Proof
    Impress Blinds — cost per enquiry down 62.63%, $23.6 to $8.82SLS Solicitors — cost per enquiry down 58.48%, $84.64 to $35.14FixCare Property — cost per enquiry down 56.36%, $35.24 to $15.38Rubbish Removal WA — cost per enquiry down 53.18%, $71.02 to $33.25Floral Cakery — cost per enquiry down 49.82%, $13.83 to $6.94ILLUMINATE Laser Emporium — cost per enquiry down 48.54%, $138.65 to $71.35Aussie Plumbing — cost per enquiry down 41.96%, $117.75 to $68.34Sydney Fence Painting — cost per enquiry down 33.68%, $136.62 to $90.61Alliance Plumbing — cost per enquiry down 29.6%, $81.26 to $57.21Gridless Build Solutions — cost per enquiry down 29.16%, $78.16 to $55.37FacilityWorx — cost per enquiry down 23.62%, $157.13 to $120.01Cornerstone Roofing — cost per enquiry down 20.47%, $41.71 to $33.17A council finance platform — 194 of 194 requirements metA council finance build — 14 weeks to UAT, −34% 10-yr costA cultural institution — $634K of $750K kept workingA council platform — $470,106 built vs $503,262 SaaSA federal agency — n=5,000 prevalence survey at ±1.4%A civic mural — 36 concepts for a 71m × 9m wallA regional shire — 32-page visitor guide, 3 weeks earlyA shire council — one platform retiring 8 of 9 vendorsA pressure washing business — 138 jobs at A$20.43 eachA pressure washing business — 21.20% conversion rateA carpet cleaner — 53 jobs in 15 days at A$24.92 eachA roofing company — 68 quote requests in 35 daysA CCTV installer — 39 qualified leads in 15 daysA fence painter — 36 jobs in 24 days, quotes by day 3A maintenance business — live in 8 weeks, 3 stacks gone41 numbered clauses, published in full5.0 across every Google review$120M+ in media under management250+ active engagements across five countries
    SoudCoh
    Other people’s advertising, analysed

    Australian video ad teardowns, without the reverence.

    7 campaigns from Australian advertisers, pulled apart the same way each time — what the opening does, how the film holds you after it, what it actually asks for, and the part worth reading: what still works once you remove the budget.

    Start readingHow video advertising is bought

    Every campaign below belongs to the brand named in its heading. SoudCoh made none of it.

    Read this first

    We made none
    of this work.

    This is a library of other companies’ advertising that we admire and argue with. It is not a portfolio, and nothing on this page is a SoudCoh production.

    Every campaign is credited

    The advertiser is named in the heading and the agency that made the work is named directly beneath it, before any analysis begins. Where nobody is publicly credited we say that rather than guessing, because a guessed credit is an attribution error about a real business.

    Every film links to its source

    Each entry links out to the original upload, and states whose channel that upload sits on. Nothing is embedded here: another company’s player inside our page would blur exactly the line this page exists to hold, and it would slow the page down for readers who never press play.

    Every figure names its source

    No performance number appears without the publication or the claimant named in the same sentence. Where a widely repeated figure is contested, the contest is stated. Several entries carry no result at all, because none was published — and that is written down rather than quietly filled in.

    What is ours is the analysis. We buy media for Australian businesses, which means we watch a great deal of advertising professionally and form opinions about why some of it works. This is where those opinions are written down.

    The rubric

    The same five questions, every time.

    A teardown library that will not show its own rubric is opinions with better typography. Here is what each entry is asked, in the order it is asked, so you can disagree with the answers on the same terms.

    1. What does it do in the first five seconds?

      Almost every decision about whether to keep watching is made here, and almost every small-business video spends the opening on a logo, an address or a claim nobody asked to hear.

    2. How does it earn the rest of the view?

      An opening buys attention once. Something structural has to hold it — a device, a song, a withheld answer, an escalating joke. If nothing does, the ad is a five-second ad with a long tail attached.

    3. What does it actually ask for?

      The call to action reveals what the advertiser genuinely wanted, which is frequently not what the brief said. A pledge, an install and a phone number are three different businesses.

    4. How big is the advertiser?

      A takeaway is worthless without it. A state agency's public-education budget and a suburban trade business's ad budget are not the same instrument, and treating them as one is how bad advice gets repeated.

    5. What survives the budget being removed?

      The only question that matters here. Casting, celebrity and production value do not transfer. Structure, restraint, a device and an honest promise all do — and none of them have a price.

