The Digital Display Dictionary
A public education campaign that worked with attention rather than against it, using contextual creative to teach Victorians about Indigenous culture.
The Thinking: Indigenous Victorian culture is more than 50,000 years old. It existed long before Stonehenge, predates the Pyramids, and is older than the Acropolis. And yet most Victorians know almost nothing about it. The challenge from the Victorian Government was a familiar one: how do you increase interest in a topic people have already tuned out? Our solution was to stop asking the audience to engage with Indigenous culture in the abstract, and instead, connect it to things they were already interested in.
My Role: Concept Development, Copywriting & Messaging, Art Direction
Ads That Didn't Interrupt
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Relevance At Scale
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Ads That Didn't Interrupt — Relevance At Scale —
The Digital Display Dictionary ran across major editorial mastheads — The Herald Sun, The Daily Telegraph and News.com.au — with each of its ads served contextually. The ads didn't interrupt the content, they deepened it, and that's what made them worth reading.
Victoria's Indigenous languages offered an enormous body of material. But where words from other states and territories were more contextually relevant to a given placement, we included those too — because the more relevant a word was, the more it would be remembered.
Of course, single words are just the first step in learning about Indigenous Australia. So some placements went even further, turning an impression into an education.
