’re seeing an increase in usage of their most important tool, the government rebate calculator, with a new user rate of 23% and a dwell time of 3:22. This tool takes the complicated federal and state rebate offers for film and TV productions and simplifies it, so getting this tool in use by our audience is crucial to the future success of the Australian film and television production industry.