    Campaigns by other companies

    7 campaigns, taken apart one at a time.

    Government road-safety work, a rail operator, a tourism body, an equipment hire business, a trades marketplace and a franchise network. Different budgets, different jobs, and one structural lesson each.

    Metro Trains Melbourne

    “Dumb Ways to Die”

    2012 · 3:02

    Created by
    McCann Melbourne. Song by Ollie McGill with vocal by Emily Lubitz; animation by Julian Frost.
    Watch the original on Dumb Ways to Die on YouTube

    Hosted on: The campaign's own channel rather than Metro Trains' corporate one. The film outgrew the advertiser: the channel now carries a games-studio copyright line, so what began as a rail-safety campaign is today an entertainment property in its own right.

    The size of the advertiser

    Metro Trains Melbourne runs Melbourne's suburban rail network under franchise with roughly 7,000 staff, owned by an MTR, John Holland and UGL consortium. Calibrate before copying: this was a public-safety budget held by an operating company, not a retail advertising budget held by a consumer brand.

    The first five seconds

    No train, no logo, no warning. A ukulele starts, a jellybean-shaped character sets its hair on fire, and a pleasant voice begins singing about dying stupidly. The opening spends itself on a joke with no visible connection to rail safety, and by the time the connection arrives the audience has already agreed to keep watching. It buys attention with charm before it asks for anything at all.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    The song is the mechanism, not the decoration. It is short, repetitive and pleasant enough to sit through twice, which matters because re-watching is the behaviour a video platform rewards. The casting is deliberately abstract — the characters are not people, so no viewer can decide the warning is aimed at somebody else's demographic. Then the turn is deferred almost the entire three minutes before it lands: the final deaths are rail-related, the tone drops out and the joke stops. Withholding the point for that long is a genuine risk, and it is the reason the ending has any weight.

    What it asks for

    A pledge, not a phone number. Viewers were asked to promise to be safe around trains — no form, no quote, no purchase, nothing to buy. That is close to zero friction and highly shareable, which is what turned a public-safety film into something people forwarded to each other unprompted.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    The safety message occupies roughly the last tenth of the runtime. Most trade and service businesses do the exact opposite: they lead with the message and lose the viewer well before it lands. The transferable structure is earn the attention first, then spend it — and the earning does not require animation or a commissioned song. It requires something a viewer would watch if you were selling nothing. The moment a drain camera finds the blockage is that. A thirty-second explanation of why you are the right choice is not.

    Any published result, and its source

    Metro Trains and McCann claimed a reduction of more than 20 per cent in near-miss accidents in their own case study. Treat it carefully: Mumbrella has reported industry scepticism about attributing rail incident numbers to a campaign, and the claim rests on agency case material rather than an independent study. It appears here because it is the figure everybody repeats, not because it is settled.

    Transport Accident Commission (Victoria)

    “Meet Graham”

    2016 · 0:30

    Created by
    Clemenger BBDO Melbourne. Sculpture by artist Patricia Piccinini, developed with trauma surgeon Christian Kenfield and crash investigation expert David Logan.
    Watch the original on Transport Accident Commission Victoria on YouTube

    The size of the advertiser

    The TAC is a Victorian state agency of roughly 800 staff. Not a global advertiser, but a government body with a standing public-education mandate and the budget that goes with it.

    The first five seconds

    A face you cannot stop looking at. No crash, no gore, no siren, no ambulance — a still, lifelike human figure with a skull built like a helmet and barely any neck. The camera simply lets you look at him. Thirty years of road-safety advertising had opened on consequences; this opens on a body redesigned so the consequences would not happen.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    Graham is the argument, made physical, so the film never has to argue. There is no victim and no villain in it, which means nobody watching is being lectured and nobody can file it away as being about reckless drivers. The thirty-second cut worked as broadcast, but the campaign actually lived in the sculpture, an interactive layer and a gallery tour — the TAC's own upload sends viewers to see him at the State Library of Victoria. The film is effectively the trailer for the object.

    What it asks for

    Go and look at him, in person or online. The ask is to visit rather than to change behaviour on the spot, which is an unusually patient request for road safety and one that only works because the object is genuinely worth the trip.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    A single physical object that embodies the argument will out-travel a well-written script, and it is the cheapest idea on this page to copy. For most trades the object already exists: the cut-open pipe, the burnt-out switchboard, the before-and-after specimen somebody keeps in the van because customers do not believe the description. Make the evidence the creative instead of describing the evidence in a voiceover.

