A shared love of lamb helps bridge Australia’s generation gap

The campaign

The ad world is a little too obsessed with demographics sometimes, but Australian Lamb’s new year offering, created by Aussie ad agency The Monkeys, documents some all too relatable differences, before finding a common meat-based connection.

The background

Gather a group of creatives in a room together for long enough and you’re guaranteed to hear a familiar lament: ‘where have all the jokes gone?’

In recent years, advertising has shifted from drumming gorillas and nodding dogs to real beauty and fearless females, as heart has replaced humour as the industry’s dominant language.

Which is why, when a spot as funny as this comes along, the world sits up and pays attention.

The big idea

Apparently the annual ad from Australian Lamb (timed to coincide with Australia Day on January 26th) has become a bit of a fixture in the cultural calendar Down Under. And this year’s effort certainly justifies the hype.

With Australian society seemingly as gripped by inter-generational tension as the UK, the ad sets out to heal the country’s gaping age divide…with lamb.

Across a full three minutes, the ad skewers (geddit?!) every generation of Aussie adults.

Boomers are handed free houses, while their Gen Z cohorts exist on a meagre diet of unlimited digital content. Ageing Millennials awkwardly attempt to ‘slay’, while Gen Xers, oh frankly who cares!

The review

Perfect. No notes.

Every last detail of this film is perfectly observed, right down to the Boomers’ inability to ever turn off their phone torch. If all ads were this good, perhaps I’d watch more telly.