Australia’s top marketers and creatives came together in Sydney last week for Effie: The Work Behind The Work, where leaders, including Nestlé’s Shannon Wright, Australian Retirement Trust’s Simonne Burnett, VML’s Alison Tilling and Jack Delmonte, and M+C Saatchi’s Grace Wallace, revealed the thinking behind this year’s Gold, Silver and Bronze Effie-winning campaigns.
With VML taking the stage twice, presenting both the Kit Kat Break Chair and the ADF Careers masterbrand, the event offered rare, unfiltered lessons in audience insight, commercial rigour and creative bravery.
Across FMCG, government recruitment and superannuation, a clear message emerged: effectiveness lives or dies on deep audience understanding, clever strategy, and creativity that earns its place in culture.
Kit Kat Break Chair: turning an empty seat into a cultural moment
Kit Kat’s challenge was simple but daunting: connect with Gen Z authentically, without falling into the trap of trying too hard. Rather than targeting Gen Z demographically, VML and Nestlé dug into their cultural behaviour, landing on an insight hiding in plain sight in gaming streams.
Streamers regularly disappear for long breaks, leaving viewers staring at an empty chair. Instead of sponsoring gameplay, Kit Kat saw an opportunity to “sponsor the break.”
The custom-built Break Chair revealed a QR code only when a streamer stood up, sending viewers to a timed three-minute Kit Kat break experience and the chance to win limited-edition bars featuring their favourite creators. The “absence” became the star.
“When brands try to enter gaming and get it wrong, you’re the dad at the disco very quickly,” VML Creative Director Delmonte said. Authenticity meant working with a carefully curated mix of major and micro-streamers to foster genuine cultural fit.
The response surpassed expectations: spikes in sales, brand sentiment, Gen Z engagement and extraordinary viewer retention. “People spent hours interacting with just the Kit Kat chair stream,” said Wright.
The lesson out of all of it? When targeting a niche group, cultural specificity builds on iconic broad targeting positioning.
ADF Careers: The masterbrand that rewrote recruitment marketing
VML’s second Gold Effie revealed the inside story of a multi-year transformation: unifying the Navy, Army and Air Force under a single recruitment brand for the first time.
For decades, Defence had operated three competing brands with separate budgets, strategies and gaps between campaigns, an inefficient model in a tightening talent market.
The pivot to ADF Careers wasn’t a creative instinct; it was evidence-led. VML and the Defence team delivered a strong evidence base through nationwide interviews with young Australians and their influencers, and extensive proof that unity would outperform fragmentation.
The big insight: young Australians crave impact. They want careers that pay enough and pay it forward. Purpose, stability and contribution outweigh job descriptions.
This drove the “Make Your Impact” platform, supported by immersive 3D outdoor work, always-on communications, and a new career-matching tool that simplified entry.
The results were game-changing: huge lifts in completed applications and the propensity to join the ADF, a best-ever month of application starts, and a more efficient, unified media investment model.
Tilling summed up the team’s approach: “If there’s no tears in the research, you haven’t gone deep enough.”
Her key takeaway was that evidence is the most persuasive creative tool you have. When the audience insight is clear and emotionally resonant, strategy and execution align naturally.
Australian Retirement Trust (ART): The big blue monster that made super human
In one of advertising’s most apathetic categories, ART’s “Big Blue Monster” broke through by making the invisible visible. Formed through the merger of QSuper and Sunsuper, ART faced the challenge of rapidly establishing awareness and distinctiveness in a crowded market.
“Superannuation is faraway money for many Australians, meaning marketing really needs to work hard to gain attention,” Simonne Burnett, Chief Member Experience Officer, ART, noted. But a simple description from a financial advisor—that “Australians are sitting on a monster when it comes to super”—sparked the idea that ultimately became Artie, a giant blue creature embodying the power and potential of super.
“This kind of creativity starts with deep human insight,” said Grace Wallace, M+C Strategy Director. “Super feels distant. Artie makes it tangible.”
More than 500 monster designs were explored before landing on the final, purpose-built character. Multiple rounds of research and quantitative evidence of efficacy were key to securing stakeholder support.
The payoff was significant: brand awareness jumped, putting ART in the top 10 most recognised superannuation companies; trust rose significantly; new member applications surged; and the campaign ranked among the top performing ads in Australia
“Every dollar we spend on marketing in the superannuation category must be in the best financial interests of our members, which makes effective work imperative”,” Burnett reminded the crowd.
Lesson for marketers: Distinctiveness isn’t decoration, it’s a growth strategy. When combined with human truth and commercial discipline, it can transform even the driest category.
Insight leads, creativity elevates, and evidence wins
Whether reinventing an FMCG icon, reengineering national recruitment or reframing superannuation, this year’s Gold Effie winners made one thing clear: the work that wins is the work that understands people the deepest.
Thank you to all our Sydney speakers.
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Effie: The Work Behind The Work takes place in Melbourne tonight, Tuesday 2 December, with two new case studies: Saatchi & Saatchi’s ‘The Ultimate Comeback: How a Seasoned Champion Reclaimed the Crown’ for Toyota, and Clemenger BBDO’s ‘Blood Supply: How a Media First Elevated Blood Donation Into a National News Story, Saving Up to 28,848 Lives’ for Australian Red Cross Lifeblood. Learn more and register here.
