The film opens on a broken down bus filled with a country football team. The steam pouring from the engine means one thing: they aren’t going to make the final match. The captain puts in a phone call to their club president with the bad news. Rather than forfeiting, the club president comes up with a plan.

We see her race around the town, picking up a motley crew, the pub owner, the policewoman, the priest, the stay-at-home dad, the delinquent, the Chinese restaurant server, the mechanic, amongst others.

It’s a bizarre looking team of back-ups who take the field. But they all have one thing in common, team spirit.

As the other team smirks at this odd bunch of ring-ins, the pub owner smiles back, revealing a few missing teeth. This isn’t his first rodeo on the field…

Our line “This isn't country footy. This is footy country.”

Football is a bit different in Australia. For one, we call it ‘footy’. Even so, the love for our footy would rival fandoms in any nation.

That’s why Australia’s biggest brands battle it out every single week on the side lines for a slice of the attention. But, unlike footy in other countries, celebrity cameos and special effects don’t really do the job. If you’re not doing it for the real fans, they will call bullshit.

Telstra, Australia’s biggest mobile network, is also the biggest sponsor of the game, but they were only putting their logo on signage which wasn’t making any meaningful connection with fans.

We needed something that broke through. Something that got people feeling Telstra understood the game and is part of the fabric of footy.

We had hugely encouraging results for a campaign that was only in market for 4 weeks.

55% of respondents said “it was the best ad they’d ever seen.”

Consumers felt that “the campaign reflected the best parts of Australian life and humanity in general”.

Results also showed that the campaign represented Australian ideals we don’t see much of anymore, like ‘a sense of community’. It gave consumers a feeling of nostalgia to see these values played out on their screens.

It stood out so much compared to the usual advertising that radio shows and footy shows began speaking about it during their own coverage.

The campaign was such a success that Telstra plan to keep it as a platform for years to come.

The campaign also validated the focus on regional footy, and Telstra invested a further 8 million dollars’ worth in grants used to help fund regional footy clubs.

Our team went and spent time in regional clubs, talking to coaches, players, and the volunteers who make every footy match possible.

What we learnt was how much the whole community helps out. Everyone in town had their role to play in the game. And because everyone had a role, everyone felt like they were part of the team.

This was the behaviour we wanted to leverage in our campaign. We wanted to show that no matter who you were, you could put on the footy jersey.

And because football in Australia is so heavily reliant on volunteers, the work resonated deeply with metro and coastal communities, as well as the remote communities the film was based on. It was a universal behaviour that everyone could understand because everyone had participated in it.