Once again this year Youngbloods Australia were invited back onto ABC TV’s Gruen to compete for Pitch glory.
However, unlike Youngbloods Gruen pitches in previous seasons, it wasn’t to be the traditional battle between VIC vs. NSW. Due to the COVID restrictions placed on Eastern state production, cross-border alliances were formed, seeing VIC and WA team up to convince more Aussie’s to write letters, while the NSW and QLD team were tasked to get more picking up the phone.
What this meant was that in addition to the budget restrictions, a 5-week turnaround deadline to produce responses, and the pressure of appearing on national television, each team had to quickly devise a plan on how to split creative and production capabilities without ever meeting.
The results were extremely impressive and saw two responses that were both creatively insightful and produced to an extremely high standard.
So much so that the judges were split, with Russell Howcroft and Camey O’Keefe going for VIC/WA’s “Don’t be a number, write a letter”, while Todd Sampson and Priya Patel were swayed by NSW/QLD’s “Be Brave. Pick Up Australia”.
Host Will Anderson revealed the split trophy and promised to fax half each to the teams! National Co-Chairs Matt Bladin and Linh Diep had this to say on the challenges each committee faced this year. “Filming ads this year has been hard. Most of all for the southern states that have traditionally been tapped by Gruen for the Youngbloods episode of The Pitch.”
“But lockdown’s challenges opened an awesome opportunity to make this year a national collaboration between VIC/WA against NSW/QLD.”“As the teams got bigger, so did the ideas and productions. It was a pleasure watching the judges try and pick a favourite.”
Episode 9 of Gruen which features the Youngbloods is available to watch on ABC iview now.
