Melbourne is Australia’s culinary capital, but its Food & Wine festival had become decidedly stale. We needed to inspire the region’s food critics to see the Festival with fresh eyes. Our insight? Foodies are constantly on the hunt for something new; restaurants, ingredients, cooking techniques. In that sense, they’re modern-day explorers. So we positioned the Melbourne Food & Wine Festival as a destination to ‘Discover Something New'.
To launch the Festival’s positioning as a destination to ‘Discover Something New’, we created a series of communications as handcrafted as the dishes themselves. Taking visual inspiration from the classic food and beverage artwork of the past. Each touchpoint challenged the viewer to discover new meaning with every glance.
With a limited advertising budget, the festival relies on restaurants to help sell tickets. Trouble was, none of Melbourne’s top restauranteurs were willing to display traditional advertising material. Taking inspiration from the classic food and beverage posters that are now considered collectible art, we created 150 limited-edition framed art posters and hand-delivered them to the city’s best restaurants - accompanied by a personal invitation from the Festival Director to hang them on their walls as a targeted reminder to foodies while they dined.
A big part of bringing the Festival to life was an app that used Bluetooth smart beacon technology to send personalised micro-location-based notifications to people as they wandered Melbourne in search of new culinary adventures. Very handy in a city that prides itself on keeping its treasures well hidden.
D&AD - Wood Pencil x2
Cannes Lions - Shortlist x2
New York Festival - Finalist x2
AWARD - Finalist x2
Campaign Brief - The Work x1
Best Ads - Best Print of the Week