AUSTAR Sport TV package case study

An Aussie pub with no sport? You cannot be serious. That’s the message agency Sydney Rapp drove home in a direct mail campaign to promote pay TV package AUSTAR Sport. Aimed at country pub owners in Australia who felt they couldn’t afford the service, the agency took iconic Australian song ‘The pub with no beer’, rewrote the lyrics and changed the title to ‘The pub with no sport’.

The original was sung by country music legend Slim Dusty in the 1950s, which added weight to the message for pub owners in out-of-the-way towns like Dingo and Rooty Hill. And to give the mailing a retro feel, the CD was designed to look like a 45rpm vinyl record and the cover artwork had a back-in-time feel to it. With lyrics like ‘The smile on his face begins to contort when the barman says sadly this pub has no sport’, the copywriting was pure genius, too.

And it touched the target audience – the campaign broke even after two months and will deliver an ROI of 6.5:1 in the first year.