    Any published result, and its source

    At Cannes Lions 2017 the campaign won two Grand Prix, in Health & Wellness and in Cyber, and — as reported by Campaign Brief — 29 Lions in total including eight Gold, contributing to Clemenger BBDO Melbourne being named Agency of the Year. Awards measure the industry's opinion of the work, not road trauma. No behavioural outcome is quoted here, because none was sourced.

    WorkSafe Victoria

    “Homecomings”

    2006 · 1:30

    Created by
    Shannon's Way. Directed by Aleksi Vellis through Chocolate Studios, produced by Kate Merrin.
    Watch the original on WorkSafe Victoria on YouTube

    Hosted on: WorkSafe's own channel, though the upload postdates the campaign by several years — the film was made for broadcast at a time when YouTube was not yet a media channel.

    The size of the advertiser

    WorkSafe Victoria is the state's workplace safety regulator and insurer: a statutory authority rather than a commercial advertiser, running a long-horizon behaviour campaign with no sales number attached to it.

    The first five seconds

    People finishing work. That is the whole opening. A boy starts bouncing a basketball in a driveway, a mother glances at a clock, and nothing is explained — no product, no statistic, no incident, no voiceover telling you what to think. The film withholds so completely that you keep watching simply to find out what kind of film it is.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    Tension built entirely from absence. Ninety seconds of ordinary homecomings — parents, sons and daughters arriving safely, some of it warm, some of it funny — cut against one house where the usual time comes and goes. The dread is located in who has not arrived rather than in anything shown happening. WorkSafe's own published description of the film ends on the question instead of the answer, which tells you the withholding was the plan and not an accident of the edit. The line it all rests on: the most important reason for making your workplace safe is not at work at all.

    What it asks for

    There isn't one, in the ordinary sense. No number, no website, no next step. The film reframes what safety is for and then stops. That is a legitimate choice when the objective is to change how a decision feels over years rather than to generate a response this week — and it is the wrong choice for very nearly every business reading this page.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    Read this one directly beside Dumb Ways to Die, because they are opposite solutions to the same problem. One buys attention with charm and defers its message almost to the end; the other spends attention immediately on dread and never releases it. Both work. What they share is that neither leads with the product. The usable lesson is that the choice between charm and gravity is a decision made before the shoot, not something to be discovered in the edit — and a business making one film has to pick a side and commit to it.

    Any published result, and its source

    No independently published effectiveness figure is quoted here. The campaign is included for its construction, not its numbers.

    Tourism Australia

    “Dundee”

    2018 · 1:30

    Created by
    Droga5 New York, which won the account in a closed US pitch. Directed by Steve Rogers through Revolver/Will O'Rourke, as reported by Campaign Brief and AdNews.
    Watch the original on Tourism Australia on YouTube

    The size of the advertiser

    Tourism Australia is the federal government's tourism marketing body, and this was the launch of a multi-year push into the United States. The single largest budget on this page by a wide margin.

    The first five seconds

    It opens as a film trailer. Studio-trailer grammar, a cast list, a returning franchise — the greatest name in the outback, back in the outback. Nothing in the opening suggests an advertisement, because for that stretch it is not pretending to be one. It is pretending to be a Crocodile Dundee reboot, and it commits to the lie completely.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    The entire structure is a withheld reveal, and it began weeks before the broadcast slot: teasers ran with real actors attached, so a substantial audience had already decided to care about a film that did not exist. By the time the reveal lands — this is not a movie, it is a tourism ad — the viewer has spent attention they cannot get back, and the joke pays them for it rather than punishing them. Tourism Australia's own upload states the trick plainly in its description, which is the correct move once the reveal has already happened.

    What it asks for

    Come to Australia. It arrives in the last few seconds, after the payoff, and it is the softest possible ask: no date, no offer, no booking step. Making the country interesting again to an American audience was the job; the transaction was somebody else's problem entirely.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    The celebrity casting is not the transferable part, and the budget makes the film useless as a template. The withholding is transferable and costs nothing. Lead with the thing your audience is already curious about and let the sell arrive last. The warning matters just as much: this structure works once per audience, and only when the reveal is a real payoff. Run it as bait and you have taught people to distrust the next thing you publish.

    Any published result, and its source

    AdNews reported the campaign at $36 million and did not break out how much of that was the broadcast slot itself. That is a spend figure, not an outcome. No verified visitation result is quoted here.

