The One Show
The One Show is the world's most prestigious award show in advertising and design. For over 50 years, the Gold Pencil has been regarded as one of the top prizes in the creative industry. The One Show has a rich legacy of honoring some of the most groundbreaking ideas, created by some of the most remarkable minds in creativity.
Category
Custom Content
Annual ID
OS23_RA024M
About the Work
The Australian Navy needed to recruit Electronic Spectrum System Operators. It’s an intelligence role that’s difficult to recruit for and involves identifying threats by manipulating frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum – also known as The Invisible Battlefield. So, that’s where we ran our ad. With a small budget for social media, we created a single audio file that was so much more than something to listen to. We challenged people to analyse it, decode it, manipulate its frequency content and discover its hidden message – a recruitment poster, painted with sound.
The Audio Ad You Can See is 56 seconds of audio. But hidden inside the audio is an image – our recruitment ad. To 99% of Australians, all they would hear is sound. But the 1% we needed to talk to would see our ad. The audio needed to be processed with a spectrogram. It’s a tool that analyses frequencies in the electromagnetic spectrum and is used by tech experts to analyse sound. It’s also used by the Navy to analyse frequencies and identify threats that can’t be seen. Only those with the right problem-solving abilities could find the hidden message and get the direct link to the job listing. The result was an audio ad that was also a print ad, a social post, user-generated content, a direct recruitment campaign, and an innovative way for the Australian Navy to find its new intelligence recruits.
This was one of the Navy’s most successful direct recruitment campaigns. On social media, it had more interactions than any other organic post from Australia’s Defence Forces with 512% more impressions, resulting in 80 times more engagement with the job listing, all from high quality candidates. The Audio Ad You Can See gave high quality candidates an experience that went beyond listening to an ad or looking at a poster – it put them in the shoes on an Electronic Spectrum Systems Operator and helped them imagine an intelligence career in the Navy.
2023 Awards
Total Points: 3
Merit
Credits
Agency
VMLY&R Australia
Music / Sound Production Company
Squeak E. Clean Studios
Chief Creative Officer
Paul Nagy
Creative Director
James Wills
Robyn Bergmann
Designer
Simon Gray
Editor
Leigh Cooke
Executive Creative Director
Jake Barrow
Executive Producer
Ceri Davies
Account Director
Meaghan de Laurier
Account Executive
Jess Osrin
Account Manager
Madeleine Moorhead
Head of Sound
Paul Le Couteur
Navy Brand Portfolio Manager
Jess Goggin
Navy Brand Portfolio Manager (acting)
Anjali Bakaya
Related Awards