    Kennards Hire

    “Get the Ken Oath Feeling”

    2024 · 0:15

    Created by
    Enigma (creative), with Hatched on media and Herd MSL on production and PR, as reported by AdNews, B&T and Mumbrella. The 'Ken Oath' platform itself dates from 2020.
    Watch the original on Kennards Hire on YouTube

    Also worth comparing

    Keep It Moving

    A companion cut at the same length. Worth watching back to back — the platform is doing the work, not the individual film, and you can see how little has to change between executions.

    The size of the advertiser

    The largest family-owned equipment hire business in Australia and New Zealand: more than 200 branches per its own channel, and roughly 1,900 staff around its 75th anniversary in 2023. Genuinely mid-sized, genuinely family-owned, and the closest thing on this page to a scaled trade business.

    The first five seconds

    A customer mid-job with a problem. Not a product beauty shot, not a branch exterior, not equipment rotating on a turntable. Fifteen seconds leaves no room for a setup, so the film opens inside a situation the viewer recognises from their own week and trusts them to catch up.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    The platform rests on one piece of Australian vernacular that happens to contain the founder's surname — an asset most businesses would never find and, having found it, would over-explain. The film does not explain it. Casting is unpolished and regional, the cut runs fifteen seconds because that is what short-form placement rewards, and the promise being made is service rather than product. Nobody in the ad sells a scissor lift. The ad sells somebody turning up.

    What it asks for

    Brand-level, not offer-level. No discount, no deadline, no urgency. That is the right call for a business whose purchase is triggered by a job starting rather than by an advertisement — and it is close to the opposite of what most trade businesses are told to do with a fifteen-second slot.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    The service promise is the ad. Kennards is not claiming better equipment than its competitors, which would be both checkable and boring; it is dramatising that someone will help you. Any business with a genuine service standard — answering after hours, arriving inside the window, cleaning up before leaving — can film that standard being kept, and the footage costs a phone and an afternoon. The hard part is having a standard worth filming, not filming it.

    Any published result, and its source

    Mi3 reported in 2024, via Kennards Hire's Manelle Merhi, 100 per cent consideration among tradies, a three-point lift in brand awareness, and a 14 percentage point increase in first-choice consideration among enterprise buyers, with customer satisfaction moving from around 9.3 to over 9.4 across three years. These are brand-tracking measures reported by the advertiser, not independently audited sales figures, and they should be read as such.

    hipages

    “Start with hipages”

    2025 · 0:30

    Created by
    Thinkerbell, as reported by Campaign Brief, AdNews and LBB. Launched alongside the brand's sponsorship of The Block.
    Watch the original on hipages on YouTube

    The size of the advertiser

    hipages is ASX-listed (HPG) — a trades marketplace rather than a trade business. Worth holding on to, because a marketplace's customer acquisition problem is not the same as a plumber's, even though both are advertising to the same suburb.

    The first five seconds

    The walls start talking. It is a conceit rather than a situation, and it is doing structural work from the first frame: a marketplace has two audiences with two different anxieties and one thirty-second slot, and a talking house can address both without the film splitting in half.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    The device carries the load for the full runtime, which is why it was chosen over a straight demonstration. Homeowners need to believe the tradie will be any good; tradies need to believe the leads will be real. A talking wall can voice the first without ever turning the film into a lecture about the second. It is also worth knowing that the campaign launched alongside a television sponsorship — that was the media strategy, and the upload is an archive copy rather than the campaign itself.

    What it asks for

    The brand name is the instruction: start with hipages. Then the app, three steps, post a job. It is the most transactional call to action on this page, and appropriately so — this is a product with an install, not a brand with a showroom.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    Two lessons, and the second is the better one. First, if you serve two audiences who need different reassurances, find one device that carries both rather than making two thin ads. Second, and more useful: hipages has re-executed the same underlying idea through several agencies since 2016. Continuity of idea with churn of execution is a far more achievable position for a small business than reinventing the message every year, and it is much the cheaper of the two.

    Any published result, and its source

    None sourced, and no result should be inferred from the view counter either. The buy was television and sponsorship, so the number under this upload is a rounding error next to everything else on this page. Judging a campaign by its YouTube count is one of the more reliable ways to reach a confidently wrong conclusion.

    Jim's Mowing

    “Your Local Gardening and Mowing Experts”

    2024 · 0:15

    Created by
    No external agency is publicly credited. The work has historically been produced in-house and through local production partners, which is itself part of what makes it interesting.
    Watch the original on Jim's Mowing AU on YouTube

    Also worth comparing

    The 2007 original

    On the Jim's Group channel. Embedding is disabled on it, so it opens on YouTube. Watch it after the current cut: seventeen years apart, and the structure has barely moved.

    The size of the advertiser

    A franchise network rather than a single operating business, which changes what the advertising has to do — the ad generates a call and the system routes it to a local operator. That is a materially different job from a single-location trade business advertising its own diary.

    The first five seconds

    A logo, a jingle and a phone number. There is no hook in the creative sense at all, and it would be dishonest analysis to pretend otherwise. The opening is the brand and the number, because the number is the entire point of the exercise.

    How it earns the rest of the view

    It does not earn the view the way everything else here does. It buys recall through repetition — fifteen seconds, structurally almost unchanged across three decades. That is the least fashionable answer on this page and arguably the most efficient one. The description under the current upload still leads with the phone number and a free quote, which tells you how little has drifted since the franchise was founded in 1989.

    What it asks for

    Call the number, or request a quote online. That is the whole ad and it is deliberate. Unaided recall of a national phone number is an extremely expensive asset to build and an extremely cheap one to maintain once it exists.

    What a small Australian business can take from it

    Consistency is the strategy nearly every small business abandons in its second year, usually because the owner is bored of the ad long before the market has even noticed it. Jim's is the counter-example: same promise, same number, same voice, until the recall is unassailable. The risk deserves naming too — the brand is now inseparable from its founder's public profile, and a personal brand at that scale is an asset and a single point of failure at the same time.

    Any published result, and its source

    Jim's Group reports more than 5,000 franchisees across 52-plus divisions, and the Jim's Mowing channel states more than 2,000 franchise owners. Forbes Australia has described the system as approaching a billion dollars a year in turnover — that figure is system-wide franchisee revenue rather than company revenue, and the distinction matters a great deal when you are using it as a benchmark.

    Across all 7

    What repeats, once you line them up.

    Written after the entries above rather than before them. These are the patterns that survived reading all 7 back to back.

    • None of them open on the product

      Not one of these seven films leads with what is being sold. Two open on a joke, one on a sculpture, one on a driveway, one on a fake movie, one on a customer's problem, and the last one on a phone number that is a brand rather than a product. The instinct to state the offer first is the single most common and most expensive mistake in small-business video.

    • The best ones commit to one idea and refuse the others

      Meet Graham does not also mention seatbelts. Homecomings does not also list safety procedures. The Kennards cut does not also promote a range. Every one of these had a version that said three things, and somebody killed it. A fifteen-second film that says one thing beats a thirty-second film that says three.

    • Length follows placement, not ambition

      Three minutes, ninety seconds, thirty seconds and fifteen seconds all appear here, and in every case the runtime is a consequence of where the film was going to be seen. The two fifteen-second cuts are not shortened versions of longer ideas; they were built at that length. Deciding the runtime after the edit is how you end up with a ninety-second film nobody watches past twenty.

    • The cheapest ideas here are the most transferable

      The physical object that carries the argument, the withheld reveal, the service standard filmed being kept, the refusal to change a working message — none of them require money. The celebrity cast, the commissioned song and the broadcast slot all do. Read the takeaway on each entry with that split in mind, because the expensive half is the half that gets copied and the cheap half is the half that works.

    • Almost nobody publishes a clean result

      Of the seven, one has a contested claim, one has advertiser-reported brand tracking, one has an awards haul, one has a spend figure, and three have nothing at all. That is the normal state of published advertising, and it is worth knowing before you benchmark yourself against a case study somebody wrote about their own work.

    FAQ

    About this library.

    Who made the work, how the campaigns were chosen, why nothing is embedded, and how far you should trust a number in a case study somebody wrote about themselves.

    If you want this kind of thinking applied to your own advertising, the first call is free and there is no deck.

    Book a free strategy call

    Where the analysis turns into a media buy.

    Reading advertising well is the cheap half. These are the pages about the expensive half — where a film gets placed, what it costs, and what has to happen after somebody decides to act.

    Disagree with us

    If you think one of these readings is wrong, or you want the same treatment applied to a competitor’s advertising or your own, say so. Both are reasonable requests and neither needs a budget attached.

    Start a conversationMarketing for small business

    Every campaign above belongs to the brand named in its heading. SoudCoh made none of it.